Publications, Peer review, Plagiarism and the so called "scholars"

Originally posted at http://sanjosnonsense.blogspot.com/  on Jan 31, 2009

"A chemist in India has been found guilty of plagiarizing and/or falsifying more than 70 research papers published in a wide variety of Western scientific journals between 2004 and 2007. Some journal editors left reeling by the incident say it is one of the most spectacular and outrageous cases of scientific fraud they have ever seen."

Read more about the fraudulent skills of Pattium Chiranjeevi, a Chemistry professor of Sri Venkateswara University,Tirupati, in February 18, 2008 issue of Chemical and Engineering News. If you don't have access to C&EN, you can see archived version here

Similar incidents brought much shame for India earlier also. Some of them can be read in Wikipedia

It was an irony when a higher authority dealt with intellectual property rights (IPR) itself went against the IPR. That was happened in the case of Mashelkar, former Director General of the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR). He asked the government to “withdraw” the Report of the Technical Expert Group on Patent Law issues written by a panel he headed after a crucial paragraph on patent law was found to have been copied ad verbatim from other sources, without any attribution. (Indian Express, February 22, 2007)

Prof. B.S. Rajput who was the vice-chancellor of Kumaon University was forced to quit from the position after he was found guilty of plagiarism. You can compare his papers with the original ones here. And the Physics of Plagiarism is dug out in October 26, 2002 issue of Frontline. You can read the politics behind this issue in The Hindu and The Indian Express.

I think the most celebrated scientific fraud in recent times, was that of South Korean stem cell pioneer(?) Woo Suk Hwang, who claimed to have cloned human embryos. He was dismissed from Seoul National University after he was found guilty in acquiring eggs from human donors through unacceptable practices and faking two landmark pieces of research in cloning human stem cells.

The "reports" of Woo Suk Hwang retracted from Science are Evidence of a Pluripotent Human Embryonic Stem Cell Line Derived from a Cloned Blastocyst and Patient-Specific Embryonic Stem Cells Derived from Human SCNT Blastocysts.
Some days ago I have given a note that Peer Review helps you to question the status of science reported on the internet and scholarly journals. So, can we still believe in Peer Review?

"Peer review is good at calming down over-optimistic claims and improving the presentation, but the evidence shows it is really bad at picking out very major fraud." Freelance publications consultant Liz Wager says,"[Peer review] is a bit like democracy: it's a lousy system but it's the best one we have". She adds, "This kind of thing has to be policed at the departmental and institutional level; they actually know what's going on. They need to create an environment in which a whistle blower can feel safe."

See what BBC News science reporters, Paul Rincon and Jonathan Amos say about the issue.

"Some scientists say that one of the benefits of the "open access" business model for journals - where scientific papers are free for all to read in a web-based database - could be beneficial for picking up plagiarism and possibly other forms of misconduct. (Read A Very Brief Introduction to Open Access by Peter Suber).

A great many scientific journals are subscription-based, so that readers have to pay to view research."We think it would be harder for people to plagiarise work once you can do extensive word searches and access more material free on the internet. You'll be able to spot where someone has lifted their work much more easily," says Robert Terry, senior policy adviser at the UK medical charity, the Wellcome Trust." The Wellcome Trust, which funds research in the life sciences and medicine, was the first research funder to make open access a condition of its grants.

In an PLoS Biology article, Terry makes it clear that Trust-funded researchers will have to deposit an electronic version of their manuscripts in PubMed Central to be made available for free via the Internet within 6 months of publication.”(Terry R (2005) Funding the Way to Open Access. PLoS Biol 3(3): e97)

Read more about scientific misconduct at Wikipedia and Prometheus.(The full text of "Scientific fraud and the power structure of science" by Brian Martin can be read here.) Read an interesting article, "Statistics of Scientific Fraud" by Dmitriy K. Yuryev, on a scientometric study estimating the percentage of fabricated experimental data in biomedical scientific literature somewhere at 5-10 %"

Those who are new to plagiarism...
What is plagiarism? Find answers at Wikipedia and Plagiarism.org. Here is a much detailed explanation, Plagiarism and Failure to Cite Relevant Literature [in PDF] by Jens Koch.Tail piece:
Find a song of Tom Lehrer on plagiarism and some quotations on Plagiarism. I liked the one by Albert Einstein, "The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources."All the sources can be verified by following the respective links in the article.