I’m surprised too, at the reaction of North and others. They may have a point.
by Dr. John Nielsen-Gammon at the Houston Chronicle’s Climate Abyss
I spread the word yesterday to my colleagues about Wegman begin caught in a plagiarism scandal and his paper on the social networking of climate change researchers being withdrawn by the journal (see USA Today coverage here and here; for extensive details see deep climate). I’d been following the work of Deep Climate and John Mashey with some interest, not least because Wegman’s report was in effect a competing report to that issued by the National Research Council committee headed by Gerald North, whose office is down the hall from me.
Jerry North’s reaction was a surprise to me:
Ed Wegman is the very guy who testified alongside (but against) me in Congress in 2006. We sat side by side for four hours under the gun. Ed and his former [student] Said wrote a contrarian report to the NRC Committee (“Hockey Stick”) report that I chaired. Then later they published it in the journal referred to in the articles.
While I cannot excuse the academic crime of plagiarism, I do feel somewhat sad that this episode has reached this stage. I think Wegman is a well meaning person who was a victim of plagiarism by a foreign student who probably did not understand this ‘strange’ American custom. Having just read a biography of J. Robert Oppenheimer, I can feel for someone who is being vilified perhaps more for the (perhaps foolish) position he has taken in the past than for the ‘crime’ itself.
Could this be a ‘gotcha’ for ClimateGate? Institutions cannot take this kind of heat without throwing someone under the bus. I hope George Mason University can take it.
That prompted a followup comment from climate scientist and former colleague Tom Crowley, now at Duke University: most recently at the University of Edinburgh:
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Read the whole essay here, well worth it.
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Self-plagiarism? Is that some made up stuff?
Of course, now my interest is piqued. Where’s Mosh when you need him.
“[name of famous paleoclimatologist redacted] had some pet idea that couldn’t get published some time back. Eventually it wound up in [journal name redacted] – completely inappropriate journal that had, surprise, an editor who was a former student. ” <———— Who's that guy?
I've got a wiff of some really good irony here.
The obvious question – how does it happen that a paper appearing under Wegman’s name was part-written by a foreign exchange student? Uncredited? And what happened to the journal’s peer review?
Nick Stokes says:
May 18, 2011 at 9:31 pm
The obvious question – how does it happen that a paper appearing under Wegman’s name was part-written by a foreign exchange student?
======================================
IDK Nick, what does this statement mean to you? What does it imply?
“and such a fate could have happened to a lot of us (“there but for the grace of God go I”…..)”
Interesting – there are climatological cutting and pastings in Dr. John Nielsen-Gammon papers. E.g. this string “This period corresponds to typical summertime
emissions and meteorological conditions in this region.” appears verbatim in both http://geotest.tamu.edu/userfiles/231/p75.pdf and http://meto.umd.edu/~zli/PDF_papers/Fan%20et%20al.%202005JD005805.pdf (which are apparently different papers – the author lists are different, anyway, if not all the words). This is a trivial sentence, but I suspect that the chances are that one of these instances preceded the other, and that the other was a direct copy. And I’m quite sure that there are many other small examples of cutting and pasting in climatology…
Nick, I don’t excuse either the student nor Wegman for the failure to cite. Question, though, was the uncited part key material that was germane to the findings, or was it background information?
forgive me if this seems too off topic, but since it is a current story about what is and what isn’t a lie it struck me as germane. Also, although it concerns a political character I do not cite it to indicate any approval or disapproval of any political views; I just think it is a humorous insight on the use of language today.
SO, a couple days ago Newt Gingrich was being interviewed about some comments he made last weekend, and he said “Any ad which quotes what I said on Sunday is a falsehood, because I have said publicly those words were inaccurate and unfortunate.”
In other words, “Anyone who quotes the words I actually said is a liar!!!”
what a world, what a world!!!
Wasn’t the stuff that was ‘plagiarised’ simply terminology and definitions but not chunks of someone else’s true scientific work? In effect the dodgy content was largely immaterial to the conclusions? Storm in a teacup is my impression. And incidentally students in France are noted mostly for their ability to parrot their profs, not their ability to think for themselves. One key test to get into the big grad schools is too effectively summarise a big report, not to analyse/critique it.
wws says:
May 18, 2011 at 10:19 pm
SO, a couple days ago Newt Gingrich …….
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lol, yeh, old Newt. I have no idea what he was thinking or if dementia has kicked in but he should eliminate any thoughts he had about running for pres. Repubs have two main factions. Moral conservatives and fiscal conservatives. His divorcing his ailing wife screwed him with the moral cons. His mouthing of the budget plan screwed him with the fiscal cons. He has absolutely no chance of winning anything. I seriously doubt he could carry his home state.
Nick, the paper was written by the student with Wegman as one of the several co-authors. That is why you will see referred to Said et al, rather than Wegman et al.
Doug in Seattle says:
May 18, 2011 at 11:22 pm
Nick, the paper was written by the student with Wegman as one of the several co-authors. That is why you will see referred to Said et al, rather than Wegman et al.
======================================
Yeh, character assassination by proxy. How come we don’t hear the outrage towards the other co-authors? Oh, wait, they probably didn’t make their precious hockey stick players look like buffoons on capital hill.
Tom Crowley was right! “It is very easily to be overly righteous on this matter, and I am sure many will seize this for their own venal purposes.”
And there isn’t a person on the internet that doesn’t copy and paste.
Ummm…am I right in thinking that the only ‘crime’ committed here is that the guy copied a bit of text from wikipedia or somewhere and didn’t say so?
Because away from Academia, that seems to be a minor infraction of a cosy convention, not a big problem.
If he’d actually stolen somebody else’s original work and presented it as his own, then I could see the point, but this sort of spat just reinforces my increasing view that the world of academics is populated by a bunch of very thin-skinned dilettantes fighting among themselves.
It seems to bear as much resemblance to reality as do the (in)famous untested climate models.
Doug in Seattle says: May 18, 2011 at 11:22 pm
Nick, the paper was written by the student with Wegman as one of the several co-authors. That is why you will see referred to Said et al, rather than Wegman et al.
Doug, the paper is listed here. Which co-author do you think is the foreign exchange student that they are talking about?
I think I must be missing something here.
Is the accusation that the plagiarised material is inaccurate? If it is then the case made by the paper is undermined; if it is ‘stolen’ but nevertheless germane to the paper and correct, where’s the problem with the veracity of the report?
Many students, no matter their origin, paste sections of text into their work files picked up from on-line sources. They then, because they are relatively inexperienced, get these copied tracts mixed up with their own commentaries and two years later when they start drafting their thesis inadvertently plagiarize. Unwittingly, when drafting a paper from one of the chapters for publication, some of this copied text is again inadvertently introduced. I and a co-supervisor working up the paper making corrections as we revise their work may spot the problems but then we may not. With a large number of doctoral students working in different areas inevitably they are more up to date with the certain aspects of the literature than we are. We might run the article through Turnitin and it comes out with a score of (say) 14% with individual items below 1% – a score of this level would not normally be regarded as significant and we dispatch the paper for publication. It is accepted.
Some opponent for reasons we will not term academic decides to attack my reputation. It maybe that I have adopted a position on a subject of great international importance and I have identified serious inconsistencies in their work or have gone before a public commission with evidence that they – and their collaborators – have cornered the literature and are putting pressure on editors to reject otherwise excellent research with a critical or contrary perspective. They sift the paper for examples of plagiarism. Payback!
So to any who find Wegman guilty as charged remember this: one day when you are a senior academic and when the fire of self-righteous indignation does not burn quite so bright, it might just happen to you.
Nick,
Clicking on your link gives the information below so it is pretty obvious that the exchange student is Yasmin H Said and the paper should be referred to as Said et al as Doug indicated.
I think the plagarism comment is not to do about culture but about attention to detail. If the text plagarised is not considered by the authors as central to the novelty of their work then they may well resort to copying previous work. Indeed copying previous work may even be desired in order to show that they are not pretending to re-invent the wheel. The error in that case is not taking the care to correctly cite sources which is a common student error.
It is one of the responsabilities of the co-authors to pick up these errors but nobody is perfect.
The results of Nick’s link (http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1316213) :
Social networks of author-coauthor relationships
Authors: Yasmin H. Said Department of Computational and Data Sciences, George Mason University, Fairfax, VA, USA
Edward J. Wegman Department of Computational and Data Sciences, George Mason University, Fairfax, VA, USA
Walid K. Sharabati Department of Computational and Data Sciences, George Mason University, Fairfax, VA, USA
John T. Rigsby Department of Computational and Data Sciences, George Mason University, Fairfax, VA, USA
Social networks of author-coauthor relationships 2008 Article
Published in:
· Journal
Computational Statistics & Data Analysis archive
Volume 52 Issue 4, January, 2008
Elsevier Science Publishers B. V. Amsterdam, The Netherlands, The Netherlands
table of contents doi>10.1016/j.csda.2007.07.021
It seems that when quoting your sources it is possible to come up with work of this quality by Ailie Gallant:
http://bunyipitude.blogspot.com/2011/05/insane-clown-posse-part-ii.html
(from paragraph 6 below her pic.)
Give me Wegman’s report every time.
OK – after further thought I think I have got it.
The whole controversy (if indeed it is) only arises because two separate but related things have got seriously entangled..and it is difficult to unpick the one from the other.
Q1: Has anyone shown there to be anything scientifically wrong with the work as published?
A1: No
Q2: Under academic conventions, should the whole credit for this work go to the stated authors?
A2: Under academic convention, possibly not…there may have been a minor technical breach of the citations convention.
Q3: Does the answer to Q2 mean that the actual content of the paper can/should be ignored/discarded?
A3: No. The answer to Q2 has no effect on the paper’s scientific content.
Q4: Is this row a storm in an academic teacup and largely irrelevant to the debate?
A4: Yes
Q5: Does it make some academics look like a bunch of self-important precious prima donnas, ever able to see the mote in another’s eye while missing the big picture?
A5: I leave as an exercise to the lay reader……………..
Richard,
Yasmin Said was not a foreign exchange student – she was Associate Editor of the Journal where it appeared.
Back in the days before the internet, if you wanted to copy someone elses work it was likely that you had to read it at very least. Now big chunks of script can be pasted without any thought as to it’s meaning.
RE Professor Bob Ryan says:
May 19, 2011 at 1:16 am
Very well stated sir!
Nick Stokes said on May 19, 2011 at 2:49 am:
So what are you saying Nick?
This has been portrayed as Wegman bypassing peer review by submitting it to his friend who waved it through for publication.
Is what really happened was an associate editor got a paper they lead-authored quickly published at their journal without peer review?
The ongoing search for participants in the climate debate (or any other area of society, for that matter) that successfully hold themselves to the highest standards of scientific integrity is likely to take a while
Diogenes is still looking.
The student’s name was Denise Reeves. Doesn’t sound very foreign to me.
Don’t quote yourself without attribution.
Don’t quote yourself without attribution.[1]
[1]Watts Up With That, Nielsen-Gammon interviews North and others on Wegman – plagiarism may be related to a cultural misunderstanding by foreign exchange student, 18 May 2011, in the comments 19 May 2011 04:12 am.