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A Torrid Tale of Plagiarizing Paleontologists
Posted by
Zonk
on Thu Jan 31, 2008 06:04 PM
from the sexy-tales-of-science dept.
from the sexy-tales-of-science dept.
its hard to think of writes "There's an interesting story up at Nature News about scientific ethics. It seems that while one group of scientists is figuring out details about aetosaurs (ancient crocodiles), another group in New Mexico is repeatedly taking credit for their work and naming the new animals they 'discover'. It also looks like the state government, which has been asked to intervene, is trying to sidestep the issue. 'The New Mexico cultural-affairs department, which oversees the museum, conducted a review of two of the instances last October and concluded that the allegations were groundless. But some experts call that review a whitewash, claiming that it failed to follow accepted practices of US academic institutions faced with claims of misconduct. Now all three cases are before the Ethics Education Committee of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology, a professional organization based in Northbrook, Illinois, which is awaiting responses from the New Mexico team before making a ruling.' How widespread is this kind of thing?"
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Not very (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Not very (Score:5, Interesting)
Parent
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What would the publisher do if you sued them for copyright infringement? That could be rather embarrassing for them.
They would refer you to the whoever submitted the paper, and tell you to sue them.
When you publish in a journal, you sign a form/contract that says that you own the copyright for the work and you are transferring it to the journal (or license it, depending on the journal). So if there's any copyright infringement going on, it's the submitting authors who are to blame.
You could sue the publisher for infringement, but they would turn around and sue the submitting authors anyways. I suspect in court the
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Re:Not very (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:Not very (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
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The plagiarizing joke gets +3 funny
at this rate, my worthless summary will get +5 insightful
Re:Not very (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
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To accommodate for the fact that
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NOVA did an investigation several years ago called "Do Scientists Cheat". Their investigation followed up on whistle blowing by two NSF scientists. The result was an estimate that 48% of all published reports use cooked, trimmed or totally falsified data.
There are at least three methods which supposedly guard against bad science:
1) Peer review
2) Replication
3) "Scientific Method"
None of them work well and abuses go undetected more often than not.
Neither work
They work. People just suck. (Score:5, Interesting)
The problem doesn't lie in the scientific method or in replication, and peer review wouldn't be a problem if people were motivated to do science for science's sake rather than greed. People are they problem. They are not using those processes, at least, not correctly. I try to teach these things in my science classes, but I worry that by trying to make good scientists (biologists in my case), I'm setting my students up to not be able to compete in the real scientific world. :(
Parent
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If it were greed, they would become lawyers rather than scientists. I think the real motivator is ego. I saw some colossal egos while I was a graduate student and still in academia. I'd reckon that the ego of the biggest media-hound CEO is no bigger than that of a good sized portion of academia. Unless you were talking about grant money. Scientists do chase grant money like lawyers chase a
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Ironically, publishing those findings will likely make them slightly more correct.
Oh no! (Score:2, Funny)
Oh no! (Score:2)
Fits the Profile for Standard Theft (Score:4, Insightful)
For once, that *IS* theft... (Score:4, Insightful)
Just thought I'd mention that because otherwise folks rush to allegations of hypocrisy, especially since I don't believe in imaginary property.
Parent
Re:Fits the Profile for Standard Theft (Score:4, Interesting)
I personally don't care much about the position of my name in the list, though it ticks me off to see other people taking credit for projects that were essentially entirely my work. Actually, I don't really care much about publication at all anymore; it's simply a game with fairly arbitrary rules. I know it could prevent me from obtaining a good career in academia, but I'm going into industry anyway, to continue my research either on the job or on my own time.
Parent
Wow, that group from Poland really got boned (Score:2, Funny)
(What? Digg doesn't have a paleontology section?)
Tag Winnar (Score:2, Funny)
How widespread is the problem? (Score:3, Interesting)
(For those too lazy to RTFA, this study estimates 1-2% of the content in Medline is duplicated to some degree.)
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Unfortunately common in some places (Score:2)
What a bonehead! (Score:4, Insightful)
Yeah, I guess he didn't understand that visiting colleagues and publishing about their discoveries before the people who actually discovered them had a chance to is bad form. I take back my bonehead comment, that's a compliment to a paleontologist. "Tool" seems to fit the bill.
I remember another instance... (Score:2)
A horrid hail of annoying alliteration! (Score:2)
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This isn't really new (Score:3, Informative)
The International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature says scientists must not name species if they know a competing scientist is in the process of doing so.
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No, but at its present rate... it soon will be.
Isn't there a species-naming tribunal? (Score:2)
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One recent-ish example (Score:4, Interesting)
Technology is another area with a dubious history. Edison was rather notorious for "inventing" other people's inventions, which is a slight variant form of plagarism. Countries, as well as individuals, have been suspected (or proven guilty) of conducting industrial espionage in order to beat someone else to the goal of being first.
In other words, it happens. A lot. The acclaim and fortune that goes with being first is too alluring for some to refuse. Some don't bother to steal, they just make it up. Some in the hope they can get the "right" results later, others in the hope that nobody notices until they're rich and elsewhere. I'd place the professor of cloning from South Korea in the first category, simply because he could have left when suspicions were first raised, but didn't. I think he genuinely thought he could make a real breakthrough first and that everyone would then forgive him for past misdeeds. On the other hand, the cold fusion guys from Utah were good enough chemists to know that you can't perform fusion through elecrolosys. Cold fusion might be possible, but if all you needed was an anode and cathode, the first potato clock ever made would have ended up rather more than baked.
It would be good if there was some sort of independent international auditing body that examined initial claims and then revisited that claim after so many years, again after the claimant's death, and also at the 50 year and 100 year marks (as those are when papers held as secret by Governments are usually declassified automatically), where that body had power to reassign credit and possibly award some percent of past earnings to newly-recognized discoverers/inventors. It still wouldn't stop fraud, but some redress is better than a one-line entry in a textbook nobody will ever read.
Parent
Correction:The Zoological Code Has No Such "Rules" (Score:3, Informative)
A famous case of "stealing" the original description is the case for the description of the second living coelacanth from Indonesia, originally discovered by an American but published first based on sca
There is one simple solution to the problem (Score:3, Interesting)
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Wtf? (Score:2)
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professional groups (Score:4, Funny)
The summary got it wrong (Score:3, Funny)
Not the EECoSVP! (Score:3, Funny)
Boss tried to take mine (Score:4, Interesting)
My Boss removed my name from the document and put his name in place of it and sent it to all the district managers... which I had already done.
They all called up hooting and laughing at what he did... it was more funny than anything else and it was not too much longer that he was removed from the position. I do not know if that had anything to do with his removal... but I still chuckle at what he did.
Happens a lot (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm a biologist, went through the whole Pile Higher and Deeper thing, taught for decades, did research, yadda, yadda, yadda. A lot of that 48% is really minor stuff that wouldn't alter the results. The vast majority of scientists are astonishingly honest, given that the whole thing is run on the honor system.
But based on my personal experience, I'd guess that around 10%-15% is really major: ripping off grad students, postdocs, untenured faculty; real falsification of data; and that kind of thing. Power is the first principal component in who gets away with cheating and who doesn't.
It's not peer review that needs fixing so much as the power relationships in the system. Enough with the absolute serfdom of the lower echelons. Nobody, including migrant fruit pickers, should be treated like migrant fruit pickers. Have peer review be *double* blind, not single blind. (Right now, the submitter doesn't know who is doing the reviews, but the reviewers know who the author is. People at, say, Yale, get astonishingly good reviews astonishingly often.) And so on.
For some reason, the people who hold all the power in the current system are dead against any reforms that will actually make a difference.
Not a new issue (Score:3, Informative)
Plagiarize,
Let no one else's work evade your eyes,
Remember why the good Lord made your eyes,
So don't shade your eyes,
But plagiarize, plagiarize, plagiarize...
Only be sure always to call it please, "research".
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