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NSF Audit Finds Numerous Cases of Alleged Plagiarism
sciencehabit writes "The National Science Foundation (NSF) is investigating nearly 100 cases of suspected plagiarism drawn from a single year's worth of proposals funded by the agency. The cases grow out of an internal examination by NSF's Office of Inspector General (IG) of every proposal that NSF funded in fiscal year 2011. James Kroll, head of administrative investigations within the IG's office, tells ScienceInsider that applying plagiarism software to NSF's entire portfolio of some 8000 awards made that year resulted in a 'hit rate' of 1% to 1.5%. 'My group is now swamped,' he says about his staff of six investigators."
There is a difference.
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When researcher's lives are ruled by arbitrary metrics on volumes of papers published, people will cheat. It's certainly true in computing. Try picking a few papers from the ACM Digital Library and start following the references. Rehash after rehash of other people's papers. Particularly their own...
It isn't really a scandal until the cases of plagiarism are confirmed. I once tested some plagiarism software on published academic economics, and it produced many false positives, many of which required some knowledge to interpret. Notice that a grant application may seem to be a somewhat "safer" place to plagiarize, since only a few people will see the application. However, those few might well include the borrowed from author - the granting agency will be sending the proposal for review to many researchers who have written on the topic before..
Are they just using a web service such as turnitin.com? I've used that for classroom assignments, and it has a rather high rate of false positives - even when factoring out direct quotes that students love to use to much to fill space.
i don't know karate, but i know ca-razy
How much self plagiarism and how much false positives?
Science is NOT 'believing what they tell us at face value'. Science IS asking (and getting) evidence before accepting their conclusions (the concept of repeatability). Yes, scientists are annoyingly human and therefore bedeviled with the same positive and negative attributes as the rest of humanity.
I'm not entirely sure what your point is. You seem to be confusing journalists with scientists. There is an unfortunate tendency for the press to dig around an abstract, find some enticing sentence and tart it up well past the point where the authors would even admit to writing about it - then have it repeated in the Internet echo chamber until it's a cure for cancer, scabies and annoying foot perspiration. But that isn't what science is.
Go to a conference about something and listen to the question and answer period. That's science.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Scientists have been proven to be human beings after all. They can lie and cheat like the rest of us. So that begs the question. Why should we all believe what they tell us at face value rather than using our deductive reasoning to figure out whether what they say is plausible? Why shouldn't we ask for hard evidence before accepting their conclusions at face value? If they are just as fallible as anyone else then why should we believe what they say rather than judging whether what they are saying makes any sense?
Well, you don't need to take what they say at face value(if you did, we could skip the tedious 'experiments' and 'peer review' and 'writing scientific papers' and 'data' and other boring stuff). More generally, the reason we don't generally use deductive reasoning is that it's somewhere between cumbersome and useless outside of toy examples written for deductive logic exercises. Induction is kind of lame by comparison; but it has the advantage of actually providing us with information about the world...
A plagiarism hit rate of only 1 to 1.5 percent is not that high, considering that many research grants are based upon the same core studies, use similar methods (e.g. "We will use a mass spectrometer with 8 plates of xxx"), and refer to prior studies in much the same way.
You call it plagiarism. I call it a good reason to retest your plagiarism software.
A more serious problem is duplication of human subjects in study designs. Many people with rare or recessive genetic problems like to volunteer for research studies, and may show up in samples from different labs, yet be the same person. A good study design accounts for that and validates that subjects (other than twins) are not in fact the same person represented in multiple studies. Same goes for any study with limited population sets that have restrictive conditions, such as longer lived animals.
Not as much of a problem with short-lived animals or cultures, as they tend not to be reused.
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So that begs the question.
*twitch*
Why shouldn't we ask for hard evidence before accepting their conclusions at face value?
Go ahead and do so, if you want - no-one's stopping you. You could even go to college, get that degree, spend 10 years out in the field and do everything else the first guy did to check that it's all true. Personally I'm happy to accept the existence of electrons and quarks on trust at this point.
If they are just as fallible as anyone else then why should we believe what they say rather than [confirming] whether what they are saying [survives further scientific scrutiny]
That's what all the other scientists in the world are for.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
Individual scientists are often wrong. This is occasionally due to malfeasance, but more often it is just the state of the art. The truth is not always completely self evident and often multiple theories compete.
Science, as a human endeavor, makes progress because results are always being verified by multiple parties. Funding proposals and peer reviewed publication are only a part of the progress. The key operation is reproducible results. Other people use existing results as part of their own work. If the outcome differs from previously known work, it will be reported. This is normal and expected. Eventually there is a consensus and and the scientific community moves forward.
Bad behavior by individuals slows down the process, but it does not derail it. Resources and time are wasted, but as long as the scientific method is employed, the results are trustworthy.
Your positions is one sometimes taken by jealous members of the social sciences and humanities, particularity in academia. (This is one of my problems with Michel Foucault and postmodernism/structuralism.) They see the respect, status and money going to technical fields, so they try and reframe science as having no more validity then any other intellectual area. The existence of modern society proves this wrong, but since they reject the scientific paradigm they seem to have no trouble ignoring external facts. (Actually Foucault has a lot of value when his work is applied to culture and society, so I should not be quite so harsh.)
That's the long answer. The short answer is that you're a troll, and appear to short in mental stature and emotional maturity.
Why is Snark Required?
Let's hope that such detection techniques can soon be applied to Patent Office applications too :-)