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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?"
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.
"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.
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.
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 publishers would have a pretty good defense (they have no way of knowing if people are submitting their own works or plagiarizing), with the judge instructing the plaintiff to sue whoever falsely submitted the paper.
Of course, copyright relates to the expression of an idea, and not an idea (or data) itself. So if someone takes your work, and rewrites it and submits it to a journal, that's plagiarism but is NOT copyright infringement. It is unethical, but not illegal.
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.
Publication count is rather meaningless. Most scholars tend to publish tons of information on the same few topics anyway.
The point gets +2 interesting
The plagiarizing joke gets +3 funny
at this rate, my worthless summary will get +5 insightful
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.