Thoughts on publishing ethics

Here's a piece on publishing ethics I did for Wiley's website on the subject. 

Where should one start a blog entry about publication ethics? It’s such a wide-ranging topic and, given that this isn’t supposed to be a book length entry, I will just pick on a couple of issues that I have seen occur over the years, either in one of the journals that I co-edit or that I have come across during conversations with fellow editors.

Over the years you begin to delude yourself into thinking that you have seen the full range of ethics infringements.  It’s particularly ironic, I guess, when you edit bioethics journals: you would hope that your authors would be clued in to publication ethics issues.   

We have seen quite a bit of plagiarism over the years. We do subject manuscripts toCrosscheck, both randomly as well as when we have reason to be suspicious of the provenance of some of the content claimed as original by an author. Now, given that we process hundreds of manuscripts each year, what does raise suspicion? Obvious stuff really: if an author whose first language isn’t English submits a manuscript that suffers fairly consistently from low quality English language expression, and suddenly there are a few pages of impeccable English, you would probably wonder how those impeccable bits came about. Sometimes there are perfectly innocent explanations, such as authors having had a friend copy-edit parts of their manuscript, but not all of it. On other occasions you discover that some material has indeed been plagiarized.  

You might also come across content that looks a little bit too familiar. Journal editors probably pick up on plagiarism for no other reason than that they send submitted papers out for review by true subject experts. More often than not they give you a heads-up on possibly plagiarized content. Funnily enough, this is how I came across a plagiarized paper for the first time in my academic life. The former editors of the journal that I now edit asked me to review a manuscript on a topic that I had just published a paper on. True enough, the paper they asked me to review was identical (to the title of the article) to my previously published piece. Go figure.

I don’t think, courtesy of legal restraints, we do a good job these days of dealing with obvious cases of plagiarism. We do a good job flagging a duplicate publication, as that is fairly easy to show. Plagiarism is becoming an endangered category. The reason, probably, is that to call something plagiarized content you’d need to prove intent if an accused author ever decided to sue you for libel. So, it seems to me that these days most instances of plagiarism are labeled as incidents of duplicate publication. The thing is, duplicate publication didn’t historically refer to duplicating other people’s content and pretending that it’s your own, but to duplicating your own content. The former would have been called plagiarism. The latter would have been called duplicate publication. Today both cases are most often referred to as duplicate publication due to fear of litigation.

Let me give you two examples, both from journals that I edit. We had large parts of an article we had published plagiarized in a medical journal. The author of the plagiarized content also happened to be a senior editorial board member of the medical journal that published said piece, and a senior bioethicist in the region. The medical journal’s editor investigated the matter and decided to publish an erratum regretting the inadvertent duplicate publication. And that was that. No professional sanction occurred, everyone happily pretended that the blatant verbatim copying of large parts of our original content was inadvertent. Nonsense. In addition, some academic institutions have been known to ignore information showing that their faculty were caught plagiarizing other people’s work.

The other example happened just a week or two ago. Academics submitted a paper to us that we accepted after peer review. They duly signed the standard disclosure form in which they assured us in writing that their content was original, and that it hadn’t been submitted or published elsewhere. We received a tip-off that the empirical component of the article we accepted (including a number of tables) had actually already been published in a local medical journal – and that indeed turned out to be the case. We emailed the authors of said document to ‘please explain’ and have yet to receive so much as an acknowledgment of receipt of our message. Either way, we caught this one. In many documents this kind of duplicate publication would be referred to as self-plagiarism. That’s a misnomer. You can’t plagiarize your own content; plagiarism by definition involves the theft of someone else’s intellectual property and it involves the thief pretending that it is his or her own. Clearly you cannot steal your own intellectual content, hence there is no such a thing as self-plagiarism.

I have great difficulty understanding why anyone would even try to publish plagiarized content. In this day and age, whole computer programs trawl academic publications non-stop, searching automatically for plagiarized content. Incidentally, one of the cases mentioned above came to my attention via this route. Why anyone would wish to subject themselves to the risk of getting caught is truly beyond me. Perhaps academics engaging in misconduct are banking on a lack ofenforceable regulations. Unless their employer punishes their misconduct, the worst that can happen to them is that a particular journal bans them from submitting (for a while). Perhaps publishers and groups such as COPE (the Committee on Publication Ethics) should come together and discuss whether more significant punitive measures could deter more authors from engaging in forms of academic misconduct.

The website Retraction Watch keeps track of many academic journal retractions. Check it out when you have a minute.  And COPE has developed a number of really useful flowcharts on what we as Editors should do if we come across cases of suspected plagiarism or duplicate publication. I recommend them to your attention. You might find them helpful whether you are an author or a journal editor.

Reportedly Margaret Somerville is at it again in the Globe and Mail, celebrating her scholarship

Ha, an odd weekend this has been. Instead of completing a book chapter that's due next weekend I spent most of the time emptying the basement to prepare it for a major remodelling job. Hard labour probably feels a bit like that.

In any case, over the weekend a whole bunch of people have written to me about Margaret Somerville who seemingly had yet another Somerville-on-soapbox-with-megaphone piece in the Globe and Mail newspaper. An opinion piece in which she reportedly whinges about being judged by others based on her religious convictions and not her ideas.

It is so so tempting, of course, to contact the paper and ask for the opportunity to reply to this utter nonsense. Alas, I have sworn to myself not to read its Opinion pages (I don't access them on the internet either) while it keeps in its employ a columnist who is a known plagiarist. The lack of editorial integrity that goes with such misguided policies should have some consequences, one being my 'don't read, don't contribute' policy.

I'm note saying that the Globe and Mail isn't worth reading. It has many fine journalists and writers working for it, but for better or worse it is seriously tainted by its editorial decision to keep said plagiarist writing for it. You can't take a broadsheet quite seriously that operates like that.

So, I've got to be clear here, I am responding to what has been reported to me about said article (that I won't link to either). Ms Somerville seems essentially to be complaining about people judging her by her religious beliefs and not by her ideas.

Ms Somerville's views are not seriously discussed in bioethics, despite her hard work at selling herself as a bona fide bioethicist in her newspaper and other appearances. She doesn't publish in serious, mainstream bioethics outlets or serious mainstream international academic publishing houses. On her website there is zero evidence that she has any academic qualifications in biomedical ethics. For years she has been marketing herself as the founding director of some bioethics outfit at McGill University. Really Ms Somerville? Bragging about having founded something many years ago as evidence of current-day academic competence?

Despite Ms Somerville's reported protestations (in said article) to the contrary,  this empress is really naked. The reason why virtually nobody seriously engaged academically with her is that there is little academic professional output to engage with. She pontificates mostly in newspapers, and it's always predictably Catholic output. To give you just three examples: Catholic Church: Assisted Dying = bad. Ms Somerville: Assisted Dying = bad. Catholic Church: marriage equality = bad. Ms Somerville: marriage equality = bad. Catholic Church: abortion = bad. Ms Somerville: abortion = bad.

Ms Somerville - to give credit where probably it isn't actually due - has tried hard over the years to cover her Catholic agitprop in bioethics language. Among her favourite covers is 'human dignity'. As far as she is concerned, assisted dying violates human dignity. Human dignity here simply stands for a Catholic understanding of what it is to be human and what it is to live a dignified human life. There's nothing else Ms Somerville has actually to offer. There are no ideas to engage with.

I do encourage you to check out Ms Somerville's Wikipedia entry. It seems to be a hard-fought-over entry. There are ongoing debates about her being turned down as an expert witness by US Courts. The entry tries hard - at the time of writing - to persuade us that Ms Somerville is a serious academic by showing off two article in the first volume of an unknown journal propagating Christian family values. It is all a bit of a joke, to put it mildly. An anti-gay campaign outlet masquerading as an academic journal, not affiliated with any serious international publisher. The Table of Contents downloads as MS Word documents. Hilarity all around here.

Perhaps, Ms Somerville, you would be better off stopping crying in public that nobody takes you quite seriously in the academy. It is you, after all, who has given professionals working in the field that you unjustifiably claim as your own so very little reason to engage you as an intellectual. If I wanted to engage thoughtful Catholic bioethicists, there are plenty of them. We do argue with each other. The key phrase here is that we 'argue'. Ms Somerville doesn't argue, she pontificates.

More confusion on plagiarism: The case of Johann Hari

If you were to read the right-wing papers in the UK you'd think Johann Hari (a high-profile left-wing columnist at the Independent newspaper who has also published for Slate and other outlets) had committed a terrible terrible crime. Not unexpectedly his enemies, of which there are surprisingly many, want to see his head (well, they want to see him fired). The plagiarism charge is currently being leveled against Hari all over the place.

What makes this an interesting case is the nature of his transgression. Hari admitted essentially to using content as part of interviews that was not part of the actual interview in question. Say, he interviewed Hugo Chavez. Hari would include in the interview quotes from sources other than what was said during the interview (but the quotes were nonetheless verbatim quote from the person he interviewed, it's just that the stuff wasn't actually said during the interview but was published elsewhere by someone else).

What is interesting here is that by standard definitions of plagiarism he has not actually plagiarised anything. After all, he didn't pass someone else's content off as his own. The people he quoted during the interview really said the things he quoted, but they did not say it during he interview. It would have been correct and arguably required to give the other interviewer credit (ie the person who got the quote he eventually quoted as if it had been said during his own interview).

What Hari did is no doubt a bit dodgy, but does it really constitute plagiarism? Clearly not, because the intellectual content was corrected ascribed to whoever was quoted. However, he should have given credit to the person who managed to get the quote in question from the subject of the interview.

Did Hari commit a capital crime here? I don't think so. One understands the campaign run by the right-wing media against an unloved left-wing commentator and competitor, but to my mind it's time to move on. Hari admitted his errors, promised to change his ways. That should be the end of it. Plagiarism  he did clearly not commit.

Why mention countries or regions when that serves no purpose

I got an interesting letter the other day, from academics in Turkey. For reasons that will become apparent sooner rather than later, I will likely be criticized for mentioning the country where the plagiarism occurred. The letter writers essentially are annoyed that in reports about plagiarism country affiliations of researchers feature prominently. So, the headline could say 'Harvard Hoititoiti Lab Researchers Caught Plagiarizing', but instead it says that ' US Americans Caught Plagiarizing'. The authors of said letter criticize that Western media and Western academics (the target of their scorn is an article in Nature) go out of their way to point fingers at countries rather than individual academics, just as if individual academics in a particular country plagiarizing something implicate many or most other academic researchers in the same country with wrongdoing. In this particular instance, under a big heading mentioning Turkey, in a kind of block in the centre of the Nature article, an Italy based academic is mentioned as saying that in certain cultures plagiarism is not considered deplorable. Anyone merely browsing the pages of Nature could be forgiven for taking home the message that plagiarism is not considered deplorable in Turkey, when really in this particular instance Turkish universities withdrew papers they considered plagiarized. That does not exactly suggest that they considered plagiarism anything but deplorable. So, what purpose did it serve for Nature to mention that the transgressions occurred in Turkey, and for designing the article in such a way as to suggest to the superficial reader that plagiarism in Turkey is not considered deplorable, when the opposite is actually true.

Interesting point that is being made by these academics. This nearly falls into the same category as racist talk (aka Black people are this, White people are that), but not quite so, given that it is superficially linked to a particular case at least. Still, it makes me wonder whether we should take country mentions out of paper headings unless they are relevant to the case. That's not to say that we mustn't add this kind of information within articles or in reference sections.

Scientific misconduct

The news on research misconduct is coming in hard and fast. A Bradford University professor was reportedly caught having published content that he plagiarized from Indian academics.  Germany had its fair share of significant scandals fairly recently. Retraction Watch reported on Professor Joachim Boldt who had some 90 or so papers retracted because they involved academic misconduct of some kind or other. The country defense minister was forced to resign (mostly because of outrage among the conservative middle classes and widespread anger among academics) because his doctoral thesis basically was a patchwork of stuff he copied elsewhere. Der Spiegel weekly magazine reports that the head of sport medicine at Freiburg University is currently under investigation by university authorities for having plagiarized parts of his habilitation (a German kinda second doctorate that you need if you wish to go for professorial jobs - a waste of time by any stretch of the imagination, but that's a story for another day). As yet unsubstantiated rumors have it that he delayed his PhD student's thesis defence so that he'd be able to publish his habilitation first. The university also investigates claims that said professor's wife, in order to speed up her doctoral thesis defense misappropriated content from doctoral theses her husband supervised for her own thesis.

At Bioethics, a journal that I am associated with as an Editor, we had to face - in this year alone - two plagiarism cases, each time involving stuff we published being plagiarized elsewhere. One paper has since been retracted by BMC Medical Ethics, an Open Access electronic publication operated by Springer Publishing. The retraction did not occur until significant pressure was exerted on the reluctant publisher. In case of doubt, strangely, publishers and editors seem quite happy to cover their authors' tracks and opt for Errata as opposed to retractions, the dreadful word 'plagiarism' is avoided at nearly all cost by publishers and editors. It's unclear to me whether that is due to legal reasons as opposed to lack of insight on the relevant editors' part. The other plagiarism claim is still investigated. When you realize that we publish only between 55 and 65 manuscripts in any given year, that's quite a bad start into 2011.

In Britain the conservative paper The Telegraph reports the results of a nationwide survey suggesting that some institutions had to face down hundreds of cheating students in just one year. You'll be pleased to know that the supposedly best universities in the country, Oxford and Cambridge (where likely the pressure to perform is highest) reported in 2009/2010 12 and 1 instances respectively of cheating amongst their students. I guess, the good news is that once you've been admitted there you don't have to worry too much about getting caught while you engage in academic misconduct. Their  enforcement of academic standards is likely to be pretty lax indeed. Cambridge having caught one student cheating in said academic year seems to be the perfect place to study these days. I recommend the league table to you in case you consider enrolling in places where you stand a fair chance at getting away with cheating because nobody seems to bother checking too carefully. Go for those universities that report close to no students cheating, and you likely are on to a winner. To my academic colleagues asking for evidence I have to say that I do think students everywhere cheat in significant numbers. It's simply the case that some institutions care more so than others about catching cheats. A low number of caught cheats in my reality is not evidence of fewer cheats, rather it is evidence of lax enforcement and monitoring.

In unrelated news, the BBC reports that Germany is today the world's most popular country, closely followed by Britain...

Universities too lenient with plagiarising students

A remarkable piece of research was reported by the BBC. The target of the investigation were some 80 plus UK universities. It seems as if of 9200 students caught plagiarising only 143 students were expelled. That's possibly fair enough, because without further information about the severity of the cheating it's difficult to ascertain whether expelling the students would have been more appropriate in the majority of cases found. Still, it is hugely worrisome that the reason given for why penalties have not been harsher is that academics felt they would likely not be backed up by their institution and/or worries that high-powered student lawyers would destroy the case in court. Check out the original reporting and read the commnens made by university teachers as well as cheating students. It's frightening!