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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?"
This kind of thing gets found out about very quickly.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
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.)
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!!!
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
"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 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
it was bound to happen where two professional organizations have bone to pick with each other.
Methinks they have a reptile dysfunction.
"History doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme." Mark Twain
I think "Zonk" is the name of the script. The last human "editor" left to "work" at BoingBoing 3 years ago.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
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.
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 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)
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
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".
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.