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Wegman begin caught in a plagiarism scandal and his paper on the social networking of climate change researchers being withdrawn by the journal (see USA Today coverage here and here; for extensive details see deep climate).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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“The material cited is almost textbook boilerplate, widely quoted by others, almost cliché.”
And yet the reviewers of Said, Wegman et al (2008), who are supposed to be experts in the subject, didn’t recognize it. Strange.
From BA on May 19, 2011 at 6:15 pm
From barry on May 21, 2011 at 9:25 am
Now that you all have your talking points down pat, they’re still wrong. Knowledge of climatology or dendro was not needed as Mann’s statistical work was examined, which was examined by statisticians. McIntyre’s code was used as Mann was not forthcoming enough to allow replication of his statistical work.
Moreover, not only was Said an associate editor at the journal Computational Statistics and Data Analysis, but Said and Wegman are 2 of 3 co-Editors in Chief of another journal, Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Computational Statistics (WIREs: Computational Statistics).
2007 reference:
http://www.stat.wmich.edu/mckean/Simon/Guide-for-Authors.pdf
2010 reference:
http://media.wiley.com/assets/3002/50/WIREs_comp_stats_guide_for_authors12.10.pdf
Thus they should be well aware of the issue of plagiarism and its detection. Now, as was mentioned before concerning the Wegman Report for Congress, attribution guidelines for such reports are looser than the standards for academic journals. If Wegman and Said had known there was plagiarized material in it, that one have been thing. But if they knew it was there, and remained there when it was recycled into the Said et al paper, to then submit it to a journal knowing that plagiarism should be screened for as part of the acceptance process, would have been rather brazen as they should expect it would have been detected. Therefore, the logical conclusion is they were not aware of the questionable material when they submitted the paper.
As to the purported lack of knowledge or experience with social network analysis, social relationships and networks are actually something known by Said, as can be seen by her work. From the 2007 reference:
Dr. Said is well-versed in studying social relationships and interactions, with her work focused on alcohol use and even HIV/AIDS. Accusations that the authors (collectively) didn’t know about social network analysis are therefore unfounded.
Meanwhile, amongst the indignant cries for righteous retribution due to Said’s and Wegman’s alleged direct plagiarism, I await the calls from those same voices for equal treatment with investigation and subsequent appropriate punishment for Raymond Bradley’s blatant copying of Fritts without attribution. You all are fine with “equal treatment for all,” right?
“You all are fine with “equal treatment for all,” right?”
Absolutely. That is, in fact, my central theme here. And yet pretty much every comment from the regulars on this thread goes to extraordinary, and speculative, lengths to dismiss a clear case of incompetence at the least. You do also.
If Bradley was remiss or sloppy in his attribution to Fritts, then that is reprehensible.
Why am I not hearing clear-cut statements like that about Wegman and Said? Because commenters here are too keen to overlook atrocious practise on a favoured paper, I suppose.
So let me try and figure out what has happened here, with your help.
“Knowledge of climatology or dendro was not needed as Mann’s statistical work was examined…”
and
“the logical conclusion is they were not aware of the questionable material when they submitted the paper.”
If knowledge of dendro was not needed, why does it appear in their paper (in plagiarised form?) From comments here, it seems that they farmed out this section to a to pad out the report and study, and never bothered to have an expert check it. Why on earth didn’t they enlist an expert in the first place? And why, if they though the student’s work was original, did they not give the student co-authorship?
As to Yasmin Said’s biography, she has published no papers on social network analysis and it seems that the inclusion of this field on her resume is based on her joint effort with Wegman. The section on social networks was reviewed by an expert and found to be poor quality. Further, if Said is an expert in network analysis, how is it the 5 pages devoted to it was submitted with no citations to the work copied? And if Said didn’t write the section, how is it her expertise failed to spot the plagiarised material? And if she thought that the student’s work was original, why was the student not given co-authorship on the paper?
No matter how you work it, the least offence here is incompetence.
kadaka,
“I await the calls from those same voices for equal treatment with investigation and subsequent appropriate punishment for Raymond Bradley’s blatant copying of Fritts without attribution.”
I did something really crazy here. I went to the Bradley/Fitts post and read it (at the original source – climateaudit, not WUWT). Then I checked source material. Then I re-read the post and comments.
Bradley attributed to Fritts throughout the paper, and had permission to re-use the material, graphs etc. He also indicated where he directly quoted, and where he paraphrased Fritts in his study. Stephen McIntyre acknowledged the permission downthread in the comments – but for some reason didn’t amend the post to reflect that.
I’t’s quite possible that some mainstream climate scientist somewhere has plagiarised, but this doesn’t seem to be the example you’re hoping for. Should one come to light, I will join you in condemning it.
But that would not distract from, nor mitigate the incompetence and negligence of Said et al and the Wegman report. (I don’t think this was your intent)
I found North’s response fair-minded, and that there is no clear evidence of deliberate deceptiveness on the part of Wegman and Said. I have no desire for “righteous retribution.” The shoddy work here, though, coupled with other reviews of Mann et al 1998/99 (like the NSA), casts a deeper shadow over the controversial Wegman report and the follow-up paper. I think objective thinkers will bear this in mind considering the issue this leads back to – the debate about global temperature in the MWP as compared to the last 30 years. But that’s for another thread…
From barry on May 23, 2011 at 2:12 am:
Thus I know you are lying. Bradley (1985 or 1999) is a textbook, not a paper nor a study. If you had really read the Climate Audit Bradley Copies Fritts post AND the comments, AND checked the source material, AND re-read the post and comments, you’d have known that. This is seen in the very first line of the Climate Audit post (bold added):
Multiple comments refer to “Bradley” being a book.
One
Two – John M links to the 1999 book on Amazon.
Three
Four
etc…
It is not credible that you could have read that post and the comments then mistakenly referred to “Bradley” as BOTH a report AND a study. One such mis-speaking is possible, twice strains credulity. Your claims that you re-read post and comments AND read the source material seals it. How can you read a textbook then refer to it as both a report and a study?
Bradley having permission to reuse the material is not the issue, as that concerns copyright. Bradley did not attribute to Fritts throughout the textbook. As Steve McIntyre showed, Bradley did not provide sufficient attribution to Fritts, as evidenced in the captions of the figures. As mentioned in the original post and expanded on in the next Climate Audit post, Bradley Copies Fritts #2, although in the running text Bradley lifted vast amounts from Fritts, he gave Fritts little attribution. Indeed, the revision (Bradley 1999) had even less references to Fritts than the original (Bradley 1985). From the second post:
Back to your comment:
Oh come on, you didn’t even spell Steve’s name correctly! And as Steve himself said here, “My interest here wasn’t in copyright but in copying practices…” Thus permission is not relevant, there is no (sensible) call to amend the post.
Commenter ZT put together a small collection, starting when the Wegman/Bradley thing first blew up. It was mentioned in the first Climate Audit post here, going by your claim you have already read about it twice. It is here. Start condemning.
Yet you said in a previous comment:
You found there is no clear evidence of deliberate deceptiveness, yet state the obviousness of the deliberate act of dishonesty, i.e. deceit? Are you withdrawing your earlier statement?
Yes, he did. And I was wrong to call it a ‘paper’ and a ‘study’. It is indeed a textbook, but I’d been talking about science papers all day and repeated the terminology.
You can get the relevant chapter online, as I did. This is the link I used. You or anyone else can check for how many times Fritts is mentioned (all the way through). You can even see it for yourself on the graphics McIntyre posted.
In the 1999 revision I count:
5 references to Fritts 1976 in the body of the text and under captions
8 referenced to Fritts 1971 in the body of the text and under captions
(same as McIntyre found)
Therefore, “Raymond Bradley’s blatant copying of Fritts without attribution” is a falsehood.
Compare Bradley’s chapter stuffed with references with the pages of unreferenced lifts from Bradley and wikipedia, for god’s sake, in the journal paper submitted by Wegamn and Said, and tell me how the comparison is even close.
Yes, I did. His first name is spelled ‘Stephen’ (no ‘v’), and he goes by the shortened version on his blog. Not that it makes a jot of difference. Nor does it matter that you don’t know that. It’s completely incidental.
Cool your jets. I referred specifically to Wegman and Said, who advised that they did not write up the offending sections. I take them at their word. In the earlier comment I was writing from the POV of what is acceptable in peer-reviewed literature (regarding Said, Wegman et al (2008). Plagiarism is academic dishonesty, and this study contains blatant examples of it – which is why it has been withdrawn.
I juat now checked the first article at ZT’s blog you linked to. It appears to be examples of climate scientists quoting themselves. ‘Recycling’, ZT calls it. This has nothing to do with plagiarism. It’s pure distraction. Can I ask you to put that on hold for a second…?
Kadaka, straight up, what do you think of the plagiarism in Said and Wegman (2008), the topic of this thread? Do you apply your standards equally?
@barry says: May 25, 2011 at 9:39 am
Cherry picking the examples, I see.(Those climatological habits die hard). Here is an example of climatologists, including Jones, plagiarizing one another:
http://climatologyplagiarism.blogspot.com/2010/10/jones-and-coauthors-plagiarize-mann-and.html
Finding such examples is not hard – I have spent but a few moments doing it. It is, however, hard not to reach the conclusion that climatologists are paid by the word, and that they tend to hold skeptics to a considerably higher standard than their climatological colleagues.
Feel free to condemn away.