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- A Serious and Growing Issue?
- How Do We Cope with It?
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- Plagiarism
- Fabrication of data/information
- Inaccurate referencing
- Gratuitous co-authorship, premature publication, duplicate publication
- Fudging
- Carelessness, lack of knowledge of research process, or ethical lapses =
misconduct?
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- When is seeing believing
- Digital technology enables manipulation of images: subversion of the
certainty of photographic evidence
- Workers at plant (six African-American workers became “mysteriously
white and an Indian executive had lost his beard and turban): Newsweek
(March 4, 1996), p. 55
- Abraham Lincoln and Marilyn Monroe
- George H. Bush and Margaret Thatcher
- Photo of fictitious meeting between then President Clinton and Saddam
Hussein
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- Students (high school up): Teachers trying to educate their students
(e.g., falsified home pages)
- Faculty members
- Medical researchers
- Journalists
- Governments (mislead or disguise)
- How about the private sector:
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- Of all the questions that remain unanswered, the simple one, “How much
misconduct is there?,” has inspired the most debate.
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- A professor has been accused of personally benefiting from information
he compiled from a quarterly customer-satisfaction report [by buying and
trading stocks of companies participating in the survey] (Chronicle of
Higher Education, February 20, 2003)
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- “A key study pointing to the effectiveness of high-dose chemotherapy and
bone marrow treatments in treating metastatic breast cancer was based on
faked data (Arizona Republic, April 27, 2001)
- A professor admitted to having fabricated experiment results in two
studies … while she was an assistant professor … from 1996 to 2000. The
studies were partially funded with federal money (Boston Globe, December
16, 2001)
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- A highly regarded humanities professor at the University of California
at San Diego listed “a bachelor’s degree from Grambling College on his
CV.” He claimed to have graduated in 1963. In fact, he had no college
diploma (The Chronicle of Higher education, April 4, 2003, P. A10)
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- “has been cited in more than 50 psychology studies, according to the Social
Studies Citation Index. The author fabricated three experiments in the
above article and one more.
- The fabrications were part of federally-funded research
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- Some anthropologists may have conducted questionable experiments on
Amazon tribes. They fomented deadly disease and violence and they
observed the consequences--injecting the Yanomami with a controversial
vaccine for measles (lack a natural immunity to it); the vaccine causes
measles-like symptoms and has proved deadly
- They also staged fights among tribal members and encourage violence
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- The university has accused five professors--in this case the entire
finance dept.--“of fabricating data in scholarly papers, duplicating
large chunks of their own work in several papers, plagiarizing and
listing as authors a number of professors at the university who did not
contribute.”
- “The same sets of data and results were used in multiple papers but were
attributed to different studies. … passages [were] duplicated in several
papers.” Chronicle of Higher Education (Sept. 19. 2003), p. A18.
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- Business professor at Columbia University wrote a letter on business
school stationery to the owners of about 250 restaurants in NYC,
complaining that he had been stricken with food poisoning after dinner
at their establishments. He stated that he and his wife went to the
restaurant to celebrate a wedding anniversary but ended up in the bathroom,
vomiting.
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- In fact, he was doing an “experiment” to compare how business owners
responded to polite customer complaints versus how they responded to
complaints from enraged-sounding customers.
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- …Researchers [in a study
conducted in mid-1990s] enticed landlords to recruit 108 families with
healthy children to live in row houses with varying degrees of lead
contamination to measure the effectiveness of lead-abatement projects in
the city’s poor areas. The parents say they didn’t know the row houses
had lead paint, and were told too late by the researchers that their
children were being put at risk.
- Boston Globe (9/3/2001, p. 1)
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- “The editor of American Psychologist … has reneged on an agreement to
publish an article critical of the journal’s sponsor and of several
members of Congress. … In … [that article, the author] charges the
American Psychological Association with caving in to congressional
pressure when it apologized for an article about child sexual abuse” [The
Chronicle of Higher Education, online, 05/23/2001; 05/28/1999]
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- “Of the eight persons names as authors of the article [one that appeared
in print], some claimed that they had never reviewed the original data
and most claimed that they had not seen or approved either the original
version or one or more of the three revised versions of the manuscript
One author claimed that he had seen neither the original data nor any
version of the manuscript. Thus, there was a egregious disregard of the
principles of authorship …
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- “During the review process, several of the authors’ signatures were
falsified by a coauthor (who later confirmed to us that he had done
this)”
- Gregory D. Curfman, “Editorial: Notice of Retraction,” The New England
Journal of Medicine (March 6, 2003)
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- Prior to manuscript review, each author attest to (1) his/her authorship
of the paper, (2) the fact that he/she had access to all study data, the
freedom to analyze the data as he/she saw fit, and the authority to
publish the findings regardless of the implications for companies
funding the research
- The journal then sends each author an email when the accepted has been
accepted.
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- A study by Dr. John M. Budd et al. in the Journal of the American
Medical Association (July 15, 1998) examined 235 scientific journal
articles that had been formally retracted due to error, misconduct,
failure to replicate results, or other reasons. The researchers reported
that, “Retracted articles continue to be cited as valid works in the
biomedical literature after publication of the retraction.”
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- Lack of honoring of “intellectual debt:” lifting the work of others
without attribution. The intentional mis-characterization of works of
others
- Falsifying data/experiments/ research findings
- Falsifying CVs
- While reviewing research proposals, turning one down and later
submitting the same proposal yourself
- Filling out some questionnaires yourself or some of the questions
- Gratuitous co-authorship, premature publication, duplicate publication
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- American Journal of Medicine
- Cell
- Clinical Research
- Journal of the American Chemical Society
- The Lancet
- New England Journal of Medicine
- Science
- Tumor Research
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- There are only a few isolated incidents
- Whatever appears in print, is true? (Even in peer reviewed journals)
- Science, after all, is self-correcting
- Governments never “lie”
- How about links between corporate sponsorship and conflicts of interest
(e.g., medical research)
- -- Researchers have a significant financial stake in companies
sponsoring research; researchers are driven by financial motives,
including the need for subsequent public or private sector funding
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- Findings of research, government and non-government
- What we read and hear
- Scholarship, including the integrity of journals and fields of study
(e.g., publishing fraudulent research to discredit a journal and a field
of study)
- educational system
- Policies based on certain research
- Library budgets
- Other?
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- Office of Management and Budget, “Guidelines for Ensuring and Maximizing
the Quality, Objectivity, Utility, and Integrity of Information
Disseminated by Federal Agencies”
- The public can complain that a particular scientific study did not meet
the standards set. Agencies would be required to respond to such
complaints, review the study, and correct if it is found to be in
error.
- In other words, what if some object to the study and use the appeals
process as delaying tactic. Their objection cast as objecting to parts
of the research process in fact related to religious, social policy,
etc. issues
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- Strengthen penalties on those convicted of misconduct
- Review conflicts of interest guidelines
- Require signed agreements from all authors; ensure that each one is sent
that agreement and returns it
- Make more people aware of the issue (as the New England Journal of
Medicine has done)
- Find ways to increases information literacy of various groups—e.g.,
locate and evaluate information before using it.
- Do not assume the problem resides only with students
- Become familiar with the Office of Research Integrity (Department of
Health and Human Services),
http://ori.hhs.gov/html/programs/instructresource.asp
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- Resume congressional oversight hearings, like done in early 1980s, for
the purpose of (1) greater public awareness and (2) accountability for
public monies spent
- Increase knowledge of the research process, among students in more
social and behavioral sciences
- Including requiring research methods in LIS programs
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- Continue to support committees that protect human subjects, animals in
research, etc.
- Pressure universities to deal with the issue and have proper guidelines
for addressing the issue. Tendency is to be silent on the issue: image
- Correct bibliographic apparatus: need for retraction and correction
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- Interfere with the integrity of the peer- review process
- Attack or discourage legitimate whistleblowing
- Overvalue replication of social science research (placing such research
in peer-reviewed journals)
- Assume that misconduct applies only to students
- Assume that misconduct is an insignificant problem
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- Undergraduate students
- Grade inflation
- Limited reading and literature searching, and only do what is necessary
for a grade
- Excellent at taking tests (a nation of test takers) but problems with
conceptualization and problem solving, as well as communication
(written, oral, and presentation skills)
- Do not filter their information
- Ahistorical: lack historical context
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- Students (continued)
- Failure to repay intellectual debt in what they use/cite
- Inaccurate references
- Faculty
- Failure to obtain permission for quotations, figures, and adaptations
of figures placed in scholarly articles
- Failure to repay intellectual debt and inaccurate references
- Place article on home page contrary to journal/ publisher
specifications (publisher agreement)
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- One study shown to be the result of misconduct has had more than 750
citations, none of which are negative!
- Misconduct has surfaced in disciplines such as history, psychology,
chemistry, physics, anthropology, and literature. It also has posed a
problem for journalism: print and electronic media
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- Bogus research may be forgotten, its perpetrators disgraced or dead, but
tainted writings endure. As Mallon (1989) wrote, “To put one’s theft
into print is to have it forever on the library shelves, guiltily
stacked just an aisle away from the volume it victimized, a stain that
doesn’t wash but forever circulates.”
- In 1997, Altman and I wrote, “Unfortunately, the mechanisms for
notifying purchasers [and users] of bogus, falsified, and simply
erroneous publications are even weaker than the mechanisms for detecting
them.” Has this situation changed?
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- Altman, Ellen and Peter Hernon (ed.), Research Misconduct: Issues,
Implications, and Strategies (Ablex, 1997)
- Braxton, John M. (ed.), Perspectives on Scholarly Misconduct in the
Sciences (Ohio State University Press, 1999)
- Journal of Higher Education (Spring 1994 issue)
- LaFollette, Marcel C., Stealing into Print: Fraud, Plagiarism, and
Misconduct in Scientific Publishing (University of California Press,
1992)
- Simmons, Patience, “Plagiarism and Cyber-Plagiarism,” College &
Research Libraries News (June 2003): 385.
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