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?"
I disagree. Graduate students simply do not count for much in academia. While a graduate student at Texas A&M, Dr. Robert Coulson plagiarized a paper that my boss designed and I wrote in 1990. The last half of one of his papers was our paper with no attribution. Coulson had tenure and my boss was trying to get tenure. The University handled this by having Coulson send an errata to the publisher giving my boss a partial authorship credit. My name was not even mentioned. Total cover up. I am convinced this happens all the time.
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
I have (as far as I know) never been maliciously plagiarized, but I have been surprised at how many times I've been plagiarized by papers that cite my own. Clearly, they're not trying to hide anything, or they wouldn't have bothered to cite the paper that they're copying from, but there seem to be many authors who don't see anything wrong with lifting a paragraph and just changing a couple words. Certainly the few I've contacted about doing this have seemed very surprised that I should think there's anythin
I have been surprised at how many times I've been plagiarized by papers that cite my own. Clearly, they're not trying to hide anything, or they wouldn't have bothered to cite the paper that they're copying from, but there seem to be many authors who don't see anything wrong with lifting a paragraph and just changing a couple of words. Certainly the few I've contacted about doing this have seemed very surprised that I should think there's anything wrong with it. Obviously this kind of thing isn't as serious as what's being alleged in TFA, since none of them were claiming credit for my ideas or work, but I think it is laziness and dishonesty to grab something that's someone else's rather than doing it yourself.
My graduate supervisor was very outspoken about the fact that his name would not come first on any paper from my research. He said it was his duty to help get the work published but that I deserved the credit. He has done this consistently with all of his graduate students (MSc and PhD). So my point is that not all scientists are so unscrupulous. However, from what I have observed (a bit), the fields of anthropology, archeology and paleontology are filled with people fighting little turf wars. I have heard of people hiding material that they have discovered so that no one else would have a chance to describe it at all. Then they fight any reinterpretation of their results without regard for facts. This is why progress in these fields can be so slow. Any new interpretation is heresy. Even worse, most of the time, they have a tooth, or middle toe or something to hang entire new species on.
Very true. In the fields of anthropology, archeology and paleontology, there is also pressure to sensationalize the research. For instance, in paleontology when a fossil is found, they will attribute as many sensational characteristics to the specimen as possible - example: 5 inch teeth able, jaws capable of generating 6 tonnes of pressure per square inch, capable of running 60 kmph, killed its prey by shredding it with the powerful jaws, razor sharp teeth and 12 inch claws. To accommodate for the fact that
You wish. 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.
The "publish or perish" mentality is what pushed me away from research science as I was getting my BS (Marine Biology), and I bet it's the same mentality that causes a lot of these problems (plagiarizing, especially from the work of grad students and undergrads, occasionally, using false data, rejecting data that doesn't fit, etc). Couple that with a desire to become famous, and there you have it.
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.:(
"and peer review wouldn't be a problem if people were motivated to do science for science's sake rather than greed" 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
Established scholars in a mediocre position avail themselves of work done by excessively trusting graduate students to further their careers and/or their journal that is struggling for submissions and subscriptions. Of the people I know who've been victims of "plagiarism", this is usually the profile.
by Anonymous Coward
on Thursday January 31 2008, @07:14PM (#22255554)
When you take credit for someone else's work, they no longer have the credit. Thus, the term "stealing" is appropriate here, even if what is taken is intangible. Copy a file and there are now two files. Take credit from someone else and you'll have it but they won't.
Just thought I'd mention that because otherwise folks rush to allegations of hypocrisy, especially since I don't believe in imaginary property.
In my lab, my advisor takes first authorship on journal papers, but takes last authorship on conference papers.
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.
I have no idea how widespread dinosaur name-hopping is (How "widespread" could it be? How many dinosaur systematicists are there out there?) but the study you link (the original is in the current issue of Nature) is absolute garbage. Go to their site and browse through the cases of "plagiarism" -- even the curated entries almost all look legitimate to me. A lot are clearly abstracts that were published once as posters and once as journal articles. Others are multiple papers on different aspects of the same
Just to reinforce the parent, meta-studies that consolidate data from several different studies on a subject are a mainstay in medical sciences. They're also usually some of the most valuable papers in that area.
This sort of thing is surprisingly common in many places and made me rather pessimistic about research as a whole for a while. It's a result of the combination of everything depending on publishing novel work and the fact that work is often reviewed months to years before it is actually published.
"Lucas blamed the Polish researchers for not being more explicit about their fossil-examination rules, but he did apologize for what he called "a misunderstanding".
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.
...of American scientists publishing a paper about "new" research into controlling motor muscles via electromagnetic stimulation of the brain. Nevermind that Japanese scientists had performed the same experiments and moved on to a working prototype a couple of years earlier... and published a video on the Web! (Viewable here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fILH4qgkXk8 [youtube.com]) I realize that scientific experiments need to be repeated and verified, but to claim it as new research is either deceitful or negligent.
I am not a paleontologist, but I am versed in the debates over nomenclature etc. I would have to say I would take a dim view on somebody else publishing a formal name based on research that I had done and just haven't got around to publishing formally. If nothing else, it's an ethical debate. On the other hand, if the Mexico people publish and formally describe and name some unknown species based on someone else's findings, then this can be debated and overruled. If paleontology is anything like botany (I am involved in plant systematics) then I am sure that governing bodies of nomenclature can overrule the Mexicans descriptions (and names). From the article it doesn't seem they have the type specimen, and it seems obvious that the doctoral students first reported (and informally described) the species. If anything it brings into question the NMMNHS's credibility. As the article said:
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.
...was the discovery of the large planetoid larger than Pluto and also outside of Pluto's orbit that was discovered by an American team and then rediscovered by a European team based on information they'd obtained from the first lot. I imagine it's commonplace amongst astronomers, due to the timescales involved in verifying findings and the difficulty of proving plagarism when dealing with objects visible from half the Earth's surface for extremely long periods of time. It's also common in mathematics - Sir Isaac Newton stole copiously from Huygens, Descartes, Hooke, and anyone else stupid enough to let him. Or perhaps not stupid - the only person to resist Newton's claim of ownership did die rather soon after.
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.
The parts of the ICZN ("the code") you refer to are recommendations listed in the Appendecies as Appendix A. The recommendations in Appendix A (Code of Ethics) are RECOMMENDATIONS and not part of the actual rules. Thus, unethical behavior does not technically violate the rules, only the spirit of the rules. 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
Back in the 70's I was a district Manager of ten states and was still technically accomplished so I wrote a rather large document on troubleshooting various stand alone disk drives. I sent the document to all of the engineers/branch managers in my district and then copied all the district managers around the country so they could share the information if they desired. I also sent a copy to my Boss.
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.
48% with some funny business, as reported in the NSF study, sounds about right to me.
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.
I recall Tom Lehrer's "Plagiarize" more that 40 years ago
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".
If you think that is bad, think of me man! Some slashdotter named commisaro totally ripped off a comment I was thinking of posting. Talk about preemptive plagiarism!!!
If you think that is bad, think of me man! Back in my day they would totally rip off an arm and a leg! Have you ever tried to drive a wheelchair with a single arm? In the snow? Uphill both ways?
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
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
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
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
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
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
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
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
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)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
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".
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
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