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Wegman begin caught in a plagiarism scandal and his paper on the social networking of climate change researchers being withdrawn by the journal (see USA Today coverage here and here; for extensive details see deep climate).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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kadaka (KD Knoebel) says: May 19, 2011 at 3:26 am
“So what are you saying Nick?”
Mainly that an Associate Editor of the Journal is unlikely to be a foreign exchange student. And shouldn’t have a “cultural misunderstanding” about plagiarism.
But there was something funny about the Journal process. It was over in six days.
Nick,
Yes I see that she was one of 50-60 associate editors for the 2006-2010 editions of the Computational Statistics & Data Analysis journal.
It seems she completed her Phd in 2005 under Wegman’s supervision. I notice that the paper was submitted on the 8th July 2007 and accepted on the 14th July 2007 (available online 9 August 2007) which seems a rather rapid review process (maybe this is normal for this journal?). In any case she was Wegman’s student during her PhD and published the paper two years after finishing her PhD. At the time of publication she had already been Associate Editor for a year.
I guess she had ceased being a “foreign exchange student” after she completed her PhD in 2005 and in 2007 had spent not more than two years as a post-doc or a member of faculty along with becoming an Associate Editor of Computational Statistics & Data Analysis in 2006.
Although relatively inexperienced she should have known better and this should cast doubt on the quality of her reviews as an Associate Editor.
My previous comments – that care should be taken to cite sources correctly and that it is one of the responsabilities of the co-authors to pick up these errors – still holds true.
Bigcitylib:
‘The student’s name was Denise Reeves. Doesn’t sound very foreign to me.’
What an extraordinarily ethnocentric view of ‘foreign’! In case you didn’t notice, there was a revolution a couple of centuries ago and the citizens of the United Kingdom are now ‘foreign’.
Bob Ryan:
Well put. We don’t publish much with our students in the social sciences, but your account is perfectly realistic for the natural sciences.
Its like when a bunch of politicians start accusing each other of being partisan. Politicians are by nature highly partisan, but pretend to “reach across the aisle” as a point of honour. Yet when things get heated between them the first thing that can easily be claimed is that someone is being partisan. The rest of the naturally partisan politicians then point and feign indignation that someone has been caught doing what they all do every day. It’s like when the Capt. Renault character in Casablanca says; “I’m shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in here!” while stuffing his winnings into his pocket. It is extremely disingenuous of these people to be hopping about squealing about plagiarism of this kind. They are all guilty of the same thing.
There are a variety of practices out there regarding author list. I know of lab and research department directors who insist on putting their name first, no matter who does the study, so that source citing will allow that person’s name in the article (IE Bigdeal, et. al.). These people like to see their name in print and pad their list of cited sources.
However, the usual practice is for the actual researcher, who is often a Ph.D. candidate, to be listed first, followed by their supervisor.
Just so I get this right, Wegman’s former PhD student earns her PhD, becomes an Associate Editor of Computational Statistics and Data Analysis Journal, co-authors a paper with Wegman in same journal, where the paper has a review period to acceptance of 6 days and deals with the social networks of authors and co-authors in which one of the main conclusions is that certain styles of co-authorship can lead to group-think, only to have the paper pulled after charges of plagiarism by one of the students named Denise Reeves who is of Asian descent?
Richard says: May 19, 2011 at 5:06 am
“maybe this is normal for this journal?”
No, six days is fast – you can check from the link I gave. The following paper took 7 months in review – the preceding paper took two years. Ironic for a paper which is devoted to exposing chumminess among climate scientists?
Remember all the claims that the issues revealed by the climategate emails did not materially change the “science”? Though they in fact did wildly change it. Am I wrong to think that Wegman’s problem was in the background material, and that it was just in the part of the paper where the procedure is explained? I would think anyone trying to replicate or improve on the experiment of another would have this problem even if it was not plagerism.
But on the question they all claimed was the only relevent one in climategate, that of the effect on the underlying science, I notice an absolute silence. A total lack of even handedness, balance, self awareness, honesty, take your pick.
Wegman screwed up. He was in charge of the paper.
AGW is still crap.
Move on.
Who is Deep Climate?
Wegman needs to properly cite the sources and resubmit the paper.
In the essay it mentions the Asian student had been in the states since the age of four. We need some info on where they went to school and for how long before excusing this lapse due to cultural differences.
If what they’re saying is true about not understanding the culture, it doesn’t matter. The student is publishing in the western world and is getting his/her education there, so they need to learn the customs. Part of the job of the advisor is to teach that, and apparently Wegman failed there. I know my advisor put more effort into reviewing the manuscripts from his foreign students before submitting them for publication, so advisors need to be willing to accept that before taking those students into their research groups. I have heard the above excuse plenty of times and have even encountered it with people in my graduate lab. Yes, it’s real and you can find examples of it all over the place, but that doesn’t make it okay.
I do find the 6-day peer-review process an interesting thing. People will say it’s common to take months or years, but that’s not always the case. I just got reviews back this morning from a paper submitted at the start of May, and that’s not abnormal in my field. The comments were minor enough that they could’ve all been addressed and resubmitted by the end of the day if I wasn’t too busy analyzing data for an upcoming conference..thus making the total process around 2.5 weeks. I’d say as short as 2 weeks wouldn’t be out of the ordinary at all, maybe even 10 days (though I’ve not heard of one that fast). I also know that the process at the journal can be faster when the submitting author is an editor…a previous postdoc in the lab I did my Ph.D. in had worked for a head editor at a journal, and the postdoc didn’t know the submission process for that journal, oddly enough, and he said that was because it was different for his advisor, already being the editor. (Anyone here work for a journal editor at any time to verify?) It makes sense that if a couple steps at the journal are cut out (though I don’t think they should be), it might shave a few days off of the process. Also, reviewers might be a bit faster looking over the work of an editor at a journal, but that’s just speculation. All that said, the 6-day turnaround still seems suspiciously fast to me…I’d wonder about anything less than 10 days (I haven’t personally seen anything less than 2 weeks). Given the political implications of the paper, it definitely raises question marks.
-Scott
Scott says:
May 19, 2011 at 11:02 am
If what they’re saying is true about not understanding the culture, it doesn’t matter.
=======================================================
I think the biggest difficulty here, is indeed cultural, but not in the sense described.
Scott, you’ve dealt with academia probably most of your life. Many of us here don’t.
To most of us that don’t there are only two questions. Did the authors try to pass the work off as their own? And does this effect the premise behind the paper? In other words, what effect does this have on the validity of the thoughts expressed in the paper. The rest is of little consequence to us……. it may have held more meaning if someone hadn’t brought up the ludicrous idea of self-plagiarism. I read that part and started laughing, thinking they should sue themselves for defaming themselves for not footnoting themselves. A clear act of negligence, casting themselves into poor light!
I know in academia, dotting “i”s and crossing “t”s is a big thing. For those of us in real world land, function over form is king.
You know, its weird, every time I see the word “plagiarism” the song “Glad all over” gets stuck in my head!!! Uhhhggg……. Beatle knock-offs!!!!
James Sexton,
Sorry to be pedantic but when you can work out in your own mind the difference between ‘affect’ and ‘effect’, I might take more notice of what you say.
Well, he did get ONE of them right. 😉
The reason there is so much plagiarism and statistical copying in the original Wegman report is that the authors had no knowledge or experience concerning its main subjects, climatology and social network analysis. So they copied from other sources, whether Wikipedia or Ray Bradley or McIntyre’s statistical code, to give a false impression of knowledge.
The Said paper involved copying from something copied. It is the first retraction to hit Wegman’s team, but looking at some of the unoriginal material they have published even on non climate topics, I do not think it will be the last.
I think many are missing the point that the plagiarism issue has nothing to do with Wegman’s confirmation that invalid statistical methods that were used in principal paleoclimatological papers. As I understand the issue, the withdrawn paper has no bearing on this, which was the primary thrust of the Wegman report.
Please correct me if I’m wrong.
D Johnson, it is not as you think that “many are missing the point.” Rather it is that many people such as yourself have not tried to read or understand any of the detailed analysis that look closely at the statistics of the Wegman report, and find them to be copied and wrong also.
Over and over on this blog I see statements like yours, that Wegman’s statistical criticism is still valid. But no, much of it has fallen apart when other statisticians looked at it closely, and saw that Wegman’s claim of using a first-order process with weak autocorrelation could not possibly be true. You have to read other blogs, even ones you don’t like, to learn that news but it is not made up. Wegman’s report is out there for anyone to read.
Dave Andrews says:
May 19, 2011 at 1:55 pm
James Sexton,
Sorry to be pedantic but when you can work out in your own mind the difference between ‘affect’ and ‘effect’, I might take more notice of what you say.
===================================================
Sigh, subtly kicks my ass again.
Yah, ’cause it probably isn’t clear as to what I meant. Did you bother to read what I stated? Is it conceivable that what I stated and how I stated it was purposeful? Sorry, I went too far. I forgot I was on the internets.
Let’s freaking review…….. I stated something to the akin of ……… oh heck, let’s just copy and paste….. and say it bold!!!!
“I know in academia, dotting “i”s and crossing “t”s is a big thing. For those of us in real world land, function over form is king.”
What does that mean to you? Tell you what Dave, I’ll take more notice to what you say when, 1) You can be less pedantic. And 2) you improve your reading comprehension skills.
Best wishes,
Suyts
There is an unfortunate trend here.
“was the uncited part key material that was germane to the findings, or was it background information?”
“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?”
“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?”
“Am I wrong to think that Wegman’s problem was in the background material, and that it was just in the part of the paper where the procedure is explained? I would think anyone trying to replicate or improve on the experiment of another would have this problem even if it was not plagerism.”
“Did the authors try to pass the work off as their own? And does this effect the premise behind the paper? In other words, what effect does this have on the validity of the thoughts expressed in the paper.”
“OK – after further thought I think I have got it.”
John Mashey has been posting on this for more than a year. The plagiarism is gone through in great detail and these posts are easy to find – for anyone interested. It would seem that everyone commenting here has not read any of this material, and yet feel that they can hold an opinion, largely, that the plagiarism doesn’t matter as long as the content is true to the original (and variations on that theme). EG,
“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?”
To answer some of the questions here (even the rhetorical ones), not only was text plagiarised, it was paraphrased, changing the meaning. In a given paragraph, one sentence might be copied exactly, then the next was rearranged and new words. Changes of meaning and emphasis resulted – in the direction you can imagine.
According to Mashey, roughly half of the document was plagiarised.
Before anyone else gives Wegman a free pass for shoddy work, imagine how you would respond if Schmidt, Hansen, Mann, Jones and the rest of the whipping-boy line-up presented supposedly original work that was found to be plagiarised. I think we all know that the milieu here and other skeptic blogs would heap scorn and derision, conclude that the author has no integrity, and that all their work should be summarily rejected. It wouldn’t matter a damn if a junior researcher did the plagiarising. And I think this is the mild version of how skeptics would take to the same story but cast with boffins from the other side of the fence.
Wegman should be as accountable for academic dishonesty and intellectual rigour as the the Manns and Hansens. Giving him a free pass now simply exposes a double standard amongst AGW skeptics.
Barry>
Mashey’s an obvious chunk of nutbar, and his claims are ludicrous. He doesn’t know what plagiarism means, and most of the time apparently doesn’t even speak English. Find a better source.
Mashey’s an obvious chunk of nutbar, and his claims are ludicrous. He doesn’t know what plagiarism means, and most of the time apparently doesn’t even speak English. Find a better source.
Ad hom attack coupled with a false statement. Mashey found and documented real plagiarism. Three nationally known plagiarism experts contacted by a USA today reporter for an earlier story all agreed that what Wegman did was obvious plagiarism. Now the journal’s own review has reached the same conclusion.
You might think plagiarism is OK for people you agree with, but that is a different argument than saying it is not there.
BA says:
May 20, 2011 at 8:00 am
Mashey’s an obvious chunk of nutbar, and his claims are ludicrous. He doesn’t know what plagiarism means, and most of the time apparently doesn’t even speak English. Find a better source. <————- YOU FORGOT TO SOURCE YOUR QUOTE!!!!!!!
The paper was a report to Congress, not a university.
The material cited is almost textbook boilerplate, widely quoted by others, almost cliché.
The only crime here is character assassination.
“The paper was a report to Congress, not a university”
Skimmed Deep Climate?
The follow-up report was submitted for review at a science journal. It was passed in 6 days. That report included some of the plagiarised sections of the Wegman Report to Congress.
I’ll say it again, if Mann, Hansen, Schmidt or Jones had work published with plagiarised sections of wikipedia and of science papers, character assassination would be a mild phrase for how people here would respond.
The journal had no choice other than to retract the paper. Apart from the obvious academic dishonesty, the clear implication is that none of the authors had a firm grasp on the subjects so heavily plagiarised – social networking and dendrochronology. This becomes even clearer where the paraphrasing distorts the meaning of the original.
This isn’t character assassination. There’s no need to suggest a dark purpose when incompetence is explanation enough.