Post updated below – see my own experience with plagiarism by NOAA and how it was solved easily – Anthony
I get word that USA Today reports that the caterwaulings of the anonymous Canadian named Deep Climate and his accusations of plagiarism made against Dr. Edward Wegman in the Wegman report to Congress, which later became the paper Said et al, (published in the journal Computational Statistics and Data Analysis) has succeeded.
The paper, which revealed some questionable behavior by climate scientists has been yanked by the journal’s legal team after it went through a private 3 person review. Here’s what USA Today says:
The journal publisher’s legal team “has decided to retract the study,” said CSDA journal editor Stanley Azen of the University of Southern California, following complaints of plagiarism. A November review by three plagiarism experts of the 2006 congressional report for USA TODAY also concluded that portions contained text from Wikipedia and textbooks. The journal study, co-authored by Wegman student Yasmin Said, detailed part of the congressional report’s analysis.
Wegman’s attorney told USA Today:
“Neither Dr. Wegman nor Dr. Said has ever engaged in plagiarism,” says their attorney, Milton Johns, by e-mail. In a March 16 e-mail to the journal, Wegman blamed a student who “had basically copied and pasted” from others’ work into the 2006 congressional report, and said the text was lifted without acknowledgment and used in the journal study. “We would never knowingly publish plagiarized material” wrote Wegman, a former CSDA journal editor.
Well, congratulations to Deep Climate for being able to attack a man in another country without having having to put your name behind it. Such courage. You must be proud.
So, no problem from my view. I expect the report will be rewritten, with citations where needed, maybe even adding extra dictionary definitions of words and their origins to satisfy the imagined slights against our lexiconic ancestors envisioned by DC and Mashey man, and they’ll resubmit it with the very same conclusions. That’s what I would do.
UPDATE: Some folks have erroneously come to the conclusion that I’m siding with the idea that plagiarism is OK . Let me be clear, that’s not true at all. My issue is how this whole affair was conducted. I had my own issue with plagiarism in the case of NOAA/NCDC which I dealt with in an easy, simple way. Here’s the issue:
More dirty pool by NCDC’s Karl, Menne, and Peterson
Menne solved the attribution issue at my request…and here’s the solution and path forward I offered, with a hint to DC, Mashey, et al to take it.
How to solve attribution conflicts in climate science
I wrote then:
So, apology made, attribution added, document updated, and the problem was solved. Simple, I’m satisfied. Of course I could have been a jerk about it and demanded all sorts actions via formal complaints, copyright claims, etc. But I didn’t. It simply didn’t rise to that level.
It would have been easy for DC and Mashey to follow that example, instead they chose the “dark side” and demanded that pound of flesh along with a national newspaper writer acting as an accessory for public flogging. It’s ugly the way it was handled. Again, the best way forward, now that they have their pound of flesh, is for Said et al to make the appropriate edits and citations were needed, and resubmit the paper. – Anthony
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As pointed out by some commenter or blogger, maybe yourself elsewhere, what a journal does or doesn’t do has no force with respect to Congressional hearings; they determine their own sources and standards.
deep climate is [snip – sorry, as much as I dislike the guy’s actions, I’m not gonna out him. Hopefully he’ll have the integrity to out himself – Anthony]
“Deep Climate” has always impressed me as something of a priss. So, as you state, these things will get added but they won’t make a bit of change to the conclusion.
It is sadly amusing that when people can’t argue the message, they begin to search for peripheral technicalities on which to focus as if imply that because a cite was missing, the entire paper is invalid.
Yeah, it delays things, but that’s about it.
Academic bad practice, if established, is not acceptable but it is certainly true that those of us who come to rely upon the assistance of others in doing our research run the risk that they will not do their job properly. Wegman, has almost certainly fallen into this trap and is having to pay the price. I hope that his reputation has not been damaged beyond repair. However, the retraction of this article means absolutely nothing as far as its conclusions are concerned. They still stand.
It is a tactic no one should pursue to this extent, nevertheless a warning about just how careful you have to be if you want to take on the “team”.
I’m sorry, if the paper was sloppy enough to contain plagiarised text, then it is sloppy enough to contain other mistakes. Whether warmist or sceptic, we should be aiming for the highest standards and just because some annoying individual came out the blue and asked annoying questions which the journal properly investigated, we shouldn’t be supporting bad papers.
It would be better to contrast how this individual was received and Steve McAlpine. That would be a far far better comment than to criticise the journal for acting properly.
OT.
Hathaway looks like ‘marching’ his prediction uphill again.
http://solarscience.msfc.nasa.gov/images/ssn_predict_l.gif
Is this a further salvo in the societal war to end all (wars), the fight to control hearts and minds, where truth is the first casualty and the end result is one that only a dictator can solve? Is this the path to an ideal world?
We all make mistakes. The answer is to stand up, take it on the chin and do the job again properly and according to the rules.
That way lies respect and honour.
EO
This entire issue makes my head spin.
With regard to “The hockey stick” one side asserts all that matters is the conclusion while the other side asserts all that matters is transparency, code/data availability, flaws in the method and so on.
With regard to a report and follow-up paper criticising “The hockey stick” the sides reverse. Suddenly one side only cares about the conclusion and whether those that found problems are anonymous or not.
Is there no possibility of rationality in this debate? Does it really have to be divided up into camps that don’t care about anything but whether the bottom line supports them or not? Can we not all agree that the answers reached are much less important than the processes and methods used to achieve them?
Too bad the IPCC isn’t subject to the same level of scrutiny.
+1 to what McSceptic says.
This is fair game. I have no problem with the entire process. Live and learn. Next.
According to the USA Today piece, it was “Computer scientist Ted Kirkpatrick of Canada’s Simon Fraser University [who] filed a complaint with the journal after reading the climate science website Deep Climate”
If Dan Vergano, the author of the article, is not able to distinguish between a “website” and a “blog” [the latter of which is not deeemed to be “an acceptable source of information” under the IPCC’s new, improved “rules” wrt non-peer-reviewed literature, btw], I’m not sure that I would give much credence to the rest of his account.
But that aside, it seems to me that Vergano (or his editor) is attempting to fudge a conflation of the actual Wegman Report with whatever was published in the Journal.
The Journal has retracted an unnamed “study”. But the same paragraph indicates that the “analysis [in this study] was an outgrowth” of the Wegman Report.
Furthermore, there’s no indication in the article of whose work was allegedly plagiarized … Wikipedia?! It was the publisher’s legal beagles who advised retraction of the “study” … and publishers’ legal beagles have their own “precautionary principle”, don’t they?!
As this is a short string I’d like to enter a slightly off topic comment: all of the material collected by WUWT and similar bodies is NOT getting through to the public at large. This needs to be addressed, as there is little public discussion on the subject, because at the moment there is very little actual physical evidence (except that my garden here in SE England needs rain!) The stories of melting glaciers, droughts, floods, sinking islands, etc are mostly too far away for people in Britain to worry about. The stories are therefore half-believed, which means that the people who shout the loudest will be listened to for want of front page refutation.
On the rare occasions I can get anyone to listen, all I get is “well you would say that, wouldn’t you?” as I follow Socrates in trying to make people question their statements, which is really annoying to them, and childishly satisfying to me. I know why Socrates enemies wanted to get rid of him!
If it’s plagarism then it means others agree with him and so strengthens the concensus on the point he is making.
The take home message is “Do it properly first time”.
Doubtless the RC lot will be trumpeting this as complete vindication of Mann & all his works.
Deep Climate’s allegations are ill founded when they come to the substance of the report; but in a politicized atmosphere close citation is vital simply to deny this sort of cheap shot.
That blog that no one reads any more, Sincere Climate?, will have its usual field day using a missed cite to hide little items like the complete corruption of the GISS temp record.
However, in the end, the reversal of the PDO will put paid to the loonier claims of the warmistas and there need be no citation for steadily declining temps caused by, well, er, nature.
This is unfortunate, but changes nothing about Wegman’s findings – which were not plagiarised and have not been impugned.
Simply listing the publications (as I did in Science and Public Policy) in which the Hockey Team had collaborated is sufficient to show what a tight-knit group they were. All Wegman did was a SNA that showed the degree of collaboration statistically.
It is worth noting that this would not have been a great problem in the past, but the communications revolution has mean that the clique interacts with effectively zero cost. The jumbo jet made travel cheap, so there is much more personal networking. (The IPCC process has exacerbated this). And e-mail has made communication immediate and easy and has brought those who might serve as independent referees into contact (remember Climategate?). This undermined peer review.
Some of the practices of relevant journals (allowing authors to nominate potential referees; revealing the identity of authors to referees) have also corrupted the quality assurance process — as has the IPCC practice of allowing these same people to sit in judgment on their own research and that of any critics, as if there is no conflict of interest in this.
From my recollection at the time of ‘Mashey-gate’ the passages at which the plagiarism charge was levelled were descriptions of method that were essentially ‘boilerplate’ descriptions that resembled similar statements elsewhere. Sloppy scholarship but you’d probably find a high degree of agreement is you ran the same description of method for most scientific papers through approapriate plagiarism detection software, such as Turnitin (which is what my university uses).
So this, as far as I can see, changes nothing in the results, but will be damaging nonetheless. There was a similar case in sociology in Australia in the 1980s that was worse, but had the same cause: over-reliance on a research assistant.
Apologies – only Science and Public Policy was supposed to be italics. I don’t seem to have any clue how to turn italics off!! (Fixed – Anthony)
Chris @ur momisugly 1:49
Make that +2. There has been too much dodgy science committed. Our only recourse is meticulous methodology. Nothing less.
Ah the trouble is now that a benchmark has been set, Mann et al will have to not only meet it but exceed it and with all the sloppy work that their team puts out, just how long do you think it’s going to take before it comes back to haunt them?
While it is true we should give credit where credit is due, the facts remain the facts. I don’t give a d— if a fact is plagerized, if it is truely a fact.
What has bothered me from the start, concerning fellows like Hansen and Mann, is that facts are turned into these odd things called “adjustments,” and also facts are arranged in strange ways, where a single tree matters a lot, whereas a whole forest is ignored.
There is no copyright on truth. As soon as people start mumbling that truth is theirs, and others can’t see their data, I sense a smokescreen, especially when the truth has been gathered using my tax dollars.
I agree with Scottish Skeptic. We should demand high standards for all publications — those we think are right as well as those we think are wrong.
sharper00 says: May 16, 2011 at 1:36 am
Is there no possibility of rationality in this debate? Does it really have to be divided up into camps that don’t care about anything but whether the bottom line supports them or not? Can we not all agree that the answers reached are much less important than the processes and methods used to achieve them?
Shaperoo, the conclusion reached should be a logical outcome of applying the scientific method. If one side (the warmists) are not applying the scientific method, then we can hardly accept their results without criticising the method (gut feeling) that they use.
Of course, if climate “science” were a proper science, then they would understand that open and honest debate of their methods is a vital component in improving and validating their methodology.
In contrast, they see open and honest debate as some kind of heretical attack on their belief system: a belief system which basically is that they and they alone should be the arbiters of what counts as “science” in climate “science”.