6 ms·

“Close to 10% of the papers we receive show some sign of academic misconduct”

66 points by tokenadult 13y ago

spikels 13y ago
Important issue. It is good to see Elsevier, a publisher often thought to be more concerned with profits, highlighting the problem.
- Kliment 13y ago
  I don't see why that matters. This is in issue with absolutely every journal, and Elsevier should die regardless. Ask the editors of any open access journal what percentage of submissions show problems like this, you'll likely get the same response. This in no way excuses or mitigates the evil that Elsevier has done to the world.
WalterSear 13y ago
And those are the ones who do a sloppy enough job to get caught.
rurounijones 13y ago
Kind of ironic that we have lawyers from elsevier talking about misconduct when they have this http://www.the-scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/27383/title/Elsevier-published-6-fake-journals/ http://www.the-scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/27383/... in their closet as well as sundry other things. On the other hand, maybe they really are trying to improve themselves and I am being too judgemental.
aroch 13y ago
On a vaguely related note, I know of a crystallographer who would send out Christmas cards every year that looked like postcards with a partial, yet to be published, crystal structure as the image. One year, one of the crystallographers he sent the card out to figured out which protein it was, reconstructed the density map (partially from his own data on the same molecule, partially from the solved structure on the card) and published the first PDB for it to RCSB. The following tiff and yelling about academic misconduct was pretty funny. They wound up taking down the PDB, but the guy's never sent out another postcard-like Christmas card
- craigyk 13y ago
  sounds like a good fairy tale. are you claiming he phased data he had already using the model in the postcard? seems unlikely.
bsullivan01 13y ago
What happens to them, are they blacklisted from future publications?
Brakenshire 13y ago
You can't enforce such a brutal publish or perish pressure on someone's livelihood without selecting to some extent for people who will abuse the system. I personally think the whole system is fundamentally flawed, given the extent to which it relies upon trust. You're operating a very, very competitive market, where the integrity of the 'product' is almost entirely self-verified.
pizza_boy 13y ago
I've said as much in the article comments, but it's worth repeating here: there's really no surprise that this sort of thing happens when more than a million articles are published every year. There is so much pressure on researchers to publish. I really do think the way to solve this sort of problem is to find ways to give researchers credit for other forms of contributions. This is what figshare is doing with datasets, and what we're doing with peer-review: http://blog.publons.com/post/61380784056/announcing-doi-support-for-reviews http://blog.publons.com/post/61380784056/announcing-doi-supp...
- chubot 13y ago
  For Computer Science Ph.D.'s, I think you should get credit for writing code. Either production-quality open source code, or pedagogical code. I'm looking at the Stanford Pintos kernel and MIT xv6 kernel. While there were minor papers from those projects, I think they were more like a labor of love. When you consider the coding effort, those projects probably took 10x the effort than a typical paper. But yeah it would be better if a little more time was spent on code vs. papers. I actually attended a talk from an Adobe researcher talking about software abstractions some years ago. He advocated that you should be able to get a Ph.D. for finding a good abstraction, e.g. for say modeling a paint brush or something. There are lots of bad ways to write code but only a few good ones. Even better would be to write it in a way so that other people can actually learn from it.
  - foobarbazqux 13y ago
    I'm not sure you can really write production quality code in a Ph.D., because that requires a production environment, which just isn't available in academia, and also because writing such code conflicts with research goals.
    - chubot 13y ago
      Sure you can. Plenty of 16 year olds have written say windows managers that thousands of people use -- that's production quality code. Your second argument is circular -- I'm saying a valid research goal should be to write solid and useful code, and then explain it. For example, you could write an OS kernel or kernel subsystem to fill some particular part of the design space. A great but rare example is what the authors of Lua have done.
unreal37 13y ago
Half the plagiarism violations are "self-plagiarism", which I assume means copying from your own previously published works. Hardly seems like such an ethical problem to copy from yourself except of course if you're paid by the word.
- jules 13y ago
  Exactly. A research group will build an experimental setup and then do several experiments with it. In each paper you need to describe the experimental setup, so it makes sense to write that description once and use it in several papers while only changing the parts of the setup that you changed for the new experiment. Another case in which this often occurs is in the introduction. Each paper has a one or two paragraph introduction to the field. For instance papers about breast cancer maybe have an introduction that goes "Breast cancer occurs in X% of women over N years old, etc etc". Since a researcher's papers are most times in the same field, it makes sense to reuse those paragraphs in several papers. They may call this "self-plagiarism" but in my opinion there is nothing unethical about this.
  - omnisci 13y ago
    Agreed, you write the same stuff over and over again. This isn't "plagiarism", it's "I've been working on the same topic of 20 years and there is nothing new to report about it in this portion of the paper, but here something new". That is the point of a paper. Either way, I agree with everyone else in this thread as well. The system of publish or perish is 1. dumb 2. old 3. not moving science forward. It's become more of a "I need xyz papers published this year" instead of "I'm curious about xyz and how it solves abc". That isn't science, it's a career/ego metric. Good news is that there are groups (like myself, science exchange, figshare etc) who are working to fix that. It's a matter of time, but a social change to science is starting.
- aidenn0 13y ago
  It increases the amount of crap out there, plus it pads the CV
  - 13y ago
beloch 13y ago
Self-plagarism is a tricky thing. Some redundancy in publications is virtually unavoidable. If you are reporting new results from an experiment that has been previously published, you still need to provide a brief summary of how things work but, of course, you reference your previous work. This is as transparent and innocent as things get, and isn't self-plagiarism. However, what if you reproduce a figure published in another journal exactly? Then things can get ugly (Depending on a lot of legalese no researcher should have to worry about.)! To make matters worse, the same experimental setup is frequently used to run experiments that result in several publications. When you have several papers authored by different overlapping groups of researchers in various stages of review simultaneously things can get very confusing. The first paper you submit is frequently the last one published. The last paper you submit will then wind up referencing arxiv pre-prints instead of published articles, and if you did plagiarize yourself by mistake, the publisher of the paper submitted last might have absolutely no chance of detecting it. On top of it all, there is frequently interference from editors and reviewers. A well-written and coherent paper on a theory an experiment testing that theory might be considered "too long" or "too confusing" by a referee, and the editor will jump on that comment and demand the paper be split into two, sometimes only one of which they feel like publishing in their journal. If the researcher had done this of his/her own initiative many would consider it CV-padding! Yes, self-plagiarism can be a means to pump up your publication list, but it also happens innocently because publishing is such a confusing counter-intuitive mess! It's probably an idiotic idea, but some kind of pan-journal version control system, even just for figures, would be a tremendous headache reducer if done right!
gcatalfamo 13y ago
Elsevier talks about ethical problems. There is a joke in here somewhere.
mistercow 13y ago
I thought this was going to be a study of papers written by undergrads for class. I thought 10% sounded extremely low.
denzil_correa 13y ago
I can speak for Computer Science and the problem is "quid pro quo". Irrespective of what the conferences/journals say, reviews are NEVER blind and the people know each other in the community. No one "dares" to cross lines or report in fear of being censured.
- pmiller2 13y ago
  Exactly. I've experienced this in mathematics. Just knowing the topic of a paper will typically narrow down the possible list of authors to about 5 people. From there, the writing style or other clues typically give it away.

66 points by tokenadult 13y ago

Important issue. It is good to see Elsevier, a publisher often thought to be more concerned with profits, highlighting the problem.

Kliment 13y ago
I don't see why that matters. This is in issue with absolutely every journal, and Elsevier should die regardless. Ask the editors of any open access journal what percentage of submissions show problems like this, you'll likely get the same response. This in no way excuses or mitigates the evil that Elsevier has done to the world.

WalterSear 13y ago

And those are the ones who do a sloppy enough job to get caught.

rurounijones 13y ago

Kind of ironic that we have lawyers from elsevier talking about misconduct when they have this http://www.the-scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/27383/title/Elsevier-published-6-fake-journals/ http://www.the-scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/27383/... in their closet as well as sundry other things. On the other hand, maybe they really are trying to improve themselves and I am being too judgemental.

aroch 13y ago

On a vaguely related note, I know of a crystallographer who would send out Christmas cards every year that looked like postcards with a partial, yet to be published, crystal structure as the image. One year, one of the crystallographers he sent the card out to figured out which protein it was, reconstructed the density map (partially from his own data on the same molecule, partially from the solved structure on the card) and published the first PDB for it to RCSB. The following tiff and yelling about academic misconduct was pretty funny. They wound up taking down the PDB, but the guy's never sent out another postcard-like Christmas card

craigyk 13y ago
sounds like a good fairy tale. are you claiming he phased data he had already using the model in the postcard? seems unlikely.

bsullivan01 13y ago

What happens to them, are they blacklisted from future publications?

Brakenshire 13y ago

You can't enforce such a brutal publish or perish pressure on someone's livelihood without selecting to some extent for people who will abuse the system. I personally think the whole system is fundamentally flawed, given the extent to which it relies upon trust. You're operating a very, very competitive market, where the integrity of the 'product' is almost entirely self-verified.

pizza_boy 13y ago

I've said as much in the article comments, but it's worth repeating here: there's really no surprise that this sort of thing happens when more than a million articles are published every year. There is so much pressure on researchers to publish. I really do think the way to solve this sort of problem is to find ways to give researchers credit for other forms of contributions. This is what figshare is doing with datasets, and what we're doing with peer-review: http://blog.publons.com/post/61380784056/announcing-doi-support-for-reviews http://blog.publons.com/post/61380784056/announcing-doi-supp...

chubot 13y ago
For Computer Science Ph.D.'s, I think you should get credit for writing code. Either production-quality open source code, or pedagogical code. I'm looking at the Stanford Pintos kernel and MIT xv6 kernel. While there were minor papers from those projects, I think they were more like a labor of love. When you consider the coding effort, those projects probably took 10x the effort than a typical paper. But yeah it would be better if a little more time was spent on code vs. papers. I actually attended a talk from an Adobe researcher talking about software abstractions some years ago. He advocated that you should be able to get a Ph.D. for finding a good abstraction, e.g. for say modeling a paint brush or something. There are lots of bad ways to write code but only a few good ones. Even better would be to write it in a way so that other people can actually learn from it.
- foobarbazqux 13y ago
  I'm not sure you can really write production quality code in a Ph.D., because that requires a production environment, which just isn't available in academia, and also because writing such code conflicts with research goals.
  - chubot 13y ago
    Sure you can. Plenty of 16 year olds have written say windows managers that thousands of people use -- that's production quality code. Your second argument is circular -- I'm saying a valid research goal should be to write solid and useful code, and then explain it. For example, you could write an OS kernel or kernel subsystem to fill some particular part of the design space. A great but rare example is what the authors of Lua have done.

unreal37 13y ago

Half the plagiarism violations are "self-plagiarism", which I assume means copying from your own previously published works. Hardly seems like such an ethical problem to copy from yourself except of course if you're paid by the word.

jules 13y ago
Exactly. A research group will build an experimental setup and then do several experiments with it. In each paper you need to describe the experimental setup, so it makes sense to write that description once and use it in several papers while only changing the parts of the setup that you changed for the new experiment. Another case in which this often occurs is in the introduction. Each paper has a one or two paragraph introduction to the field. For instance papers about breast cancer maybe have an introduction that goes "Breast cancer occurs in X% of women over N years old, etc etc". Since a researcher's papers are most times in the same field, it makes sense to reuse those paragraphs in several papers. They may call this "self-plagiarism" but in my opinion there is nothing unethical about this.
- omnisci 13y ago
  Agreed, you write the same stuff over and over again. This isn't "plagiarism", it's "I've been working on the same topic of 20 years and there is nothing new to report about it in this portion of the paper, but here something new". That is the point of a paper. Either way, I agree with everyone else in this thread as well. The system of publish or perish is 1. dumb 2. old 3. not moving science forward. It's become more of a "I need xyz papers published this year" instead of "I'm curious about xyz and how it solves abc". That isn't science, it's a career/ego metric. Good news is that there are groups (like myself, science exchange, figshare etc) who are working to fix that. It's a matter of time, but a social change to science is starting.
aidenn0 13y ago
It increases the amount of crap out there, plus it pads the CV
- 13y ago

beloch 13y ago

Self-plagarism is a tricky thing. Some redundancy in publications is virtually unavoidable. If you are reporting new results from an experiment that has been previously published, you still need to provide a brief summary of how things work but, of course, you reference your previous work. This is as transparent and innocent as things get, and isn't self-plagiarism. However, what if you reproduce a figure published in another journal exactly? Then things can get ugly (Depending on a lot of legalese no researcher should have to worry about.)! To make matters worse, the same experimental setup is frequently used to run experiments that result in several publications. When you have several papers authored by different overlapping groups of researchers in various stages of review simultaneously things can get very confusing. The first paper you submit is frequently the last one published. The last paper you submit will then wind up referencing arxiv pre-prints instead of published articles, and if you did plagiarize yourself by mistake, the publisher of the paper submitted last might have absolutely no chance of detecting it. On top of it all, there is frequently interference from editors and reviewers. A well-written and coherent paper on a theory an experiment testing that theory might be considered "too long" or "too confusing" by a referee, and the editor will jump on that comment and demand the paper be split into two, sometimes only one of which they feel like publishing in their journal. If the researcher had done this of his/her own initiative many would consider it CV-padding! Yes, self-plagiarism can be a means to pump up your publication list, but it also happens innocently because publishing is such a confusing counter-intuitive mess! It's probably an idiotic idea, but some kind of pan-journal version control system, even just for figures, would be a tremendous headache reducer if done right!

gcatalfamo 13y ago

Elsevier talks about ethical problems. There is a joke in here somewhere.

mistercow 13y ago

I thought this was going to be a study of papers written by undergrads for class. I thought 10% sounded extremely low.

denzil_correa 13y ago

I can speak for Computer Science and the problem is "quid pro quo". Irrespective of what the conferences/journals say, reviews are NEVER blind and the people know each other in the community. No one "dares" to cross lines or report in fear of being censured.

pmiller2 13y ago
Exactly. I've experienced this in mathematics. Just knowing the topic of a paper will typically narrow down the possible list of authors to about 5 people. From there, the writing style or other clues typically give it away.