Slashdot Mirror
A Torrid Tale of Plagiarizing Paleontologists
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?"
in before Creationist shitstorm
Patriotism is a virtue of the vicious
This kind of thing gets found out about very quickly.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
They'll never win the case. I've been fighting for years for recognition of the fact that Isaac Newton totally ripped off my laws of motions, to no avail!
I'm not holding out much hope for the new Beebeardosaur I found yesterday in the Houston Museum of Natural Science! :(
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.
Soon to be seen on another site... "Digg this up!"
(What? Digg doesn't have a paleontology section?)
"whendidnewmexicostartbelievingindinosaurs" wins the "Best Tag" award for this article. (but ouch!)
If this study is representative, then I'd say it's rather widespread.
(For those too lazy to RTFA, this study estimates 1-2% of the content in Medline is duplicated to some degree.)
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.
Never let a lack of data get in the way of a good rant.
I'm not holding out much hope for the new Mischodon I found yesterday in the Philadelphia Museum of Natural Science! :(
--You will rephrase your request for me to go to hell. Goto statements are not acceptable programming constructs
...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) I realize that scientific experiments need to be repeated and verified, but to claim it as new research is either deceitful or negligent. Probably gets you more grant money, though.
Give it a rest guys.
That is to say, virtually extinct.
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.
Peer review every single paper published by Lucas, since I highly doubt that this incident of plagarism was the first, nor will it be the last.
Feed the need: Digitaladdiction.net
Is everyone besides Zonk on vacation today or what? Geez.
it was bound to happen where two professional organizations have bone to pick with each other.
Similar to the process used for asteroids, domain names, mountains, etc?
Give a man a fish and you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish, and he'll say "WHERE'S MY FISH, YOU IDIOT?"
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.
I can't be the only one that read the review's conclusion as "the alligators were groundless" can I?
Medline is an "Online database of 11 million citations and abstracts from health and medical journals and other news sources."
This paper was just published: http://bioinformatics.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/24/2/243
Déjà vu--A study of duplicate citations in Medline
Motivation: Duplicate publication impacts the quality of the scientific corpus, has been difficult to detect, and studies this far have been limited in scope and size. Using text similarity searches, we were able to identify signatures of duplicate citations among a body of abstracts.
Results: A sample of 62 213 Medline citations was examined and a database of manually verified duplicate citations was created to study author publication behavior. We found that 0.04% of the citations with no shared authors were highly similar and are thus potential cases of plagiarism. 1.35% with shared authors were sufficiently similar to be considered a duplicate. Extrapolating, this would correspond to 3500 and 117 500 duplicate citations in total, respectively.
"Once again Doctor Jones, there is nothing you can possess, that I cannot take away."
They misspelled "eatosaurs". Which is certainly appropriate for ancient crocodiles!
I am government man, come from the government. The government has sent me. -- G.I.R.
Gasp, taken before the Ethics Education Committee of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology?! They must be shaking in their pith helmets!
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
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. :(
"Empathise with stupidity, and you're halfway to thinking like an idiot." - Iain M. Banks
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.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Now all three cases are before the Ethics Education Committee of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology
Lesson: if you want to avoid review, go into Mollusks and Arthropods instead.
Table-ized A.I.
From my own experience, I would like to chime in on how I see this problem. First, I can say from when I took an upper-division course on vertebrate paleontology that there really are not that many people in the world with the job title "paleontologist". And those few that do have that title have to push pretty hard for a piece of a shrinking pot of research money. So while it is unfortunate, it isn't a huge surprise that there was a rush to get credit for naming this particular creature.
Second, paleontology has been competitive in this country for a very long time. One only has to look back to the infamous 19th century Bone Wars to see how cut-throat that field was at its beginnings. Some people have even rumored that Marsh actually named dinosaur dung "coprolites" as a way to discredit his competitor named Cope.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Who the fuck marked that as flaimbait?
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bone_Wars The Bone Wars were an infamous period in the history of paleontology when the two pre-eminent paleontologists of the time, Edward Drinker Cope and Othniel Charles Marsh, competed to see who could find the most, and more sensational, new species of dinosaur. This competition was marred by bribery, politics, violations of American Indian territories and virulent personal attacks.
But their discoveries were accompanied by sensational accusations of spying, stealing workers, stealing fossils, and bribery. Among other things Cope repeatedly accused Marsh of stealing fossils, and was so angry that he stole a train full of Marsh's fossils, and had it sent to Philadelphia. Marsh, in turn, was so determined that he stole skulls from American Indian burial platforms and violated treaties by trespassing on their land. He was also so protective of his fossil sites that he even used dynamite on one to prevent it from falling into Cope's hands.
Hi i worked in the paeleo area in the 1980's and 90's as a technician and it is not unknown for strange stuff to happen with fossils. The incident that comes to mind is the Himalayan peripatetic fossils see Nature 338, 613-615 20 04 1989 Commentary, Nature 341, 11-12 07 09 1989 Commentary,Nature 341, 13-15 07 09 1989 Commentary, Nature 343, 305-307 25 01 1990 Commentary, Nature 343, 405-406 01 02 1990 Commentary. This was a source of some amusement at the time it was going on but it was of course a really bad thing for understanding the geology and and paleontology of the region
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.
And in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make
torrid
Function: adjective
1 a: parched with heat especially of the sun : hot b: giving off intense heat : scorching2: ardent passionate
sordid
Function: adjective
1: marked by baseness or grossness : vile 2 a: dirty filthy b: wretched squalid3: meanly avaricious : covetous4: of a dull or muddy color
(m-w.com)
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".
Look what P2P file-sharing has done to us. Even the brightest minds in university now steal others work, all thanks to illegal downloading of music.
I suggest you read Slashdot
This seems to have become a bone of contention...
In Bill Brysons excellent book about the development of science over the last 300 years or so, he gives dozens of examples of paleontologists being invloved in petty, bitterly waged ego battles as well as brazen plagiarism, although, on the converse, when Darwin finally decided to publish his "Origin of the Species" book, he did so because one of his colleagues had started communicating to him about ideas that were very close to his theory of evolution. This individual Wallace did the honorable thing and let Darwin take all the credit.
prepare the survey weasels.
Is that like the latest release of Ubuntu?
http://dilemma.gulecha.org - My philospohical short film.
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 scales stolen from the specimen by a French worker (probably with an Indonesian accomplice). This nomenclatural act (publication prosing a new name) was challenged by many ichthyologists worldwide, who likewise took "a dim view" of such behavior, including many other French workers who saw the injustice of this. However, the ICZN had no basis to overturn the name proposed on the basis of scale morhology, regardless of how illicitly obtained because the "theft" did not explicitly violate the rules.
This may seem unjust, but the Commission hardly has the time or resources to rule on nomenclatural issues, much less judge the ethical standards of fellow scientists.
The rules of priority can only be overturned in cases where an older name has not been used as valid since 1899 and where uses of the junior synonym can be shown to have been used a definite number of times over a definite period of years (See Arcticle 23.9.1). That is in cases where use of an older name would upset prevailing useage
However, while the French worker's name will in perpetuity be attributed to the French author, for all practical purposes the French worker destroyed his good name (assuming it once meant something to him) by his actions and will in perpetuity be associated with his egregeious and unethical behavior.
Possibly Botanists who have their own set of rules may have arrived at a different outcome (I am not familiar with the the rules for Botanical Names). It would be interesting to know.
a comment like "How widespread is this kind of thing" makes me wonder where Zonk was living for the last 5000 years. How long has fraud or prostitution or theft been around....then of course, this is /.
I tend to agree with what you say. However, "credit" in science is largely irrelevant to the actual science. I'm not saying it has no effect, particular on people who do not understand the science. The effect may be large and often the most clever, efficient, and devious, even perhaps ruthless survive. The fact that Bill Gates is the world's richest man, rather than the descendants of either Paul Gottlieb Nipkow and Philo Farnsworth show that the "spoils" of innovation don't always get passed to those who first propose it. However, this is only in the context of human behavior and the human "food chain" that feeds of the products of science. It is irrelevant to science itself. Ethical behavior is largely up to historians of science to discuss and to theologians, who always take it upon themselves to pass judgements on the behavior of others, whether they have a reasonable basis for such judgements or not.
Everyone knows that Newton and Leibnitz essentially "invented/(discovered?)" calculus. However, fewer are aware that recent discoveries suggest that many of the seminal mahtematical ideas with respect to "infinitesmals" may have been first worked out by Archimedes many centuries earlier in his Palimpsest. We are human so we would all like to be held in such high esteem as any of these giants. No doubt fame, prizes and rich awards, and maybe even sex, would follow. However, it really matters little to the actual mathematics (save notation, where it seems Liebnitz won this aspect hands down). By declining the Fields medal Grigori Perelman, a Russian mathematician made this point rather forcefully. It is worth noting that on the Field Medal is the inscription "Transire suum pectus mundoque potiri", Rise above oneself and grasp the world, which is the essence of what science and mathematics is about.
Generally speaking, if you are in science for credit, glory, fame, or money you are really in the wrong business. For the most part, one gets into science for the joy of doing and the excitment of discovery, and the satisfaction of knowing how it is you know. As far as the science goes, there is little else to it.
I clicked this article first this morning because it relates to an issue that I'm dealing with at my university. Recently I was sent an email informing me that I am suspected of self-plagiarism. The penalty ranging from failing the assignment, course, warnings, to expulsion. The situation was that I was repeating an online course for our co-op program. The question asked me something directly from the previous term and I answered with my old answer because I received a decent mark. The answer was one paragraph long (5-7 lines) answering "What do you think about an problem statement?". Not exactly a breadth of opportunity in content matter there.
So I sent them an email explaining my position and arguing that this doesn't fit the policy of plagiarism because it does not cover a major portion of my prior assignment (explicitly stated in the policy). 5-7 lines out of a 11 page document.
Essentially my defense was not to argue about the principle of the matter because doing that in a bureaucracy is about as useful as trying to tear down a wall with a feather. So instead I tried to show how my case does not apply.
Personally I see the entire title self-plagiarism to be complete bullshit. It is my own work, how on earth could I be held liable for copying it. The definition of plagiarism makes this term an oxymoron. Yet, I am still being investigated. Thoughts?
Sources
Jumphard, M J. "A Torrid Tale of Plagiarizing Paleontologists." Slashdot. 1 Feb. 2008.
I spotted in TFA down at the comment section where someone stated that the NMMNHS Bulletin allows the submitters to select their reviewers which seems a bit odd to me. This places a extra bit of potential bias on the process. To my knowledge most, if not all scientific journals select peer-reviewers anonymously. I wouldn't go so far as to say this is completely unbiased but being able to choose who says whether your methods and results were scientifically sound seems outrageous to me. A scientist could easily exclude younger ones from getting published and get his buddy's papers through and vice versa. This really detracts from the process and I don't think it should even be possible. I hope the NM museum gets slammed for ripping off that grad student's research.
Absolute power corrupts absolutely. indymedia
It's funny until you realize how true it is. The whole book is extremely interesting, very funny and quite relevant to this topic.
"Follow me" the wise man said, but he walked behind.
I wanted to message you privately, but don't know how. I did some reading overnight, and you're absolutely correct. My apologies for talking about something I didn't understand properly, and my wrongful assumption that TFA contained facts. Thank-you for your reply.