A Torrid Tale of Plagiarizing Paleontologists 160
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?"
meh, it's just science (Score:1, Funny)
Not very (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Not very (Score:5, Interesting)
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What would the publisher do if you sued them for copyright infringement? That could be rather embarrassing for them.
They would refer you to the whoever submitted the paper, and tell you to sue them.
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
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Whatever contract the publisher had with the plagiarist is meaningless as copyright defense. Sure they could turn around and sue the plagiarist for contract violation, but they still violated copyright and you could still sue them. Its just unlikely they would be found to have willingly done it so damages would be low.
I would still do it however. Let them put their attack dogs against the plagiarist. In fact you could sue them both for violating copyright laws and the plagiarist would have willingly done i
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Isn't this called paraphrasing?
(c) Jan 31 2008 A vux984 original post.
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Meaning, the word paraphrasing has lost it.
Obviously, the word paraphrasing does not mean what it used to.
I do not thing he knows what the word paraphrasing means anymore.
He obviously does not know what paraphrasing means.
Paraphrasing has obviously lost all meaning as a word.
Re:Not very (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Not very (Score:4, Funny)
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The plagiarizing joke gets +3 funny
at this rate, my worthless summary will get +5 insightful
Re:Not very (Score:5, Insightful)
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Perhaps because you can replicate experiments in many other fields, but you only get to dig something up once.
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To accommodate for the fact that
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My graduate supervisor was very outspoken about the fact that his name would not come first on any paper from my research.
Er, I thought that was the standard practice. Maybe it's just in physics (where I happen to have done a little research work), but I have always assumed that for most papers, the first name is the primary author and the last name is the advising principal investigator (and, everything in-between would be co-authors, colleagues in experiment, those who worked on experiment for a while and then left for a different appointment, etc.).
Why would a professor want his name first on any paper anyway? Does he want
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Did you know it happened? Then it proved my point "These things are found out quickly".
The fact that you didn't follow up on it is your problem.
If someone plagiarized my book and I did nothing about it, then it isn't the systems fault, it would be mine.
Yeah, Yeah "But I was a student..." or "I feared I wouldn't get..." or some other such pathetic excuse is about to roll of your tongue.
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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
They work. People just suck. (Score:5, Interesting)
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. :(
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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 a
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Ironically, publishing those findings will likely make them slightly more correct.
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They stole the data from a graduate student's thesis.
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Were any of the reports they looked at published in peer-reviewed journals or did they just go on hearsay and not bother pointing out where this theorised mass of bad data resides?
If these two scientists can show that half of all peer-reviewed papers use false data then why don't they refute them via publishing in the same journals?
And finally, why would anyone accept at f
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There are at least three methods which supposedly guard against bad science:
1) Peer review
2) Replication
3) "Scientific Method"
Unfortunately, these are not the methods you think they are. In particular, as is evident in the Schön scandal [wikipedia.org], peer review is not a guard (was never designed to be) against fraud. It is more of a guard against crack-pottery (although, given that fraud is also a kind of crack-pottery, there are obviously some flaws).
I don't know what you could possibly mean by "scientific method", as the method of "hypothesis and then experiment to verify" is the method you use during your own research, not to detect
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You can start anytime you like.
MODS (Score:2)
Good luck. (Score:1)
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Oh no! (Score:2, Funny)
Oh no! (Score:2)
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Fits the Profile for Standard Theft (Score:4, Insightful)
For once, that *IS* theft... (Score:4, Insightful)
Just thought I'd mention that because otherwise folks rush to allegations of hypocrisy, especially since I don't believe in imaginary property.
Re:Fits the Profile for Standard Theft (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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he PI's don't need or want top billing, because it's understood by all that they (most likely) played a large part in directing the research. The grad student or post-doc who did the majority of the actual work gets a first authorship to further them on their own way.
I'm a computer science graduate student and am working with a Mathematics professor at my university on a research project. You analysis is true with us as well. I'm doing a majority of the work but without his ideas I would have no idea where to start. If a paper comes out of it I would expect my name to appear somewhere but there's no way I could take all the credit.
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Wow, that group from Poland really got boned (Score:2, Funny)
(What? Digg doesn't have a paleontology section?)
Seriously (Score:1)
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Tag Winnar (Score:2, Funny)
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How widespread is the problem? (Score:3, Interesting)
(For those too lazy to RTFA, this study estimates 1-2% of the content in Medline is duplicated to some degree.)
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Unfortunately common in some places (Score:2)
What a bonehead! (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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scientists and academic's are even bigger money grubbers then business, most people don't realise this fact though
I couldn't disagree more with you on that one. I'm not sure what scientists and academians you were exposed to that caused you to come to that conclusion, but i can tell you they are not representative of the community.
Even the highest paid / most despised scientists make nowhere near the money that corporate bigwigs do. How many CEO's in the US pull in multi-million dollar bonuses? Thats a rather long list. But yet most scientists - especially in academia - will die before they pull in anywhere ne
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How are scientists who take a relatively low salary in comparison to what they could make in industry, undergo far more rigorous training, have a job requirement that includes routinely thinking of things no one else has thought of before, and who publish their research for free money-grubbing? Maybe some are in it for patents or something, but that's a very small percentage of scientists.
The reasons for going into science are diverse, and while ego might be among them, money is not. It should be, actuall
I remember another instance... (Score:2)
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A horrid hail of annoying alliteration! (Score:2)
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This isn't really new (Score:3, Informative)
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.
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No, but at its present rate... it soon will be.
Isn't there a species-naming tribunal? (Score:2)
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One recent-ish example (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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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.
Ehm, Descartes died in 1650. Newton was born in 1643. As at least Hooke was actively contesting the rights of discovery, I am not sure what you mean by the death reference, as he lived to the age of 67, while the conflict arose far earlier. Newton was not amicable to everyone, but you certainly had quite a bit of hyperbole in your post.
Correction:The Zoological Code Has No Such "Rules" (Score:3, Informative)
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 sca
There is one simple solution to the problem (Score:3, Interesting)
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They learned it from BitTorrent (Score:2)
Wtf? (Score:2)
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professional groups (Score:4, Funny)
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Plagarism in Medline (Score:2, Interesting)
This paper was just published: http://bioinformatics.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/24/2/243 [oxfordjournals.org]
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 id
The summary got it wrong (Score:3, Funny)
Not the EECoSVP! (Score:3, Funny)
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My $.02 on the issue at hand... (Score:2)
Second, paleon
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That would be the commentators on palaeontology who have got no knowledge of Greek at all, or the ones who think that Marsh had a time machine and went back a bit over 2000 years to change classical Greek in a way that's subtly insulting to his competitor.
Coprolites has the same roots as lithology and coprophagia [wikipedia.org].
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But, you're posting in a science-based forum! And of the languages that have contributed to scientific and technical terminology, by far the most profligate sources have been Latin and Greek (probably with German as a distant third). So ... either you're not as much of a scientist/ technically educated person as you think, or you never spend time thinking about the words that you use.
Well, few people do spend time thinking about what the words they use mean
Bone Wars of the 1800s (Score:2)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bone_Wars [wikipedia.org]
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.
This is not a new e.g the peripatetic fossils (Score:2, Interesting)
Boss tried to take mine (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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Good story
-FL
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Happens a lot (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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My friend Arden who was a straight "A" student in high school exchanged a paper with me that we each wrote. We recopied it in our own handwriting and turned them in for our assignment.
Arden got the "A" and I got the "B" because everyone knew that Arden was smart and an "A" student so his work must be of that caliber.
I, on the other hand was an underachiever thus I deserved the "B".
Double blind would have eliminated that kind of grading...
Not a new issue (Score:3, Informative)
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".