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?"

Comments

Not very

[geekoid]

This kind of thing gets found out about very quickly.

Re:Not very

[laughingskeptic]

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.

Re:Not very

[Jerry]

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.

Neither work

Re:Not very

[Anthracene]

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 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 a point along the continuum of laziness and dishonesty of grabbing something that's someone else's rather than doing it yourself.

Re:Not very

[Anonymous Coward]

Think more creatively. Do they have an on-line journal?

DMCA takedown.

Re:Not very

[pkphilip]

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 there is very little evidence for the above said sensational behavior, the scientist will add weasel words like "probably" or a "it is thought that" in the same statement.

You can verify this for yourself by looking at many paleontology literature (and also sites). You will notice that the vast majority of the research is into things like determining the strength of a particular specimen, the speed at which it would run.. etc.

There is a desire to feed the popular press and to do a few interviews on tv, sell a book or two and perhaps even rights for a movie. This compromises the quality of a lot of research going on in these fields and also opens up opportunities for other charlatans who are willing to steal your ideas from you, if they can help it.

What about peer review, you say? Well, when you have a bunch of people who are having quite a party by making their "findings" as "interesting" as possible, who among them would want to make this any less interesting.

How widespread is the problem?

[pongo000]

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.)

Re:How widespread is the problem?

[MicktheMech]

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.

There is one simple solution to the problem

[Jailbrekr]

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.

Plagarism in Medline

[Boawk]

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.

They work. People just suck.

[interactive_civilian]

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. :(

Re:They work. People just suck.

[dave1791]

"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 ambulances; but that is to fuel their ego and stature.

It's also not so simple. In the fields where it is customary to keep hardbound lab notebooks, write in ink and never skip a page (even a portion of one), plagiarism is probably not a big problem. There, the problem is self-plagiarism - publishing the same work multiple times to inflate publication counts - and just plain cooking the books when it comes to analysis. I've seen top notch scientists see what they want to see in the data and disregard non-supporting data as artifacts. That latter problem I think comes about because you can't publish negative results in a respectable journal. "I had this idea, tested it and it came out negative" is not as sexy as "new discovery". Never mind that the negative result is also a critical contribution to collective knowledge.

One recent-ish example

[jd]

...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.

This is not a new e.g the peripatetic fossils

[kjoh001]

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

Boss tried to take mine

[Sanat]

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.

Re:Fits the Profile for Standard Theft

[Metasquares]

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.