andrew_gelman_stats andrew_gelman_stats-2011 andrew_gelman_stats-2011-901 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
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Introduction: As regular readers of this blog are aware, I am fascinated by academic and scientific cheating and the excuses people give for it. Bruno Frey and colleagues published a single article (with only minor variants) in five different major journals, and these articles did not cite each other. And there have been several other cases of his self-plagiarism (see this review from Olaf Storbeck). I do not mind the general practice of repeating oneself for different audiences—in the social sciences, we call this Arrow’s Theorem —but in this case Frey seems to have gone a bit too far. Blogger Economic Logic has looked into this and concluded that this sort of common practice is standard in “the context of the German(-speaking) academic environment,” and what sets Frey apart is not his self-plagiarism or even his brazenness but rather his practice of doing it in high-visibility journals. Economic Logic writes that “[Frey's] contribution is pedagogical, he found a good and interesting
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1 As regular readers of this blog are aware, I am fascinated by academic and scientific cheating and the excuses people give for it. [sent-1, score-0.175]
2 Bruno Frey and colleagues published a single article (with only minor variants) in five different major journals, and these articles did not cite each other. [sent-2, score-0.122]
3 ” Textbook writers copy and rearrange their own and others’ examples all the time; it’s only when you aim for serious academic journals that it’s a problem. [sent-7, score-0.405]
4 One question with the econ blogger did not address is: why did all these top research journals publish a paper with no serious research content. [sent-8, score-0.538]
5 Setting aside the self-plagiarism thing, everyone knows that publication in to econ journals is extremely competitive. [sent-9, score-0.312]
6 Why would five different journals be interested in a fairly routine analysis of a small public dataset that has been analyzed many times before? [sent-10, score-0.218]
7 I don’t have a great answer to that one, except that the example may have seemed offbeat enough to be worthy of publication just for fun (and, unfortunately, none of the journal editors happened to know that they were publishing a variant of a standard example in introductory statistics books). [sent-11, score-0.133]
8 And, as is often the case, the plagiarism is typically worse than the original, sometimes introducing errors, other times simply rephrasing in a way that revealed a serious lack of understanding of the original material. [sent-15, score-0.209]
9 There are various theories of what drove Wegman to steal, but I’ll go for my generic explanation of laziness , desire to simulate expertise or creativity where there is none. [sent-16, score-0.248]
10 The first session (“The Human Cultural and Social Landscape”) was organized and chaired by Wegman and featured three speakers, all from Wegman’s department, including Yasmin Said, his coauthor on the paper that was retracted for plagiarism. [sent-20, score-0.142]
11 The talk is described as a review so plagiarism isn’t so much of an issue, I guess. [sent-22, score-0.141]
12 Unlike Frey (who’s a bigshot in European academia) or Wegman (whose work is politically controversial), Fisher is enough of a nobody that apparently survive after being called out for plagiarism with his career otherwise unaffected. [sent-26, score-0.141]
13 Mark Hauser is the recently retired (at the age of 51) Harvard psychologist who is working on a book, “Evilicious: Explaining Our Evolved Taste for Being Bad,” and also reportedly dabbled in a bit of unethical behavior himself involving questionable interpretation of research data. [sent-27, score-0.159]
14 He was turned in by some of his research assistants who didn’t like that he was being evasive and not letting others replicate his measurements. [sent-28, score-0.142]
15 There is a slippery slope here though; although very few researchers will go as far as to make up their own data, many will “torture the data until they confess”, and forget to mention that the results were obtained by torture…. [sent-34, score-0.126]
16 Diederik Stapel is the subject of the most recent high-profile academic plagiarism case. [sent-36, score-0.26]
17 Wagenmakers writes: He published about 100 articles, and in high ranking journals too (Science being one of them). [sent-37, score-0.162]
18 I’ve never done any research fraud myself but I have to say I can see the appeal. [sent-47, score-0.153]
19 I could feel the real temptation to cheat and adjust the numbers to what I’d guess they should’ve been, absent the shocks which were irrelevant to the study at hand. [sent-50, score-0.143]
20 As for Frey, my guess based on his many writings on academic publication ethics is that he feels that everybody does it, so he needs to play the game too. [sent-56, score-0.275]
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Introduction: As regular readers of this blog are aware, I am fascinated by academic and scientific cheating and the excuses people give for it. Bruno Frey and colleagues published a single article (with only minor variants) in five different major journals, and these articles did not cite each other. And there have been several other cases of his self-plagiarism (see this review from Olaf Storbeck). I do not mind the general practice of repeating oneself for different audiences—in the social sciences, we call this Arrow’s Theorem —but in this case Frey seems to have gone a bit too far. Blogger Economic Logic has looked into this and concluded that this sort of common practice is standard in “the context of the German(-speaking) academic environment,” and what sets Frey apart is not his self-plagiarism or even his brazenness but rather his practice of doing it in high-visibility journals. Economic Logic writes that “[Frey's] contribution is pedagogical, he found a good and interesting
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Introduction: Someone pointed me to this letter to Bruno Frey from the editor of the Journal of Economic Perspectives. ( Background here , also more here from Olaf Storbeck.) The journal editor was upset about Frey’s self-plagiarism, and Frey responded with an apology: It was a grave mistake on our part for which we deeply apologize. It should never have happened. This is deplorable. . . . Please be assured that we take all precautions and measures that this unfortunate event does not happen again, with any journal. What I wonder is: How “deplorable” does Frey really think this is? You don’t publish a paper in 5 different places by accident! Is Frey saying that he knew this was deplorable back then and he did it anyway, based on calculation balancing the gains from multiple publications vs. the potential losses if he got caught? Or is he saying that the conduct is deplorable, but he didn’t realize it was deplorable when he did it? My guess is that Frey does not actually think the r
Introduction: A common reason for plagiarism is laziness: you want credit for doing something but you don’t really feel like doing it–maybe you’d rather go fishing, or bowling, or blogging, or whatever, so you just steal it, or you hire someone to steal it for you. Interestingly enough, we see that in many defenses of plagiarism allegations. A common response is: I was sloppy in dealing with my notes, or I let my research assistant (who, incidentally, wasn’t credited in the final version) copy things for me and the research assistant got sloppy. The common theme: The person wanted the credit without doing the work. As I wrote last year, I like to think that directness and openness is a virtue in scientific writing. For example, clearly citing the works we draw from, even when such citing of secondary sources might make us appear less erudite. But I can see how some scholars might feel a pressure to cover their traces. Wegman Which brings us to Ed Wegman, whose defense of plagiari
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