Dr Francesco Gino, a behavioural scientist at Harvard Business School, has been placed on administrative leave following the allegations, which first emerged in The Chronicle of Higher Education, reports FT.

The DataColada blog written by three fellow behavioural scientists purports to detail “evidence of fraud in four academic papers” co-authored by Dr Gino over the course of a decade.

One of the most widely-known of the disputed papers is from 2012 and was said to show that people were less likely to lie on a tax form if they were required to sign an honesty declaration at the top rather than at the bottom.

Maurice Schweitzer, a behavioural scientist at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, told The New York Times that the allegations had led to serious “reverberations in the academic community” as Dr Gino is “really a leading scholar in the field”.