How a lab came undone

The disinformation tax is the compounding cost of relying on findings that are false but not yet corrected, or corrected but not yet unlearned.

To understand this, we look at former Cornell researcher Brian Wansink, who published hundreds of studies on why we eat the way we do. But his research came under scrutiny, and the flags started — eventually touching 45 of his papers.

Here we track one piece of that tax: the citations his flagged papers kept collecting after a problem was already on the record.

Each vertical line is one of his flagged papers, in the order they were published. Grey and blue ticks are citations — blue when the citation comes from Wansink himself.