tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13392167876281906812024-03-06T06:56:20.685+03:00"Plagiarism is almost always a symptom of other educational problems"<b><a href="http://www.plagiarism.org/learning_center/did_you_know.html"> ____________________________________ </a></b>.http://www.blogger.com/profile/12823637254709580027noreply@blogger.comBlogger242125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1339216787628190681.post-46316648335040075102019-02-25T16:03:00.000+03:002019-12-25T16:08:40.276+03:00Turkey: The big business of academic ghostwriting - Deutsche Welle<div class="intro" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">In Turkey, many students are using ghostwriting
services to write final papers and dissertations. DW takes a look at
what has become a booming business.</span></div>
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<img alt="Doktorhut mit Diplom (Gina Sanders - Fotolia.com)" height="179" itemprop="image" src="https://www.dw.com/image/17366374_303.jpg" title="Doktorhut mit Diplom (Gina Sanders - Fotolia.com)" width="320" /> </a><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;"></span>
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">Turkish universities are facing a new, not very academic challenge:
ghostwriting. From bachelor's and master's theses to doctor's
dissertations — almost any form of written academic paper can now be
ordered, for a price, from specialized companies.</span></div>
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;"> </span><div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">Particularly at
private universities, there is a veritable boom in such ghostwriting.
Turkey has 63 private universities, most of them established within the
past five years.</span></div>
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;"> </span><div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">A short search on online academic forums found
that some 50 companies are operating on this ghostwriter market. They
ask for the equivalent of between €500 and €3,000 ($567 and $3,400) per
paper. That tots up to revenue of more than €25 million per year.</span></div>
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;"> </span><div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;"><strong>Private universities to blame?</strong></span></div>
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;"> </span><div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">According
to Gorkem Dogan, the chairman of Egitim Sen, a union for those working
in education and academia, this significant rise in the number of
ghostwritten dissertations has been caused solely by the uncontrolled
increase in the number of private universities.</span></div>
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;"> </span><div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">Dogan recalled the fact that many university teachers lost their jobs when <a href="https://www.dw.com/en/turkey-ends-state-of-emergency-but-eyes-tough-terror-bill/a-44739765">a state of emergency was imposed</a>
following the failed coup of June 2016. Many more than 100,000 public
service employees were formally suspended from their jobs, while more
than 6,000 academics were made unemployed just by a special decree from
President Erdogan.</span></div>
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;"> </span><div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">"It may be hard to prove whether the
suspension of these academics caused the marked increase in ghostwriters
or not. But it is a fact that the suspensions were another real blow to
Turkey's already shaken academic sphere," Dogan said.</span></div>
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;"> </span><div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;"><strong>The main users: Medical students</strong></span></div>
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;"> </span><div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">A
DW reporter pretending to be a student writing his master's thesis
asked a representative of a ghostwriting company about the going prices.</span></div>
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;"> </span><div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">The
employee said that he himself was an academic. "I am also on the
examination board for both the doctoral viva and the thesis defense," he
said. "I write any academic paper for 7,000 Turkish liras (€1,200)."</span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">It became clear during the discussion that the company has
specialized in medicine, clinical psychology and management. "About 70
percent of the students we cater to are from medical faculties. When we
write a paper for them, we make use of the know-how of surgical or
orthopedic specialists, for example. The experts we work with receive a
monthly fee of €800 to €1,200 from us. Our prices for medical papers
start at €1,700," the company representative said.</span></div>
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;"> </span><div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">He said that
these academic papers were invoiced. "It is not illegal, but perhaps
somewhat unethical," he said. When asked whether there were problems
with the examination board, he answered: "I am a member of the board
myself and mostly take on the role of the person asking critical
questions. What is more, the board includes friends of the advising
professor. One will speak out against the paper; the other will praise
it in the highest terms. And the third is there to tie up the deal."</span></div>
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;"> </span><div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;"><strong>No legal penalties</strong></span></div>
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;"> </span><div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">In
Turkey, ghostwriting is not subject to any legal penalties. Agencies
and companies that write academic papers for money operate under the
name of "academic consultants." The fee received is booked under "office
work."</span></div>
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;"> </span><div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">If, however, a university does find out that a paper has
not been written by a student his or herself but by a third person, the
student can expect to be suspended. She or he will also be asked to
rework the paper.</span></div>
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;"> </span><div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">Back in December 2016, the Turkish higher
education council, YOK, proposed making academic ghostwriting punishable
by fines. The council considers such activities as plagiarism. It said
that if a university teacher were discovered to have been the author of a
student's paper, she or he should face exclusion from the university,
which is tantamount to a dismissal. But these proposals remained just
proposals.</span></div>
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<a class="overlayLink init" href="https://www.dw.com/en/turkey-the-big-business-of-academic-ghostwriting/a-47667766#" rel="nofollow" style="clear: left; cursor: pointer; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"> <img alt="Türkei Istanbul Boğaziçi Universität Junge Menschen auf Rasen vor Gebäuden (Universität Boğaziçi)" height="180" itemprop="image" src="https://www.dw.com/image/19192185_401.jpg" title="Türkei Istanbul Boğaziçi Universität Junge Menschen auf Rasen vor Gebäuden (Universität Boğaziçi)" width="320" /> </a><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;"></span> <span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">Ghostwritten papers are less likely at established universities like the Bogazici University in Istanbul. </span><br />
</div>
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;"> </span><div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;"><strong>Difficulty finding evidence</strong></span></div>
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;"> </span><div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">The
private universities in the Istanbul districts of Uskudar and Nisantasi
are among the institutes that are often suspected of allowing or
encouraging ghostwriting. We confronted Sevil Atasoy, the vice
chancellor of the Uskudar University, with the accusations that theses
at her institute were being ghostwritten for money. She responded by
calling on those making such accusations to present their proof.</span></div>
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;"> </span><div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">Atasoy
said that five academic staff were on the committee for a thesis
defense, one of whom was from a different university. "Our staff are
conscientious and work in a highly professional manner," she said. "For
every dissertation that is presented, an evaluation is made as to
whether it contains any indications of plagiarism, for example. Our
advisers accompany every paper from the first to the last line anyway."</span></div>
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;"> </span><div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">To this day, Atasoy said, there has never been a well-founded accusation regarding ghostwriting.</span></div>
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;"></span><div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;"><strong>'Too few tenured professors'</strong></span></div>
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;"> </span><div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">Vahdet
Ozkocak, who heads OGESEN, the union of teaching staff, is of a
different opinion. He believes that the number of ghostwritten papers
has risen significantly. He said there were too few experienced academic
staff and tenured professors. According to Ozkocak, the ghostwriters of
the dissertations are, however, very experienced, several of them being
themselves academics.</span></div>
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;"> </span><div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">He said that YOK had known about this
ethical problem for years, but had never taken measures to curb it.
Despite talk of a "new higher education council," nothing "new" had ever
eventuated, he said. "We can't solve our problems like this. Setting up
a ministry for university affairs is urgently necessary," Ozkocak said.</span></div>
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;"> </span><div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">At
established state-run universities, passing off ghostwritten papers was
difficult, according to Ozkocak, while private universities saw
students only as paying customers. He lamented what he called a massive
loss of competence at universities over the past 20 years.</span></div>
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;"> </span><div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">"Without recognition, competence and patriotism, the teachers turn to the unethical occupation of ghostwriting," he said.</span></div>
.http://www.blogger.com/profile/12823637254709580027noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1339216787628190681.post-57013216409880226692018-11-01T12:08:00.001+03:002018-11-01T12:08:13.554+03:00DEF CON 26 - Svea, Suggy, Till - Inside the Fake Science Factory<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br />
<br />
<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="270" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/ras_VYgA77Q" width="480"></iframe></div>
<br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">"Fake News has got a sidekick and it's called Fake Science. This talk presents the findings and methodology from a team of investigative journalists, hackers and data scientists who delved into the parallel universe of fraudulent pseudo-academic conferences and journals; Fake science factories, twilight companies whose sole purpose is to give studies an air of scientific credibility while cashing in on millions of dollars in the process. Until recently, these fake science factories have remained relatively under the radar, with few outside of academia aware of their presence; but the highly profitable industry is growing significantly and with it, so are the implications. To the public, fake science is indistinguishable from legitimate science, which is facing similar accusations itself. Our findings highlight the prevalence of the pseudo-academic conferences, journals and publications and the damage they can and are doing to society. "
</span></div>
.http://www.blogger.com/profile/12823637254709580027noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1339216787628190681.post-34680826871308557662018-07-26T08:53:00.000+03:002018-07-26T08:53:06.392+03:00New international investigation tackles ‘fake science’ and its poisonous effects - ICIJ<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">Hundreds of thousands of scientists worldwide have published studies
in self-described scientific journals that don’t provide traditional
checks for accuracy and quality, according to a new journalistic
investigation.</span></div>
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;"> </span><div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">Dozens of reporters from media outlets in Europe, Asia and the United States have <a href="https://www.ndr.de/der_ndr/presse/More-than-5000-German-scientists-have-published-papers-in-pseudo-scientific-journals,fakescience178.html">analysed 175,000 scientific articles</a>
published by five of the world’s largest pseudo-scientific platforms
including India-based Omics Publishing Group and the Turkey-based World
Academy of Science, Engineering and Technology, or Waset. In addition
to failing to perform peer or editorial committee reviews of articles,
the companies charge to publish articles, accept papers by employees of
pharmaceutical and other companies as well as by climate-change skeptics
promoting questionable theories.</span></div>
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;"> </span><div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">Some of those publishers send
targeted emails to scientists who are under pressure to publish as many
articles as possible in order to obtain promotions and improve their
curriculum, according to the findings by Norddeutscher Rundfunk (NDR),
WDR and Süddeutsche Zeitung.</span></div>
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;"> </span><div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">In addition to the German outlets, a
group of more than a dozen media organizations including the New
Yorker, Le Monde, the Indian Express and the Korean outlet Newstapa took
part in the investigation. The International Consortium of
Investigative Journalists facilitated the collaboration.</span></div>
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;"> </span><div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">Although
the existence of these internet-based pseudo-scientific journals is not
new and has been warned against by universities and research
institutions, its recent rapid growth — with the number of publications
put out by the top publishers tripling since 2013 and involving some
400,000 scientists – set off alarms among former Nobel Prize winners.</span></div>
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;"> </span><div class="Image Article__image Image--medium Image--floatRight" style="text-align: justify;">
</div>
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;"> </span><div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">The <a href="https://www.ndr.de/der_ndr/presse/More-than-5000-German-scientists-have-published-papers-in-pseudo-scientific-journals,fakescience178.html">credibility of science is at stake</a>,
said U.S. physician Ferid Murad, the 1998 winner of the prize in
physiology or medicine. Randy Schekman, a U.S. cell biologist who was
among the 2013 winners of the Nobel prize, said that he was horrified
that scientists were publishing in such journals. “This kind of thing
has to be stopped,” said Robert Huber of Munich, who was awarded the
prize in 1988. “If there is a system behind it, and there are people who
aren’t just duped by it but who take advantage of it, then it has to be
shut down,” said Stefan Hell, a Nobel laureate in chemistry.</span></div>
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;"> </span><div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">Those
journals contribute to the production and dissemination of “fake
science” by failing to uphold basic standards of quality control, the
report said. In Germany alone, more than 5,000 scientists — including
those supported by public funding — have <a href="https://www.ndr.de/der_ndr/presse/More-than-5000-German-scientists-have-published-papers-in-pseudo-scientific-journals,fakescience178.html">published their articles in such predatory journals</a>, which have been increasing for the past five years.</span></div>
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;"> </span><div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">While
those journals’ publishers claimed that a panel of scientists is in
charge of verifying the accuracy of the papers, the investigation showed
that articles are published within a few days of submission without any
vetting process.</span></div>
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;"> </span><div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">In one case, an article in the Journal of
Integrative Oncology stated that a clinical study had shown the extract
of propolis, a secretion that bees use to glue hives together, was more
effective than chemotherapy in treating colorectal cancer. The study was
fake and the authors were affiliated with a research center that
doesn’t exist, <a href="https://www.lemonde.fr/sciences/article/2018/07/19/alerte-mondiale-a-la-fausse-science_5333374_1650684.html">Le Monde reported</a>.</span></div>
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;"> </span><div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">After the journalists questioned the journal about those findings, the article was deleted but <a href="https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:aPUm8kgjLp8J:https://www.omicsonline.org/open-access/combined-effects-of-ethylacetate-extracts-of-propolis-inducing-cell-death-of-human-colorectal-adenocarcinoma-cells-2329-6771-1000207-100320.html%3Fview%3Dmobile+&cd=2&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=fr">an archived version </a>is still available online.</span></div>
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;"> </span><div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">Omics,
which published the journal in question, claims to have published over 1
million articles and is currently being investigated by the U.S.
Federal Trade Commission for alleged fraudulent claims, <a href="https://indianexpress.com/article/india/inside-indias-fake-research-paper-shops-pay-publish-profit-5265402/">according to the Indian Express</a>. A spokesman has denied any wrongdoing and defended the integrity of its publications.</span></div>
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;"> </span><div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">Reporters
from the media outlets involved in the investigation successfully
published numerous non-scientific papers with the publishers whose
practices they were examining and also participated in several of their
conferences.</span></div>
.http://www.blogger.com/profile/12823637254709580027noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1339216787628190681.post-66252249355161054452016-07-01T00:59:00.000+03:002016-07-06T01:13:46.848+03:00Plagiarism scandal hits Turkish academia - Hürriyet Daily News<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">Some 34 percent of academic theses in Turkey have high plagiarism rates, according to a report by the Education Policy Research and Application Center (BEPAM) of Istanbul’s Boğaziçi University. </span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">In its study on the “quality of academic writing,” BEPAM examined 600 theses in total, including 470 master’s theses and 130 doctoral theses written between 2007 and 2016, daily Cumhuriyet reported. </span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">Some 477 of these theses were written in public universities, 123 were in private universities, 89 were written in English and 511 were written in Turkish. The researchers used the “Turnitin” plagiarism program and similarity index to examine the theses selected. </span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">The study revealed “heavy plagiarism” in 34 percent of the theses. The rate was 46 percent in private universities and 31 percent in public universities. </span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">Meanwhile, in a similarity index that indicates whether scientific studies are “original,” Turkey’s average was found to be 28.5 percent, compared to a world average of 15 percent. This similarity index rate was 24 percent in English theses and 29 percent in Turkish ones. It was 28 percent in public universities and 31 percent in private universities, showing that theses written in public universities are in a slightly better condition than those written in private universities. </span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">The initial aim of the BEPAM study was not to examine plagiarism rates, but the high number of plagiarized theses led researchers to look more closely. </span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">The number of plagiarized studies in public universities was 150 (31 percent) and 57 (46 percent) in private universities. This number was 173 (36 percent) in master’s theses and 34 (26 percent) in doctoral theses. It was 25 (28 percent) in English theses and 182 (35 percent) in Turkish ones. </span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">Institutions such as Boğaziçi University, the Middle East Technical University (ODTÜ) and Bilkent University provide education in English, and seem to be in a relatively better condition in terms of plagiarism and similarity. </span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;"><b>‘Serious ethical issue’ </b></span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">Researcher Dr. Ziya Toprak, who conducted the study, said the results showed that many Turkish students “do not know how to write theses,” while academics do not know how to teach thesis writing. </span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">Toprak noted that there are no Academic Writing Centers at any university in Turkey that see writing as a primary instrument of knowledge production.</span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">“Unfortunately there are serious ethical issues in our country. Certainly, there are many who unknowingly plagiarize. The findings of the research focus mainly on the theses that have high levels of plagiarism, so clearly plagiarism is at serious levels. We are not talking about a few lines or a paragraph. It was done deliberately, indicating a serious ethical issue,” he said.</span></div>
.http://www.blogger.com/profile/12823637254709580027noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1339216787628190681.post-43025302237243296552016-02-09T14:52:00.004+02:002016-06-14T09:34:31.174+03:00NATIONAL SCIENCE ETHICS COMMITTE MUST BE FOUNDED! <div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">Our precious Press,<b> </b></span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;"></span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">According to the information stated in the press recently, Higher Education Council (Yüksek Öğretim Kurulu (YÖK)) abdicates its duty to investigate plagiarism and scientific fraud (<b>*</b>). Either it abdicates or continues to share its authorization with the universities as they’ve done so far, it doesn’t matter, indeed. However, it has been proven with the experiences so far that Higher Education Council tends to cover up its own academicians’ scientific corruption with the ‘don’t let it go out of this room’ mentality.</span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">On the other hand, Higher Education Council encourages the attempts of plagiarism by ignoring them so far (<b>**</b>) (<b>***</b>).</span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">Although the situation is desperate in terms of both HEC and universities, that Higher Education Council fades from the scene passing the buck to the universities and trying to make a law meaning ‘don’t mix me with this work’ threatens that the future of science ethics will be even worse.</span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">Instead of suggesting an objective (x independent) scientific investigation and inspection method to prevent scientific theft, Higher Education Council tries to say ‘may each university cover up its plagiarism on his own’ by declaring that they will abdicate its duty to investigate this.</span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">Whether Higher Education Council abdicates investigating scientific fraud or it continues to take responsibility with the universities, scientific malpractice will continue to be ignored and therefore increase rapidly unless an objective National Science Ethics Council (NSEC) is founded.</span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;"><br /><b>SOLUTION</b></span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">Provided that it will protect and supervise of science ethics in the basis of universal science ethics norms, an independent National Science Ethics Council should be founded which will serve as an academic honour council and will work with special methods apart from the scope of authority of universities and Higher Education Institute which focuses on ignoring. Higher Education Council should keep “plagiarism and scientific fraud crimes” separate (x and independent of the investigation of these crimes), while transferring its authorization about discipline regulations, with a law which they are trying to make, to the universities and Higher Education Council should transfer investigating these crimes to the independent ‘NATIONAL SCIENCE ETHICS COMMITTE’ which will be founded, not to the universities.</span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">Universities, other research institutes and Higher Education Council should only be responsible for implementing the decisions taken by this new council NSEC. It should be arranged as a legal arrangement about how this kind of new council will occur, working procedures, what the actions and sanctions, which are against the scientific ethics, are and more importantly, what kind of responsibilities Higher Education Council and the directors of universities will have, while performing this new council's decisions with a consensus of universities, academics’ organizations and Science Academy. Scientific fraud can only be prevented with such an independent formation in earnest.</span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;"><br /><b><i>Emeritus Prof. Dr. Kayhan KANTARLI</i></b><i> </i></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;"><i>All Academics Association (TÜMÖD) / Representative of Izmir</i></span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;"><br /><b><u>References:</u></b></span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;"><br />(<b>*</b>)http://www.milliyet.com.tr/yok-yetkilerini-kismen-devrediyor-gundem-2150583/, http://www.hurriyet.com.tr/yok-universiteler-icin-yeni-disiplin-yasasi-taslagi-hazirladi-40016441</span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;"><br />(<b>**</b>) as it can be seen in the archive section of the most reliable portal on plagiarism<br />(https://plagiarism-turkish.blogspot.com.tr) of our country, it has been published 402 essays and news about scientific fraud and plagiarism in the last decade and almost all of them are being criticized and condemned due to the irresponsibility of Higher Education Council and the universities which focuses on cover up. Only in 2007, there had been 82 news and articles regarding to plagiarism which academics got involved in and most of their names were stated clearly. This internet portal shows that plagiarism is still very common in the universities. There are numerous people who has the title as professor, associate professor, assistant professor, research assistant involved in these lots of plagiarism cases and there have not been any obstacles for those to be appointed to the academic and administrative services.</span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;"><br />(<b>***</b>) Also see<br />http://plagiarism-in-turkey.blogspot.com.tr<br />https://plagiarismkarlik.wordpress.com<br />https://intihalkarlik.wordpress.com</span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;"><br /></span><a href="https://www.change.org/p/y%C3%BCksek%C3%B6%C4%9Fretim-kurulu-tbmm-ba%C5%9Fkanl%C4%B1%C4%9F%C4%B1-ulusal-bilim-eti%C4%9Fi-kurulsun" target="_blank"><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><b>PETITION</b></span> </span></a></div>
.http://www.blogger.com/profile/12823637254709580027noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1339216787628190681.post-59741498527941187352015-11-25T20:26:00.001+02:002015-11-25T20:36:45.260+02:00200 South Korean Professors Charged in Massive Plagiarism Scam - TIME<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Some 200 professors from up to 50 universities are implicated. </span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">South Korea is set to indict <a href="http://www.koreaherald.com/view.php?ud=20151124001042">200 professors</a> from several of the country’s universities for alleged copyright violations after they republished books by other authors under their own names, the Korea Herald newspaper reported Wednesday.</span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Professors from 50 universities, as well as four employees of a publishing company, are implicated in the scandal, Korean prosecutors said, with most of them having already confessing their involvement.</span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">The professors’ actions were reportedly done in a bid to boost their academic standing before rehiring-related assessments. The Herald also reported that many of the original authors were also complicit in the scheme for fear of invoking the publishers’ displeasure over future book deals.</span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">If found guilty, the accused will likely face immediate dismissal as well as up to five years in prison and fines equivalent to over $43,000.<br />[<a href="http://www.koreaherald.com/view.php?ud=20151124001042">Korea Herald</a>]</span></div>
.http://www.blogger.com/profile/12823637254709580027noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1339216787628190681.post-38436983837494675172015-05-27T07:24:00.000+03:002015-06-06T14:53:56.209+03:00Fluid mechanics article retracted with no explanation - Retraction Watch<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">An article published earlier this year has been retracted from the <i><a href="http://heattransfer.asmedigitalcollection.asme.org/journal.aspx">Journal of Heat Transfer</a></i>. But the retraction notice gives no information about what was amiss.</span>
</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">The article is entitled “<b><a href="https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B3eQ1X8ZNGGnMDQyRzBfZDhUMVU/view?usp=sharing" target="_blank">Neural Network Methodology for Modeling Heat Transfer in Wake Flow</a></b>,” and the <b><a href="http://heattransfer.asmedigitalcollection.asme.org/article.aspx?articleid=2208215">retraction notice</a></b>, in full, reads:<span id="more-28055"></span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">
</span>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<blockquote>
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">The above referenced paper is being retracted from the <i>Journal of Heat Transfer</i>.</span></blockquote>
</div>
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">
</span>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">We are unable to find a copy of the article online, despite the fact that the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) <a href="http://publicationethics.org/files/retraction%20guidelines.pdf">recommends leaving retracted articles available online</a>.</span></div>
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">
</span>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">We contacted the manager of journals for the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME), the journal’s publisher (who is <a href="http://www.researchgate.net/researcher/2069834506_Colin_McAteer">listed as the author of the retraction)</a>,
as well as the journal’s editor, but have received no reply. We also
reached out to the first and last authors, located at university
engineering departments in Turkey and Bahrain, who we were able to
identify in <a href="http://lib.gskj.gov.cn/ShowDetail.aspx?d=1017&id=Asme000000079180">a listing on a Chinese library search engine</a>. We’ll circle back if anyone responds with more information.</span></div>
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">
</span>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">The article has not been cited.</span></div>
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">
</span>.http://www.blogger.com/profile/12823637254709580027noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1339216787628190681.post-72772395823533236062014-12-11T08:43:00.000+02:002014-12-30T08:44:19.651+02:00Breaking news and analysis from the world of science policy : Study of massive preprint archive hints at the geography of plagiarism - ScienceInsider<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
</div>
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><i><b>By <span class="article-author"><a href="http://news.sciencemag.org/author/john-bohannon">John Bohannon</a></span></b></i></span></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><span class="article-author"></span></span></div>
<div class="snews-article__article-body--full-text">
<div class="field-items">
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">New
analyses of the hundreds of thousands of technical manuscripts
submitted to <a href="http://arxiv.org/" target="_blank">arXiv</a>, the repository of digital preprint articles, are
offering some intriguing insights into the consequences—and geography—of
scientific plagiarism. It appears that copying text from other papers
is more common in some nations than others, but the outcome is generally
the same for authors who copy extensively: Their papers don’t get cited
much.</span></div>
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">
</span><div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Since its founding in 1991, arXiv has become the world's largest
venue for sharing findings in physics, math, and other mathematical
fields. It publishes hundreds of papers daily and is fast approaching
its millionth submission. Anyone can send in a paper, and submissions
don’t get full peer review. However, the papers do go through a
quality-control process. The final check is a computer program that
compares the paper's text with the text of every other paper already
published on arXiv. The goal is to flag papers that have a high
likelihood of having plagiarized published work.</span></div>
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">
</span><div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">"Text overlap" is the technical term, and sometimes it turns out to
be innocent. For example, a review article might quote generously from a
paper the author cites, or the author might recycle and slightly update
sentences from their own previous work. The arXiv plagiarism detector
gives such papers a pass. "It's a fairly sophisticated machine learning
logistic classifier," says arXiv founder Paul Ginsparg, a physicist at
Cornell University. "It has special ways of detecting block quotes,
italicized text, text in quotation marks, as well statements of
mathematical theorems, to avoid false positives."</span></div>
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">
</span><div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Only when there is no obvious reason for an author to have copied
significant chunks of text from already published work—particularly if
that previous work is not cited and has no overlap in authorship—does
the software affix a “flag” to the article, including links to the
papers from which it has text overlap. That standard “is much more
lenient" than those used by most scientific journals, Ginsparg says.</span></div>
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">
</span><div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">To explore some of the consequences of "text reuse," Ginsparg and
Cornell physics Ph.D. student Daniel Citron compared the text from each
of the 757,000 articles submitted to arXiv between 1991 and 2012. The
headline from that study, published Monday in the <em>Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences</em> (<em>PNAS</em>) is that <a href="http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2014/12/04/1415135111.abstract">the more text a paper poaches from already published work, the less frequently that paper tends to be cited</a>. (<a href="http://arxiv.org/abs/1412.2716">The full paper is also available for free on arXiv</a>.)
It also found that text reuse is surprisingly common. After filtering
out review articles and legitimate quoting, about one in 16 arXiv
authors were found to have copied long phrases and sentences from their
own previously published work that add up to about the same amount of
text as this entire article. More worryingly, about one out of every
1000 of the submitting authors copied the equivalent of a paragraph's
worth of text from other people's papers without citing them.</span></div>
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">
</span><div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">So where in the world is all this text reuse happening? Conspicuously missing from the <em>PNAS</em>
paper is a global map of potential plagiarism. Whenever an author
submits a paper to arXiv, the author declares his or her country of
residence. So it should be possible to reveal which countries have the
highest proportion of plagiarists. The reason no map was included,
Ginsparg told <em>Science</em>Insider, is that all the text overlap detected in their study is not necessarily plagiarism.</span></div>
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">
</span><div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Ginsparg did agree, however, to share arXiv’s flagging data with <em>Science</em>Insider.
Since 1 August 2011, when arXiv began systematically flagging for text
overlap, 106,262 authors from 151 nations have submitted a total of
301,759 articles. (Each paper can have many more co-authors.) Overall,
3.2% (9591) of the papers were flagged. It's not just papers submitted
en masse by a few bad apples, either. Those flagged papers came from 6%
(6737) of the submitting authors. Put another way, one out of every 16
researchers who have submitted a paper to arXiv since August 2011 has
been flagged by the plagiarism detector at least once.</span></div>
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">
</span><div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><a href="http://news.sciencemag.org/sites/default/files/Plagiarism3.pdf">The map above</a>, prepared by <em>Science</em>Insider,
takes a conservative approach. It shows only the incidence of flagged
authors for the 57 nations with at least 100 submitted papers, to
minimize distortion from small sample sizes. (In Ethiopia, for example,
there are only three submitting authors and two of them have been
flagged.)</span></div>
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">
</span><div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Researchers from countries that submit the lion's share of arXiv
papers—the United States, Canada, and a small number of industrialized
countries in Europe and Asia—tend to plagiarize less often than
researchers elsewhere. For example, more than 20% (38 of 186) of authors
who submitted papers from Bulgaria were flagged, more than eight times
the proportion from New Zealand (five of 207). In Japan, about 6% (269
of 4759) of submitting authors were flagged, compared with over 15% (164
out of 1054) from Iran.</span></div>
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">
</span><div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Such disparities may be due in part to different academic cultures, Ginsparg and Citron say in their <em>PNAS</em>
study. They chalk up scientific plagiarism to "differences in academic
infrastructure and mentoring, or incentives that emphasize quantity of
publication over quality."</span></div>
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><em><strong>*Correction, 11 December, 4:57 p.m.: </strong> The map has been corrected to reflect current national boundaries.</em></span><br />
</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiHp8AyqCWplgZt9q1L7bts1onpK9Bma2_4sEzzNR9HQLV42dNG6NhhGdNNHobTPG_E6DL8KrZFRjCMt31Ekrp5Y2ya6TzFaUJ92EInT3FM_jb_d_d5jT-bW52LfZ4HapLIHV0NEaE8mXE/s1600/si-plagiarism-2.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiHp8AyqCWplgZt9q1L7bts1onpK9Bma2_4sEzzNR9HQLV42dNG6NhhGdNNHobTPG_E6DL8KrZFRjCMt31Ekrp5Y2ya6TzFaUJ92EInT3FM_jb_d_d5jT-bW52LfZ4HapLIHV0NEaE8mXE/s1600/si-plagiarism-2.png" height="300" width="400" /></a></div>
.http://www.blogger.com/profile/12823637254709580027noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1339216787628190681.post-78080644907331116762014-10-25T10:18:00.000+03:002014-10-27T18:40:11.780+02:00intihal - Plagiarism in Turkey - Copy, Shake & Paste<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><a href="http://copy-shake-paste.blogspot.com.tr/2014/10/intihal-plagiarism-in-turkey.html" target="_blank"><i><b>Debora Weber-Wulff</b></i></a></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><i><b> </b></i> </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">I was recently invited to speak at a symposium organized by the
Inter-Universities Ethics Platform and held at the Eurasian Institute of
the University of Istanbul on October 17, 2014. They kindly organized
two interpreters who took turns interpreting the talks given in Turkish
for me, and my talk into Turkish for those who had need of it.
Apparently, even in academic circles English is not a common language. I
will describe the talks as far as I was able to understand them here.
The conference was focused on <b><i>intihal</i></b>, the Turkish word for plagiarism. </span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">The deputy rector of the Istanbul University welcomed the 60-70 people
present (more would come and go during the course of the day), noting
that he himself is the editor of an international journal that tests
articles submitted for plagiarism. They reject half of the articles
submitted for this reason. </span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">The first speaker was <a href="http://www.hasanyazici.com/"><b>Hasan Yazıcı</b></a>,
a retired professor of rheumatology who sued the Turkish government in
the European Court of Human Rights and won. He first described his case,
which was recently decided (April 2014) <a href="http://bilimakademisi.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/Case-of-HASAN-YAZICI-v.-TURKEY.pdf">and is available online</a>.
Since he was speaking to a room of people who had followed the case
more or less closely, he did not go into details, but they are given in
the judgement: </span>
</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">
<i>In 1997 Yazıcı had informed the Turkish Academy of Sciences that a book
by a Turkish professor (I.D.) and the founder and former president of
the Higher Education Council of Turkey (YÖK) entitled <a href="https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B3eQ1X8ZNGGnUk9XZ0pBLWJ1RTA/edit?usp=sharing" target="_blank">Mother's Book</a> was basically a plagiarism of the popular US book on rearing children by Dr. Spock, <a href="https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B3eQ1X8ZNGGnVDNULUhneEsxbEE/edit?usp=sharing" target="_blank">Baby and Childcare</a>. In 2000 Yazıcı published an article about the plagiarism in the Turkish Journal of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation and a shortened version in a Turkish daily newspaper. </i></span></blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">In the article Yazıcı praised YÖK for establishing a committee to
examine the scientific ethics of candidates for associate
professorships, and proposed that YÖK start the conversation about
plagiarism by asking their founder to apologize for the plagiarism in
his book. In response, I.D. filed charges against Yazıcı, stating that
this publication violated his personality rights. In the following six
years the case wound its way back and forth through the court system,
with expert witnesses who were close colleagues of I.D. stating that
they found no plagiarism in the book, but that the passages in question
were "anonymous" information regarding child health and care and that
this was a handbook without bibliography or sources, not a scientific
work. Yazıcı was found guilty of defamation because his allegations were
thus untrue and fined. Yazıcı challenged the selection of experts, and
the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Court_of_Cassation_%28Turkey%29">Court of Cassation</a>
kept referring the case back to the lower courts. Again and again close
friends were appointed experts, found no plagiarism, and thus Yazıcı
was found to be guilty. </span></i></blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Yazıcı finally gave up on the Turkish courts, paid the fine, but took
took his case to the European Court of Human Rights, stating that his
right to freedom of expression—here stating that he found the book to be
a plagiarism—had been interfered with and that the Turkish courts had
not properly dealt with the case. He noted that due to the plagiarism,
there was outdated information on baby sleeping positions in the book
that had been updated by Dr. Spock in his 1998 edition, but was not
changed by I.D. The European court found in its judgement that it is
indeed necessary in a democratic society for persons to be able to state
value judgements, which are impossible to prove either true or false.
However, there must exist a sufficient factual basis, so the court (p.
13), to support the value judgement. In this case, the court found
sufficient factual basis for the allegations, and ordered the fine paid
by Yazıcı to be refunded and his costs for the court cases to be
reimbursed. </span></i></blockquote>
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">
Yazıcı made the point in his speech that the extent of plagiarism in a
country correlates strongly with a lack of freedom of speech. He sees
Turkey in the same league as China on this aspect. He noted that
everyone knows about plagiarism, but no one speaks about it.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">In order to decrease plagiarism we have to speak about plagiarism. He
stated in later discussions that it is imperative that Turkish judges
understand what plagiarism is, most particularly because there is a law
in Turkey now declaring that plagiarism is a crime punishable by prison,
but it is still not clear what exactly constitute plagiarism.</span> <span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"> </span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">The second talk on "Plagiarism and Philosophy of Law" was given by <b><a href="http://istanbuluniversitesi.hukukfakultesi.gen.tr/akademisyen.asp?ID=78">Sevtap Metin</a></b>.
She described the Turkish legal situation, in particular the law of
intellectual property. She noted that there are many sanctions for
plagiarism, for example academics can be cut off from their university
jobs or from funding. She also described the process for application for
a professorship and noted that the committees are currently not doing
their job in vetting the publications provided by the applicants. The
reason for this is that if they note a suspicion of plagiarism that they
cannot prove, they can be sued for defamation of character by the
applicant. This discourages people from looking closely at publication
lists. However, with Yazıcı recently winning his case in the EU, it
must now be possible to speak freely about plagiarism. Citing Kant's
categorical imperative, she feels that we must not plagiarize unless we
want everyone to plagiarize. And if we tell our children not to lie, but
lie ourselves, they will follow our actions and not our words.</span> <span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"> </span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">The third talk was by <b>Mustafa Kıcalıoğlu</b>, a former judge now
retired from the Court of Cassation, on "Plagiarism in Turkish Law." He
spoke about the problems that occur in plagiarism cases in which
personality rights have to be weighed against intellectual property
rights. He noted that <a href="http://www.fu-berlin.de/en/universitaet/leitbegriffe/persoenlichkeiten/rektoren/hirsch/index.html">Ernst Eduard Hirsch</a>,
a German legal expert who taught at the University of Ankara, was
instrumental in drafting the Turkish Copyright Act. Kıcalıoğlu went into
some detail on copyright and intellectual property, I noted in the
discussion that plagiarism and violation of copyright are not the same
things: there is plagiarism that does not violate copyright law and
violations of copyright law that are not plagiarisms. Kıcalıoğlu also
discussed another long, drawn out plagiarism case of a business
management professor who plagiarized on 65 out of 500 pages in a book.
He was demoted from the faculty after YÖK found that he had plagiarized,
and he sued YÖK, but lost. This person is now a high government
official. The discussion on this talk was quite long and emotional, as
many people in the audience wanted to relate a story or call for all
academic institutions to take action against plagiarism.</span> </div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">After a lunch and tea break I photographed this fine stature of a <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sufi_whirling">dervish</a> before we got into the technical part of the symposium. <b>Altan Gürsel</b>
of TechKnowledge, the Turkey and Middle East representatives of
iParadigms (the company that markets Turnitin and iThenticate), spoke
about that software. He first gave the definition of <a href="https://tr.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C4%B0ntihal"><i>intihal</i></a>
from the Turkish Wikipedia, showed a few cases of cheating that made
the news, and then launched into the standard Turnitin talk. He did
note, however, that the reports have to be interpreted by and expert and
cannot determine plagiarism, so it appears that my constant repeating
of this has at least been understood by the software companies
themselves, if not all of the users of such systems. He reported on some
new features of Turnitin, for example that now also Excel sheets can be
checked, and Google Drive and Dropbox can be used for submitting work.
In answering a question, he noted that YÖK now scans all dissertations
handed in to Turkish universities with iThenticate, but not those from
the past. They are planning on including open access dissertations in
the future in their database.</span> <span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"> </span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">I gave my standard talk on the "Chances and Limits of Plagiarism
Software", noting that software cannot determine plagiarism, it can only
indicate possible plagiarism, and that there are many false positives
and false negatives. During questions a number of people were perplexed
that there were so many plagiarisms documented in doctoral dissertations
in Germany, since dissertations need to be original research and
Germany has a reputation as having a solid academic tradition. They had
only heard about the politicians being forced to resign, and wanted to
know what was different in Germany that a politician would actually
resign on the basis of plagiarism found in his dissertation. They wanted
to know if judges in Germany understand plagiarism. I noted that
indeed, they understand plagiarism much better than many universities
and persons suing their universities because their doctoral degree have
been rescinded. The judgements of the <a href="http://www.justiz.nrw.de/nrwe/ovgs/vg_koeln/j2012/6_K_6097_11urteil20120322.html">VG Cologne</a> and the <a href="http://openjur.de/u/685638.html">VG Düsseldorf</a> are very clear and very exact in their application of law to plagiarism cases, as are the judgements in many other cases.</span><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"> </span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">After a tea break <b><a href="http://web.itu.edu.tr/tayfunakgul/">Tayfun Akgül</a></b>,
a professor of Electrical Engineering at the Technical University of
Istanbul and the Ethics and Member Conduct Committee of the IEEE spoke
on "Plagiarism in Science." Akgül is also a <a href="http://mmet.org/2012/special_guest.html">professional cartoonist</a>,
with a lively presentation peppered with cartoons that kept the
audience laughing and caused the interpreters to apologize for not being
able to translate them. He outlined the IEEE organizations and policies
for dealing with scientific misconduct on the part of its members. He
spoke at length about the case of Turkish physicists having to retract
almost 70 papers from the preprint server arXiv. <i><a href="http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v449/n7158/full/449008b.html">Nature</a> </i>reported on the case in 2007, the authors complained thereafter that they were just <a href="http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v449/n7163/full/449658a.html">borrowing better English</a>.<b> </b></span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><b>Özgür Kasapçopur</b>, the speaker of the ethics committee of the
Istanbul University gave the facts and figures of the committee itself
and the cases that it has looked at since it was set up in 2010. They
have had 29 cases submitted to the committee, but only determined
plagiarism in 3 cases.</span><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><b> </b></span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><b>Nuran Yıldırım</b> spoke about YÖK and plagiarism. She is a former
prefect who was on the ethical boards of both the University of Istanbul
and YÖK. The Higher Education Council was established in 1981. From
1998 plagiarism was added to the cases that are investigated there, as
plagiarism is considered a crime that can incur a sanction. However,
there was only a 2 year statute of limitations in place. This has been
since removed, and all applications for assistant professor need to be
investigated by YÖK. If they find plagiarism, they have a process to
follow and if plagiarism is the final decision, the person applying for a
professorship is removed from the university. However, this harsh
sentence has now been changed to "more reasonable punishments", whatever
that is. She noted that at small universities it is hard to have only a
local hearing, as often the members of the committee to investigate a
case are relatives of the accused. She had some fascinating stories,
especially from the military universities, including one about a General
Prof. Dr. found to have plagiarized. She also noted that people do
accuse their rivals of plagiarism just to try and get them out of the
way. Her final story was about someone who published a dissertation, and
eventually found that all of his tables and data were being used in a
paper by someone else. He informed YÖK, and the second researcher
defended himself by saying that he had used the same laboratory, the lab
must have confused the results and given him the results from the other
person instead. YÖK then requested the lab notebooks from both parties,
only the author of the dissertation could produce them. Since the
journal paper author couldn't find his, he was found guilty of
plagiarism. </span><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">
</span> </div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">In the final round, <b><a href="http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C4%B0lhan_Ilk%C4%B1l%C4%B1%C3%A7">İlhan İlkılıç</a></b>, a professor of medical ethics at the University of Istanbul, on leave from the <a href="http://www.unimedizin-mainz.de/medhist/institut/mitarbeiterinnen/portraits/ilhan-ilkilic.html">University of Mainz</a>
and a member of the German national ethics committee, presented a to-do
list that included setting out better definitions of plagiarism and
academic misconduct and finding ways of objectively looking at
plagiarism without personal hostilities or ideologies getting in the
way. Discussion about plagiarism is essential, even if it won't prevent
plagiarism or scientific misconduct from happening.</span><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">
</span><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><b> </b></span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><b>Sadat Murat</b>, chairman of the Turkish national ethics committee,
spoke about their work which is to investigate complaints about state
servants. However, exempt from this are low-level state servants, as
well as the top-ranking politicians. They only report on violations,
however, they cannot sanction. They also try to disseminate ethical
culture in Turkey by providing ethics training. </span><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">
</span><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"> </span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">I especially want to thank the interpreters for their work—any
errors here are mine for not paying exact attention, they did a great
job permitting me to understand a small portion of what is happening in
the area of <i>intihal</i> in Turkey. </span></div>
.http://www.blogger.com/profile/12823637254709580027noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1339216787628190681.post-68995453753310817922014-10-08T09:50:00.000+03:002014-11-10T09:55:17.711+02:00 Science fiction? Why the long-cherished peer-review system is under attack<div style="text-align: justify;">
<i><b><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><a href="http://ottawacitizen.com/author/tomspears1" target="_blank">Tom SPEARS</a></span></b></i></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Mathematicians have been studying the number pi for thousands of
years, so it might seem startling to learn that a gentleman in Athens,
Wisconsin suddenly changed its value.</span></div>
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">
</span><div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">His revised pi is a bit bigger than the one everyone else uses. And it stops after 12 digits instead of running on forever.</span></div>
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">
</span><div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">To any trained mathematician, this isn’t even worth a second look.
It’s the work of an amateur who doesn’t understand pi, the ratio of the
circumference of a circle to the diameter.</span></div>
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">
</span><div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">But his paper, published in a fake science journal that will print
anything for a fee, now shows up in Google Scholar, including footnotes
citing himself, himself, himself and himself again. Oh, and Pythagoras —
once.</span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Google Scholar is a search engine that looks for scientific articles and theses, the meat and potatoes of scientific literature.</span></div>
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">
</span><div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">But Google Scholar is not discerning. It also turns up a new paper
from an Egyptian engineer who decided to rewrite Einstein and claims to
have discovered the nature of dark energy at the same time.</span></div>
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">
</span><div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Again, that’s an eye-roller for anyone in the physics business, yet
there it is in a search of scholarly journals, muddying up the
intellectual waters.</span></div>
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">
</span><div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">It wasn’t supposed to happen this way, of course.</span></div>
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">
</span><div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">The peer review system was designed to ensure that before research is
published, it’s of good quality, whether everyone agrees with its
conclusions or not.</span></div>
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">
</span><div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Under the system, a researcher who makes a discovery sends it to a
science journal to publish. The journal sends it to a group of experts
in the field to check it out to see whether the work is well done. If
the peers approve, it is published — often with changes requested by
these experts.</span></div>
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">
</span><div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">But peer review is under assault, from both the outside and the inside.</span></div>
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">
</span><div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Thousands of “predatory” publishers that imitate science journals are
undermining scientists’ ability to distinguish good from bad.</span></div>
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">
</span><div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">The predators skip peer review. A series of tests by the Citizen,
Science magazine and others found that many predators will print
anything verbatim, allowing a flood of low-quality work to appear in
online journals.</span></div>
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">
</span><div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Researchers in Canada often maintain they are skilled enough to
recognize and ignore worms in the scientific apple. But there’s a harder
question: if simply godawful papers are getting published, what about
the whole blurry spectrum ranging from substandard through so-so to
slightly plagiarized?</span></div>
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">
</span><div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">It’s not just an academic question. Our daily use of technology, and
even the medical treatments we receive, depend on the ability of
researchers to trade information honestly.</span></div>
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">
</span><div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Many academics see the rise of a two-tier science system, a stronger
one found in developed countries, and researchers with fewer
resources in the developing world who depend on predators. A Turkish
newspaper recently wrote that whoever pays the predators “climbs the
career steps two by two.”</span></div>
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">
</span><div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">There are also small open-access journals struggling to set
themselves up with insufficient resources. One in Ottawa claims to
publish 23 international journals, using freelancers, from a single room
in Billings Bridge. Another operates from a house in Burnaby, B.C.
Staff who work there won’t reveal their last names.</span></div>
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">
</span><div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Scam scientific conferences are also a growing assault on the peer
review process. These events allow anyone to register, for a fee, to
present a paper on anything, good or bad, on topic or off.</span></div>
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">
</span><div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">The speaker can then go to the dean of his or her faculty and say,
“Look, I’m the keynote speaker at a conference in Paris!” It seems like a
career-boosting move, especially if the name of the conference mimics
that of a real scientific gathering.</span></div>
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">
</span><div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">It’s all about blurring.</span></div>
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">
</span><div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">WASET, the World Association of Science, Engineering and Technology,
organizes conferences somewhere in the world every few days, but they’re
low-quality affairs at which anyone can register a paper on anything.</span></div>
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">
</span><div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">To dress it up, WASET offers conferences with names the same or
similar to real conferences organized by real scientific groups.
Recently, WASET put on an International Conference on Educational Data
Mining. The real version belongs to the International Educational Data
Mining Society.</span></div>
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">
</span><div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">In October alone, the Turkey-based WASET has set up conferences in
Bali, Brussels, Osaka, London, Paris, Dubai, Barcelona and Istanbul.
Each will cover dozens of fields — aviation, agriculture, business
management, linguistics, mathematics, pedagogy, biology, law, medicine,
computer engineering, nanoscience, history, civil engineering, geology,
chemistry, ecology and on and on.</span></div>
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">
</span><div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Anyone who presents a paper pays 500 euros, roughly $700, (and 100 euros more if they want the paper published.)</span></div>
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">
</span><div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">It is tough to shut down groups like WASET. It is not against the law
to stage a conference with the same name as another, and even if
authorities were to go after such operators, they are hard to identify
and could easily pop up under a new name a week later. WASET has
scheduled 103 conferences for next year, mostly in Western Europe and
two in Canada. In most cases, universities pay for the travel.<br />
Canadian academics like to say that we don’t get fooled by scams. But at
the University of King’s College in Halifax, science historian Gordon
McOuat noted that his university has had to cancel travel plans of
faculty wanting to attend scam conferences.</span></div>
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">
</span><div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Jeffrey Beall of the University of Colorado found a new publisher of
107 online journals — sprintjournals.com — that advertises an
affiliation with the established Elsevier publishing group. There’s no
actual connection, but anyone reading Sprint’s website will see the
familiar Elsevier logo, and may trust it.</span></div>
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">
</span><div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Real journals are “hijacked” by impostors using the same name. So an
article published in Afinidad can be either in a reputable journal from
Spain or an impostor using Afinidad’s name to trick authors. This is a
widespread practice. An Indian publisher has a website mimicking the
legitimate BioMed Central.</span></div>
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">
</span><div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">The fake journal Experimental & Clinical Cardiology used to be
real until it was sold and new owners took a more profitable path. It
blurs its identity by using the same name as before and by claiming to
be the official journal of a very real and legitimate cardiology
society, although there is no connection.</span></div>
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">
</span><div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Legitimate peer review is far from dead. But it has a nasty cough that isn’t clearing up.</span></div>
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">
</span><div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">The papers on pi and dark energy are just two of many that show up in academic index services.</span></div>
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">
</span><div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">“For example, Google Scholar does not screen for quality, and it
indexes many articles that contain pseudo-science in them,” Beall says.</span></div>
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">
</span><div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">“(It) is the world’s most popular index for scholarly content. This
index and many other abstracting and indexing services do not
sufficiently screen for quality and allow much scientific junk to be
included in their databases. This affects the cumulative nature of
science, where new research builds on the research already recorded in
the academic record.”</span></div>
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">
</span><div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">And the predators have other ways to gain acceptance.</span></div>
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">
</span><div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">“Some scholarly publishing organizations do not screen applicants for
membership. Thus some predatory publishers apply and are granted
membership. Then the predatory publishers use these memberships to argue
that they are legitimate publishers.”</span></div>
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">
</span><div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Even the top ranks of peer review have their problems, though.</span></div>
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">
</span><div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Two U.S. psychologists ran a test of peer review back in 1982, taking
12 papers that had been published in high-ranking psychology journals
and re-submitting them to the same journals with changed titles and
different authors’ names.</span></div>
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">
</span><div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">All the originals came from famous institutions. The re-submitted
ones carried names of fictional authors and institutions, some on
the hippy-dippy side: the “Tri-Valley Center for Human Potential,” for
instance.</span></div>
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">
</span><div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">The same body of work should be accepted again, the two
researchers felt. It wasn’t. Only three of 38 reviewers and editors
spotted the duplicates. That allowed nine papers to continue, and eight
were turned down for allegedly poor quality — evidence of bias, the
authors concluded, against academic institutions with lower pedigree.</span></div>
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">
</span><div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">(Giving preference to well-known academics is known as the Matthew
Effect, from a passage in the Gospel of Matthew: “For to everyone who
has, more shall be given…”) The journal Science flagged it as a problem
as far back as 1968.</span></div>
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">
</span><div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Yes, but people are smarter now, right?</span></div>
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">
</span><div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Not so fast. In 2006, the editor of the British Medical Journal
(BMJ), Richard Smith, listed problems with peer review. It’s
inconsistent, he found: two reviewers of the same paper can come to
“laughably” opposite conclusions. Sometimes it’s dishonest (as when a
reviewer rejected a paper, but stole chunks of it for his own work.) It
rarely catches fraud. And it’s tilted in favour of male researchers.</span></div>
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">
</span><div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Smith, who was also chief executive of the BMJ Publishing
Group, calls peer review “little better than tossing a coin” and “a
flawed process, full of easily identified defects with little evidence
that it works.”</span></div>
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">
</span><div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">And he cites a colleague with similar misgiving: “That is why Robbie
Fox, the great 20th century editor of the Lancet, who was no admirer of
peer review, wondered whether anybody would notice if he were to swap
the piles marked ‘publish’ and ‘reject.'”</span></div>
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">
</span><div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Its nature, he writes, is impossible to define precisely. “Peer
review is thus like poetry, love, or justice.” (A side note: Smith
rented a 15th-century palazzo in Venice to write this as part of a
longer analysis, and he clearly had the arts on his mind, comparing a
medical study at one stage with an altarpiece by Tintoretto.)</span></div>
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">
</span><div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Still, Smith notes, the scientific establishment believes in peer
review, and concludes wryly: “How odd that science should be rooted in
belief.”</span></div>
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">
</span><div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">This summer the British Medical Journal published a study of how well peer review worked in 93 recent medical trials.</span></div>
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">
</span><div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">It explained: “Despite the widespread use of peer review little is
known about its impact on the quality of reporting of published research
articles.”</span></div>
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">
</span><div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">It concluded that “peer reviewers often fail to detect important
deficiencies in the reporting of the methods and results
of randomized trials,” and they “requested relatively few changes for
reporting of trial methods and results.” Most of their suggestions were
helpful but a few were not, it added.</span></div>
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">
</span><div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Sometimes, even with the names removed, reviewers may recognize an
author’s research because everyone works in the same field. Christine
Wenneras and Agnes Wold, two Swedes analyzing peer review in Nature in
1997, wrote of the ”friendship bonus” and “nepotism” that can occur.</span></div>
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">
</span><div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">As a widely quoted 2006 opinion piece in Nature by Charles G.
Jennings, one of the journal’s former editors, noted: “Scientists
understand that peer review per se provides only a minimal assurance of
quality, and that the public conception of peer review as a stamp of
authentication is far from the truth.” Jennings went on to argue for
harder, more quantifiable factors to make peer review more dependable —
work currently under way by an international group called EQUATOR which
promotes strict reporting guidelines.</span></div>
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">
</span><div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Medical professor Roger Pierson of the University of Saskatchewan points to the flip side: rivalry.</span></div>
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">
</span><div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">“Human nature being what it is, professional jealousy and egos flare
from time to time just because people don’t like each other — they’ll
trash each others’ manuscripts to be spiteful,” he wrote in an email.</span></div>
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">
</span><div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">“There are also constant cases of people in races to claim ‘First!!!’
for whatever that’s worth,” and giving a negative or delayed review to
one’s rival “can give them an advantage,” he wrote. “The science
community and the university system have no real way to respond or
ensure that their members are playing nicely with one another. C’est la
vie.”</span></div>
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">
</span><div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">These days, some scientists skip the whole traditional publishing
process, at least for some of their work. The Internet beckons, and they
go straight to their audience, cutting out the middleman.</span></div>
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">
</span><div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">This is what University of Ottawa biologist Jules Blais calls “the
blogification of science.” It doesn’t replace traditional journal
publishing, but “this is something that we have been seeing with social
media. The volume has gone way up and the quality is coming down. We
have to be very careful in how we preserve our highly regarded
peer-reviewed publications because we need them desperately.”</span></div>
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">
</span><div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Another way to bypass peer review is to post work directly online at
arXiv (pronounced “archive,”) hosted by Cornell University. It takes
papers in mathematics and some sciences, including physics and
astronomy. The system is called “preprint,” implying that papers can go
online at arXiv while awaiting peer review somewhere else. But the
second stage isn’t mandatory, and there are now more than 8,000 papers a
month posted on arXiv.</span></div>
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">
</span><div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Still, they can’t ignore the traditional journals entirely. Careers
are built there. Nature estimates academics worldwide publish more than
one million papers a year.</span></div>
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">
</span><div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">“Everything we do is really judged on publications, and if we want
grant funding (to keep a lab running), people look at your CV,” says
Joyce Wilson, a virus researcher and relatively new associate professor
at the University of Saskatchewan. “And if you have published well in
the past they assume that you will publish well in the future, and they
will give money.”</span></div>
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">
</span><div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">All of this worries Saskatchewan’s Pierson. “Peer review doesn’t
catch many things, even patent fraud,” he says. “There is a growing
literature on this one. Fraud and deceit in the halls of science have
been around forever and now that careerism seems to have become more
important than the search for truth that many, if not most, of us
actually entered the biz to pursue…. well, things have progressed.<br />
“Even the biggest, most prestigious journals are not immune. There have
been some particularly egregious cases in the past decade. So, cutting
the garbage? Perhaps not as much as we would like to believe.”</span></div>
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">
</span><div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Still, he concludes, that while peer review is far from perfect,
“right now it’s the best we’ve got. I think that the system needs an
overhaul and perhaps this issue (bogus science) is a good stimulus.”</span></div>
.http://www.blogger.com/profile/12823637254709580027noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1339216787628190681.post-77573678647944399472014-08-09T03:38:00.000+03:002014-08-10T03:44:13.306+03:00Some thoughts about the suicide of Yoshiki Sasai - Scientific American ( Doing Good Science )<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><i><b><a href="http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/doing-good-science/2014/08/09/some-thoughts-about-the-suicide-of-yoshiki-sasai/" target="_blank">Janet D. Stemwedel</a> </b></i></span><a href="https://www.blogger.com/null" id="author39"></a></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"></span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">In the <a href="http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/doing-good-science/2014/08/08/when-focusing-on-individual-responsibility-obscures-shared-responsibility/">previous post</a> I suggested that it’s a mistake to try to understand scientific activity (including misconduct and culpable mistakes) by focusing on individual scientists, individual choices, and individual responsibility without <i>also</i> considering the larger community of scientists and the social structures it creates and maintains. That post was where I landed after thinking about what was bugging me about the news coverage and discussions about <a href="http://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2014/08/05/national/embattled-stap-study-co-author-dies-after-apparent-suicide-bid#.U-VRB4BdVqo">recent suicide of Yoshiki Sasai, deputy director of the Riken Center for Developmental Biology in Kobe, Japan, and coauthor of retracted papers on STAP cells</a>.</span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">I went toward teasing out the larger, unproductive pattern I saw, on the theory that trying a more productive pattern might help scientific communities do better going forward. </span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">But this also means I didn’t say much about my particular response to Sasai’s suicide and the circumstances around it. I’m going to try to do that here, and I’m not going to try to fit every piece of my response into a larger pattern or path forward.</span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">The situation in a nutshell:</span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Yoshiki Sasai worked with Haruko Obokata at the Riken Center on <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stimulus-triggered_acquisition_of_pluripotency_cell">“stimulus-triggered acquisition of pluripotency”</a>, a method by which exposing normal cells to a stress (like a mild acid) supposedly gave rise to pluripotent stem cells. It’s hard to know how closely they worked together on this; in the papers published on STAP. Obokata was the lead-author and Sasai was a coauthor. It’s worth noting that Obokata was some 20 years younger than Sasai, an up-and-coming researcher. Sasai was a more senior scientist, serving in a leadership position at the Riken Center and as Obokata’s supervisor there.</span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">The papers were published in a high impact journal (<i>Nature</i>) and got quite a lot of attention. But then the findings came into question. Other researchers trying to reproduce the findings that had been reported in the papers couldn’t reproduce them. One of the images in the papers seemed to be a duplicate of another, which was fishy. <i>Nature</i> investigated, Riken investigated, the papers were retracted, Obokata continued to defend the papers and to deny any wrongdoing.</span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Meanwhile, a Riken investigation committee said <a href="http://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2014/08/05/national/embattled-stap-study-co-author-dies-after-apparent-suicide-bid#.U-ZIEIBdVqp">“Sasai bore heavy responsibility for not confirming data for the STAP study and for Obokata’s misconduct”</a>. This apparently had a heavy impact on Sasai:</span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<blockquote>
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Sasai’s colleagues at Riken said he had been receiving mental counseling since the scandal surrounding papers on STAP, or stimulus-triggered acquisition of pluripotency, cells, which was lead-authored by Obokata, came to light earlier this year.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Kagaya [head of public relations at Riken] added that Sasai was hospitalized for nearly a month in March due to psychological stress related to the scandal, but that he “recovered and had not been hospitalized since.” </span></blockquote>
</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Finally, Sasai hanged himself in a Riken stairwell. One of the notes he left, addressed to Obokata, urged her to reproduce the STAP findings.</span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">So, what is my response to all this?</span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">I think it’s good when scientists take their responsibilities seriously, including the responsibility to provide good advice to junior colleagues. </span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">I also think it’s good when scientists can recognize the limits. You can give very, very good advice — and explain with great clarity why it’s good advice — but the person you’re giving it to may still choose to do something else. <i>It <b>can’t</b> be your responsibility to control another autonomous person’s actions.</i></span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">I think trust is a crucial part of any supervisory or collaborative relationship. I think it’s good to be able to interact with coworkers with the presumption of trust. </span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">I think it’s awful that it’s so hard to tell which people are not worthy of our trust before they’ve taken advantage of our trust to do something bad.</span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Finding the right balance between being hands-on and giving space is a challenge in the best of supervisory or mentoring relationships.</span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Bringing an important discovery with the potential to enable lots of research that could ultimately help lots of people to one’s scientific peers — and to the public — must feel amazing. Even if there weren’t a harsh judgment from the scientific community for retraction, I imagine that having to say, “We jumped the gun on the ‘discovery’ we told you about” would not feel good.</span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">The danger of having your research center’s reputation tied to an important discovery is what happens if that discovery doesn’t hold up, whether because of misconduct or mistakes. And either way, this means that lots of hard work that is important in the building of the shared body of scientific knowledge (and lots of people doing that hard work) can become invisible.</span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Maybe it would be good to value that work on its own merits, independent of whether anyone else judged it important or newsworthy. Maybe we need to rethink the “big discoveries” and “important discoverers” way of thinking about what makes scientific work or a research center good. </span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Figuring out why something went wrong is important. When the something that went wrong includes people making choices, though, this always seems to come down to assigning blame. I feel like that’s the wrong place to stop.</span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">I feel like investigations of results that don’t hold up, including investigations that turn up misconduct, should grapple with the question of <i>how can we use what we found here to fix what went wrong?</i> Instead of just asking, “Whose fault was this?” why not ask, “How can we address the harm? What can we learn that will help us avoid this problem in the future?”</span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">I think it’s a problem when a particular work environment makes the people in it anxious all the time. </span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">I think it’s a problem when being careful feels like an unacceptable risk because it slows you down. I think it’s a problem when being first feels more important than being sure.</span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">I think it’s a problem when a mistake of judgment feels so big that you can’t imagine a way forward from it. So disastrous that you can’t learn <i>something</i> useful from it. So monumental that it makes you feel like not existing.</span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">I feel like those of us who are still here have a responsibility to pay attention. </span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">We have a responsibility to think about the impacts of the ways science is done, valued, celebrated, on the human beings who are doing science — and not just on the strongest of those human beings, but also on the ones who may be more vulnerable.</span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">We have a responsibility to try to learn something from this. </span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">I don’t think what we should learn is not to trust, but how to be better at balancing trust and accountability.</span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">I don’t think what we should learn is not to take the responsibilities of oversight seriously, but to put them in perspective and to mobilize more people in the community to provide more support in oversight and mentoring.</span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Can we learn enough to shift away from the Important New Discovery model of how we value scientific contributions? Can we learn enough that cooperation overtakes competition, that building the new knowledge together and making sure it holds up is more important than slapping someone’s name on it? I don’t know.</span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">I do know that, if the pressures of the scientific career landscape are harder to navigate for people with consciences and easier to navigate for people without consciences, it will be a problem for all of us. </span></div>
.http://www.blogger.com/profile/12823637254709580027noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1339216787628190681.post-14458008476769847122014-08-08T04:00:00.000+03:002014-08-10T04:03:18.413+03:00Yoshiki Sasai: A tribute to an outstanding scientist - The Guardian<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><b><i><span itemprop="author" itemscope=" " itemtype="http://schema.org/Person"><a class="tone-colour" data-link-name="auto tag link" href="http://www.theguardian.com/profile/mo-costandi" itemprop="url name" rel="author">Mo Costandi</a></span></i></b></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><span itemprop="author" itemscope=" " itemtype="http://schema.org/Person"></span></span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">The scientific community was shocked to hear of the death earlier this week of stem cell researcher <a class=" u-underline" data-link-name="in body link" href="http://www.nature.com/news/tissue-engineering-the-brainmaker-1.11232">Yoshiki Sasai</a>, who apparently <a class=" u-underline" data-link-name="in body link" href="http://blogs.nature.com/news/2014/08/researchers-death-shocks-japan.html">committed suicide</a> in the wake of a high profile case of scientific fraud at the RIKEN Center for Developmental Biology (CDB) in Kobe, Japan, where he had worked.</span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><a class=" u-underline" data-link-name="in body link" href="http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v505/n7485/abs/nature12968.html">Two</a> <a class=" u-underline" data-link-name="in body link" href="http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v505/n7485/full/nature12969.html">papers</a> from the RIKEN CDB, co-authored by Sasai and published in the journal <em>Nature</em> in late January, described a simple method for converting mature cells into embryonic stem cells, called stimulus-triggered acquisition of pluripotency (STAP).</span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">It seemed to good to be true – and it was. The findings were challenged and other labs tried but <a class=" u-underline" data-link-name="in body link" href="http://www.ipscell.com/stap-new-data/">failed to replicate the method</a>. Lead researcher Haruko Obokata was found guilty of scientific misconduct and in July both of the papers were <a class=" u-underline" data-link-name="in body link" href="http://www.nature.com/news/papers-on-stress-induced-stem-cells-are-retracted-1.15501">retracted</a>. Sasai himself was cleared of any involvement in the misconduct, but Obokata did the work under his supervision, and so he was criticised for oversights while the papers were being written up. </span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">I had been working on a feature article about Sasai’s own work for <em><a class=" u-underline" data-link-name="in body link" href="http://mosaicscience.com/">Mosaic</a></em>, and <a class=" u-underline" data-link-name="in body link" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/mocost/sets/72157640622581114/">travelled to Japan</a> earlier this year to visit his lab, as part of my reporting for the article. By coincidence, I arrived the day the STAP method hit the news - the <em>Daily Telegraph</em> had accidentally <a class=" u-underline" data-link-name="in body link" href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/science-news/10603228/Stem-cells-created-in-less-than-30-minutes-in-groundbreaking-discovery.html">published their story</a> about it too early - and so found myself competing with several film crews for his attention.</span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">As a result, my visit to the lab was cut short, and I spent far less time there than had been planned, but nevertheless I managed to interview Sasai and two of his colleagues and take a look around.</span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">The story was originally scheduled for publication on 26<sup>th</sup> August, and my editors at the Wellcome Trust have decided to go ahead and publish it on the scheduled date. They felt that it should mention of these tragic events, without letting them overshadow the real focus of the story, and so, apart from several small changes to the main story, and the addition of a brief epilogue, it is unchanged.</span></div>
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<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">I spent very little time with Sasai but he struck me as a very proud man, and the <a class=" u-underline" data-link-name="in body link" href="http://www.theguardian.com/science/neurophilosophy/2011/dec/04/1">remarkable work</a> being done in his lab gave him every reason to be, so I do not doubt reports that he had felt “<a class=" u-underline" data-link-name="in body link" href="http://www.theguardian.com/science/2014/aug/05/stem-cell-scientist-found-dead-in-wake-of-research-paper-scandal">deeply ashamed</a>” about the STAP cell papers and the disrepute they had brought to RIKEN, in the weeks leading up to his death. During this time, an independent committee had recommended that the CDB be dismantled, and Sasai’s mental and physical health had by then suffered considerably, so I feel doubly honoured to have visited him there when I did. </span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Sadly, many of the news stories about <a class=" u-underline" data-link-name="in body link" href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/06/business/Yoshiki-Sasai-an-author-of-discredited-stem-cell-study-is-found-dead.html">his death</a> have focused on the unfortunate circumstances that mired the last few months of his life. We would like to send our deepest condolences to Sasai’s family and friends and hope that that the <em>Mosaic</em> story will serve as a sensitive and timely tribute to the pioneering work of an outstanding scientist. </span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><em>This is an unedited version of <a class=" u-underline" data-link-name="in body link" href="http://blog.mosaicscience.com/yoshiki-sasai-a-tribute-to-an-outstanding-scientist/">an article</a> I wrote for the Mosaic blog.</em><span itemprop="author" itemscope=" " itemtype="http://schema.org/Person"><br /></span></span></div>
.http://www.blogger.com/profile/12823637254709580027noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1339216787628190681.post-33275824067013161172014-08-05T03:11:00.000+03:002014-08-06T03:15:00.812+03:00Researcher’s death shocks Japan - NATURE News<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">Yoshiki Sasai, one of Japan’s top stem-cell researchers, died this morning (5 August) in an apparent suicide. He was 52.</span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">Sasai, who worked at the RIKEN Center for Developmental Biology (CDB) in Kobe, Japan, was famous for his</span><a href="http://www.nature.com/news/tissue-engineering-the-brainmaker-1.11232"><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;"> ability to coax embryonic stem cells to differentiate into other cell types</span></a><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">. In 2011, he stunned the world by mimicking an early stage in the </span><a href="http://www.nature.com/news/tissue-engineering-the-brainmaker-1.11232"><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">development of the eye</span></a><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;"> — a </span><a href="http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v472/n7341/full/nature09941.html"><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">three-dimensional structure called an optical cup</span></a><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;"> — <i>in vitro</i>, using embryonic stem cells.</span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">But lately he had been immersed in controversy over two papers, published in <i>Nature</i> in January, that </span><a href="http://www.nature.com/news/acid-bath-offers-easy-path-to-stem-cells-1.14600"><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">claimed a simple method of creating embryonic-like cells</span></a><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">, called stimulus-triggered acquisition of pluripotency (STAP). Various problems in the papers led to a judgement of </span><a href="http://www.nature.com/news/stem-cell-scientist-found-guilty-of-misconduct-1.14974"><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">scientific misconduct</span></a><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;"> for their lead author, Haruko Obokata, also of the CDB. The </span><a href="http://www.nature.com/news/papers-on-stress-induced-stem-cells-are-retracted-1.15501"><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">papers were retracted</span></a><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;"> on 2 July.</span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">Sasai, who was a co-author of both papers, was cleared of any direct involvement in the misconduct. But he has been harshly criticized for failure of oversight in helping to draft the paper. Some critics, often on the basis of unsupported conjecture, alleged deeper involvement of the CDB. An independent committee recommended on 12 June that the CDB, where Sasai was a vice-director,</span><a href="http://www.nature.com/news/scientists-rally-around-beleaguered-japanese-research-centre-1.15482"><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;"> be dismantled</span></a><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">. Sasai had been </span><a href="http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v415/n6875/full/415952a.html"><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">instrumental in launching the CDB </span></a><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">and helped it to develop into one of the world’s premier research centres.</span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">Just after 9 a.m., Sasai was found hanging in a stairwell of the Institute of Biomedical Research and Innovation, next to the CDB, where he also had a laboratory. He was </span><a href="http://www3.nhk.or.jp/news/html/20140805/t10013556961000.html"><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">pronounced dead just after 11 a.m.</span></a><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">, according to reports by Japanese media. A bag found at the scene </span><a href="http://www3.nhk.or.jp/news/html/20140805/t10013556961000.html"><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">contained three letters</span></a><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">: one addressed to CDB management, one to his laboratory members and one to Obokata.</span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">In a </span><a href="http://www3.riken.jp/stap/j/s18document16.pdf"><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">brief statement</span></a><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;"> released this morning, RIKEN president Ryoji Noyori mourned the death of the pioneering researcher. “The world scientific community has lost an irreplaceable scientist,” he said.</span></div>
.http://www.blogger.com/profile/12823637254709580027noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1339216787628190681.post-27899436390308162712014-07-15T06:26:00.000+03:002014-07-15T06:26:29.987+03:00Taiwan’s education minister resigns in wake of SAGE peer review scandal - Retraction Watch<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">Taiwan’s education minister, Chiang Wei-ling, whose name appeared on several of </span><a href="http://retractionwatch.com/2014/07/08/sage-publications-busts-peer-review-and-citation-ring-60-papers-retracted/"><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">60 retracted articles</span></a><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;"> by Peter Chen — apparently the architect of a peer review and citation syndicate we were first to report on last week — has resigned over the publishing scandal.</span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">According to the </span><a href="http://www.universityworldnews.com/article.php?story=20140714143140161"><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">University World News:</span></a><span id="more-21533"></span></div>
<blockquote>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">Chiang said in a statement that the decision to resign was made to uphold his own reputation and avoid unnecessary disturbance of the work of the education ministry, after the incident ignited a wave of public criticism.</span></div>
</blockquote>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">The <em>UWN</em> reports that Chaing’s resignation on Monday came after Taiwan’s premier, Jiang Yi-huah, instructed the Ministry of Science and Technology to investigate the Chen case.</span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">What’s more, according to the <em>UWN</em> — in news that, we humbly submit, hammers home the point of our <em>New York Times</em> </span><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/11/opinion/crack-down-on-scientific-fraudsters.html?_r=1"><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">op-ed</span></a><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;"> last Friday:</span></div>
<blockquote>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">The Ministry of Science said this week that it may have funded the research for 40 of Peter Chen’s questionable papers amounting to some NT$5.08 million (US$169,164), according to Lin Yi-Bing, vice-minister of science and technology.</span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">He said in remarks released last Sunday that if Chen was found to have violated academic ethics, the science ministry would demand a return of any research funds awarded to him and bar him for life from applying for such funding.</span></div>
</blockquote>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">The relationship between Chiang and Peter Chen is a bit complicated, but may hinge on the researcher’s twin brother C.W. Chen, the <em>UWN</em> reports.</span></div>
<blockquote>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">Five of the 60 papers, written by CW Chen – Peter’s twin brother – bore Chiang’s name as a co-writer but also listed Peter Chen as one of the writers.</span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">Chiang was CW Chen’s former thesis advisor. In a statement issued this week CW Chen acknowledged that the papers in question bore Chiang’s name without Chiang having been informed in advance because they were a continuation of research on subjects related to his thesis. “It was my decision,” CW Chen said.</span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">He said he had also sought the opinion of his twin brother on some of the papers and therefore had listed him as a co-author but had not informed Chiang. His academic advisor and his brother had never met to discuss the papers, CW Chen said.</span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">At an earlier press conference, CW Chen insisted that the minister did not have any links to his brother. Peter Chen and the minister had met on only two occasions, once in 2004 when CW Chen graduated from the doctoral programme at National Central University where the minister was teaching, and at a science forum.</span></div>
</blockquote>
.http://www.blogger.com/profile/12823637254709580027noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1339216787628190681.post-62946477426809082222014-07-10T18:29:00.000+03:002014-07-15T06:34:27.553+03:00Scholarly journal retracts 60 articles, smashes ‘peer review ring’ - The Washington Post<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><span class="pb-byline"><a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/pb/fred-barbash">Fred Barbash</a></span></span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Every now and then a scholarly journal retracts an article because of
errors or outright fraud. In academic circles, and sometimes beyond,
each retraction is a big deal.</span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Now comes word of a journal retracting 60 articles at once.</span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">The
reason for the mass retraction is mind-blowing: A “peer review and
citation ring” was apparently rigging the review process to get articles
published.</span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">You’ve heard of prostitution rings, gambling rings and extortion rings. Now there’s a “peer review ring.”</span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">The publication is the <a href="http://jvc.sagepub.com/content/current">Journal of Vibration and Control (JVC).</a>
It publishes papers with names like “Hydraulic engine mounts: a survey”
and “Reduction of wheel force variations with magnetorheological
devices.”</span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">The field of acoustics covered by the journal is highly technical:</span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<blockquote class="citation">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Analytical,
computational and experimental studies of vibration phenomena and their
control. The scope encompasses all linear and nonlinear vibration
phenomena and covers topics such as: vibration and control of structures
and machinery, signal analysis, aeroelasticity, neural networks,
structural control and acoustics, noise and noise control, waves in
solids and fluids and shock waves.</span></blockquote>
</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">JVC is part of the SAGE group of academic publications.</span></div>
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Here’s how it describes <a href="http://www.uk.sagepub.com/msg/jvc.htm#PEERREVIEWPOLICY">its peer review</a> process:</span><br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">[The
journal] operates under a conventional single-blind reviewing policy in
which the reviewer’s name is always concealed from the submitting
author.<br />All
manuscripts are reviewed initially by one of the Editors and only those
papers that meet the scientific and editorial standards of the journal,
and fit within the aims and scope of the journal, will be sent for peer
review. Generally, reviews from two independent referees are required.</span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">An announcement from SAGE published July 8 explained what happened, albeit somewhat opaquely.</span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">In
2013, the editor of JVC, Ali H. Nayfeh, became aware of people using
“fabricated identities” to manipulate an online system called SAGE Track
by which scholars review the work of other scholars prior to
publication.</span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Attention focused on a researcher named Peter Chen
of the National Pingtung University of Education (NPUE) in Taiwan and
“possibly other authors at this institution.”</span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">After a 14-month
investigation, JVC determined the ring involved “aliases” and fake
e-mail addresses of reviewers — up to 130 of them — in an apparently
successful effort to get friendly reviews of submissions and as many
articles published as possible by Chen and his friends. “On at least one
occasion, the author Peter Chen reviewed his own paper under one of the
aliases he created,” according to the SAGE announcement.</span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">The
statement does not explain how something like this happens. Did the ring
invent names and say they were scholars? Did they use real names and
pretend to be other scholars? Doesn’t anyone check on these things by,
say, picking up the phone and calling the reviewer?</span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">In any case,
SAGE and Nayfeh confronted Chen to give him an “opportunity to address
the accusations of misconduct,” the statement said, but were not
satisfied with his responses.</span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">In May, “NPUE informed SAGE and JVC that Peter Chen had resigned from his post on 2 February 2014.”</span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Each
of the 60 retracted articles had at least one author and/or one
reviewer “who has been implicated in the peer review” ring, said a <a href="http://retractionwatch.com/2014/07/08/sage-publications-busts-peer-review-and-citation-ring-60-papers-retracted/">separate notice</a> issued by JVC.</span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Efforts by The Washington Post to locate and contact Chen for comment were unsuccessful.</span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">The whole story is described in a publication called <a href="http://retractionwatch.com/2014/07/08/sage-publications-busts-peer-review-and-citation-ring-60-papers-retracted/">“<b>Retraction Watch”</b></a> under the headline: “SAGE Publications busts ‘peer review and citation ring.’”</span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">“This one,” it said, “deserves a ‘wow.’”</span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><em>Update: </em>Some additional information from the SAGE statement: “As
the SAGE investigation drew to a close, in May 2014 Professor Nayfeh’s
retirement was announced and he resigned his position as Editor-in-Chief
of JVC….Three senior editors and an additional 27 associate editors
with expertise and prestige in the field have been appointed to assist
with the day-to-day running of the JVC peer review process. Following
Professor Nayfeh’s retirement announcement, the external senior
editorial team will be responsible for independent editorial control for
JVC.”</span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><em>Note to readers:</em> Thanks for pointing out my grammatical error. No excuses.</span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">There’s a follow to this story <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2014/07/11/the-most-brazen-peer-review-scandal-anyone-can-remember/">here.</a></span></div>
.http://www.blogger.com/profile/12823637254709580027noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1339216787628190681.post-31305338518959175312014-07-03T03:47:00.000+03:002014-08-06T03:51:38.185+03:00Research integrity: Cell-induced stress - NATURE News<div style="text-align: justify;">
<strong><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">As a much-hailed breakthrough in stem-cell science unravelled this year, many have been asking: ‘Where were the safeguards?’</span></strong></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span class="vcard"><a class="fn" data-popup-width="estimate" href="http://www.nature.com/news/research-integrity-cell-induced-stress-1.15507#auth-1"><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;"><em>David Cyranoski</em></span></a></span><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;"> </span> </div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">It seemed almost too good to be true — and it was. Two papers<sup><a class="ref-link" href="http://www.nature.com/news/research-integrity-cell-induced-stress-1.15507#b1" id="ref-link-1" title="Obokata, H. et al. Nature 505, 641–647 (2014).">1</a>, <a class="ref-link" href="http://www.nature.com/news/research-integrity-cell-induced-stress-1.15507#b2" id="ref-link-2" title="Obokata, H. et al. Nature 505, 676–680 (2014).">2</a></sup> that offered a major breakthrough in stem-cell biology were retracted on 2 July, mired in a controversy that has damaged the reputation of several Japanese researchers.</span><a href="http://www.nature.com/news/research-integrity-cell-induced-stress-1.15507" target="_blank"><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;"><strong> >>></strong></span></a></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
</div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgfMIoZnVI9uhagJLAnI0zZvbP_V1nOnLgVZXLxtbnIir6CxFCLfyxPswmVAodx6ZqNKmBRQ0DYbAiRZciAVoBQLgMTMz0iPCmjt3Cqh2E1ptEB5nMURgHwcmIKHvWjfXlVLNQQxZJWEGM/s1600/STAP1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgfMIoZnVI9uhagJLAnI0zZvbP_V1nOnLgVZXLxtbnIir6CxFCLfyxPswmVAodx6ZqNKmBRQ0DYbAiRZciAVoBQLgMTMz0iPCmjt3Cqh2E1ptEB5nMURgHwcmIKHvWjfXlVLNQQxZJWEGM/s1600/STAP1.jpg" height="208" width="320" /></a></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">Haruko Obokata tearfully faces the media after she was found guilty of misconduct in April.</span></div>
.http://www.blogger.com/profile/12823637254709580027noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1339216787628190681.post-21154802337985715452014-01-04T10:31:00.000+02:002014-02-06T09:32:58.460+02:00Guest Post: Plagiarism has been left unpunished - Copy, Shake & Paste<div style="text-align: justify;">
<i><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><b>This guest post is from Kayhan Kantarlı, a retired professor of
physics from the University of Ege in Turkey. He published a first
version of the article on his <a href="http://kayhankantarli.blogspot.se/2013/12/plagiarism-have-been-left-unpunished.html">blog</a>
on December 10. I edited the article somewhat and am publishing this
version here with his permission, as I do not read Turkish and am unable
to verify the sources. -- dww <a href="http://copy-shake-paste.blogspot.com.tr/2014/01/guest-post-plagiarism-has-been-left.html" target="_blank">>>></a></b></span></i></div>
.http://www.blogger.com/profile/12823637254709580027noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1339216787628190681.post-12462406613085472482013-12-07T20:53:00.002+02:002013-12-07T21:15:22.835+02:00Plagiarism has been legalized !<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;"><em><span style="color: red;">Translated from <strong><a href="http://haber.sol.org.tr/devlet-ve-siyaset/intihal-suc-olmaktan-cikarildi-haberi-83797" target="_blank">Gazete soL</a></strong></span></em></span> </div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<strong><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">State Council Committee for Administrative Cases in Turkey has ruled that banishment of faculty members who has been involved in plagiarism cases is not based on legislation, in other words, they have legalized plagiarism.</span></strong> </div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">Especially in the last few years, there has been a rise in plagiarism cases in Turkish Universities. State Council’s verdict, on the other hand, will encourage those who are involved in plagiarism. State Council Committee for Administrative Cases has decided that banishment of faculty members from their universities is unjust.</span> </div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">Higher Educational Council (YÖK) of Turkey did not waste any time to put the decree in action by issuing a directive to obey the State Council’s decision.</span><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;"><br />According to the 3rd paragraph of 11th article in Faculty Members Discipline Bylaw of YÖK’s Legislature, “using other’s work or study as one’s own without any reference” is a basis for banishment of the faculty member from the university or civil service, however, according to a State Council Decision issued in 2012, this deed has been dropped from being a crime.</span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;"><strong>There is no Legal basis</strong><br />The 15 month old decision of State Council Committee for Administrative Cases has rendered the crime of plagiarism sanctionless. Council’s Decision, dating September 2012, states that “there are no regulations for punishment of faculty member, which is established by Faculty Member Discipline Bylaw as banishment, in the YÖK Legislature no. 2547 and State Officer Legislature no. 657” the penalty has no legal basis. As a result, Council has ruled that the disgraceful act of plagiarism /scientific rip off is not a crime.</span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;"><strong><a href="http://www.yok.gov.tr/" target="_blank">YÖK</a>: Do not punish</strong><br />Faculty Members Discipline Bylaw was issued according to the YÖK Legislature no. 547, thus, after the decision of State Council Committee for Administrative Cases regarding the legality of the punishment, YÖK did not attempt to remove the legal void by National Education Ministry and Grand Turkish Assembly; furthermore, it has issued an invoice to rectorates. YÖK’s notice petitioned “to act according to the civil jurisdiction in cases initiated for plagiarism charges”. This official notice directly means to do nothing against faculty members that commit plagiarism.</span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">YÖK’s notice <a href="http://personel.istanbul.edu.tr/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/Üniversite-Öğretim-Mesleğinden-Çıkarma.pdf" target="_blank">has been imparted</a> to corresponding units in 19 November 2013 by Yunus Söylet, Rector of İstanbul University.</span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;"><strong>Old penalties rendered void</strong> <br />On the other hand, according to the Council’s rule, bygone penalties given to the faculty members regarding the plagiarism has “rendered void due to legality”. This opened up the channel for all faculty members who have been banished for committing plagiarism to return to their old posts and demand all of the salaries and monetary entitlements.</span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;"><strong>‘This will encourage plagiarism’</strong><br />Prof. Dr. Kayhan Kantarlı, a retired faculty member of Ege University of İzmir, Turkey, <a href="http://plagiarism-turkish.blogspot.com/2013/12/intihal-yaptirimsiz-kaldi.html" target="_blank">stated that Council’s rule will encourage those who intend to do plagiarism</a>. Kantarlı invited all authorities to act against the President of Higher Education Council who breached his duty by letting this scandalous thing to happen which will pave the way for collapse of ethical perception. Kantarlı also called attention of legislative bodies to close this legal void immediately.</span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;"><strong>‘There is no corresponding crime or act’</strong><br />Lawsuit was filed by Kamil Can Bulut who was a faculty member at Department of Literature in Ege University, was found to plagiarize in one of his books. In the decree of State Council Committee for Administrative Cases it has been stated that “there is also no corresponding penalty that requires banishment of the faculty member of the university in Legislature no. 2547. In this case, since there are no legal decrees that require the penalty of banishment and there is no legal basis for the act that require this penalty, there is no illegality according to the regulations that is the case before the court and the act that is based on this regulation.” Decision has passed with unanimity of 15 members of the Council except Halide Ayfer Özdemir, including the vice chairman.</span> </div>
.http://www.blogger.com/profile/12823637254709580027noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1339216787628190681.post-33810588064969687842013-12-01T09:34:00.000+02:002013-12-02T09:37:36.134+02:00Peer Review, Impact Factors, and the Decline of Science -Copy Shake and Paste<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><i><span class="post-author vcard"><span class="fn"><a href="http://www.blogger.com/profile/16036864220530629908" rel="author" title="author profile">Debora Weber-Wulff </a></span></span><span class="post-timestamp"></span></i></span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><i>The Economist</i> reported on October 19, 2013 (pp. 21-24) that there is "<b><a href="http://www.economist.com/news/briefing/21588057-scientists-think-science-self-correcting-alarming-degree-it-not-trouble">Trouble at the lab</a></b>".
Indeed. And trouble has been brewing for quite some time without a
single identifiable culprit or an easy way to solve the problem. This
problem is concerned with predatory publishing, irreproducibility of
scientific results, and the use of quantitative data as an attempt to
judge quality.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">University administrations, search and tenure committees, governments,
funding associations, and other bodies need some way of judging people
they don't know in order to decide whether to offer them jobs or
promotions or funding. This has often boiled down to counting the number
of publications, or the impact factors of the journals in which their
articles are published. Coupled with the crisis in publishing, with the
subscription price of subscription journals exploding, an unhealthy mix
is brewing.<br />
<br />
Predatory publishers promise quick publication in good-sounding
"international" journals, using the Open Access "golden road" to extract
fees from authors. They promise peer review, but if at all they only
seem to look at the formatting. Established publishers trying to keep up
their profits have incorporated more and more journals into their
portfolios without keeping a watchful eye on quality control. <br />
<br />
Enter John Bohannon. In October 2013 Bohannon published an article in <i>Science</i>, <a href="http://www.sciencemag.org/content/342/6154/60.full"><b>Who's Afraid of Peer Review</b>?</a>
He details a sting operation that he conducted between January and
August 2013, submitting 304 papers with extremely obvious deficiencies
to journals that he chose both from Lund University's "<b><a href="http://www.doaj.org/">Directory of Open Access Journals</a></b>" as well as from Jeffrey Beall's list of <b><a href="http://scholarlyoa.com/publishers/">predatory publishers</a></b>.<br />
<br />
Bohannon has put his <b><a href="http://www.sciencemag.org/content/342/6154/60/suppl/DC1">data online</a></b>,
showing that 82% of the journals chosen from Beale's list accepted the
fabricated paper, as well as 45% of the journals on the DOAJ list.
Predictably, DOAJ is not amused and accusing Bohannon of, among other
things, racism because he chose African-sounding names for the authors (<b><a href="http://www.doaj.org/doaj?func=news&nId=315&uiLanguage=en">1</a> - <a href="http://www.doaj.org/doaj?func=news&nId=317&uiLanguage=en">2</a></b>). <br />
<br />
In August 2013, <i>Nature</i> journalist Richard van Noorden <b><a href="http://www.nature.com/news/brazilian-citation-scheme-outed-1.13604">detailed a scheme</a></b>
by publishers called "citation stacking" in which a group of publishers
collude to quote extensively from each other's journals in order to
avoid being sanctioned for coercive citation. This activity was
described in <i>Science</i> in 2012 by <b><a href="http://www.sciencemag.org/content/335/6068/542">Allen W. Wilhite and Eric A. Fong</a></b>
as a process by which authors are instructed to quote from a
publisher's own journals in order to increase the so-called impact
factor. van Noorden's article focused on a group of Brazilian journals,
so he, too, was accused of racism. This is unfortunate, as it detracts
from a very serious problem.<br />
<br />
We find ourselves today in a rapidly expanding world with scientific
research being conducted in many different places and much money being
invested in producing results. People need publications, and have little
time for doing peer review, a job that is generally not paid for and
performed as a service to the community. Universities in countries
without a tradition of rigorous scientific practice have researchers who
need publications, and there are people out to make money any way they
can. Researchers competing for scarce jobs in countries that are trying
to spend less on science and education than they have in the past are
also sometimes tempted to follow the path of less resistance and publish
with such journals. And some are not aware that they have just selected
a publication that sounds like one that is well respected, as Beall has
<b> <a href="http://scholarlyoa.com/2013/11/26/stringer-open/#more-2685">noted</a></b>. <br />
<br />
I don't have a solution to offer, other than boycotting the use of
quantitative data about publications and getting people to be aware of
the scams going on. We need to get serious about peer review, embracing
such concepts as open access pre- and post-publication peer review in
order to get more rigor into the publication process. I realize that
people have been complaining about the decline of science since at least
Charles Babbage (<b><a href="http://books.google.de/books?id=3bgPAAAAMAAJ&hl=de&pg=PA174#v=onepage&q&f=false"><i>Reflections on the Decline of Science in England, And on Some of Its Causes</i></a></b>, 1830). But we are in grave danger of letting bad science get the upper hand.<br />
<br />
And what happens to those who try and point out some of the dicier parts of science? <i>Nature</i> just published another article by van Noorden, together with Ed Yong and Heidi Ledford, <b><a href="http://www.nature.com/news/research-ethics-3-ways-to-blow-the-whistle-1.14226">Research ethics: 3 ways to blow the whistle</a></b>.</span></div>
.http://www.blogger.com/profile/12823637254709580027noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1339216787628190681.post-79329650268805004242013-12-01T09:22:00.000+02:002013-12-05T09:24:26.862+02:00Musings on mock conferences and predatory journals - Copy Shake and Paste<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Jeffrey Beall published the "<b><a href="http://scholarlyoa.com/2013/09/12/conference-attendee-to-omics-i-want-out/">evaluation form</a></b>"
from a scientist who was lured to one of the many OMICS mock
conferences. He describes pretty much all of the behavior that is found
at such conferences: no involvement of the people on the committees,
shortening the conference, massive no-shows, lots of pictures and awards
and a fancy web site. It took a lot of effort on his part to get his
name removed from their web site, the entire page has now been pulled.
Perhaps scientists should quit attending large conferences at hotels,
instead sticking to smaller, focused conferences held at universities?</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">
OMICS also publish a wide range of "open access" journals that are on the predatory publishing list. I wonder how many of the "<b><a href="http://www.omicsonline.org/editors-in-chief.php">editors-in-chief</a></b>" actually know that they are editors here?</span>
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">
One of the commenters noted that there is now a<a href="http://www.journalindicators.com/"> <b>CWTS Journal indicator</b></a>
that calculates an impact factor that is normalized according to the
field for journals in the SCOPUS database. I looked up a few journals,
they seem to have only English-language journals listed. Even just
looking at my field, I see so very many journals, how on earth are
people able to <b>read</b> all of them? It might be good to check out the journals you are planning on submitting to before you dash off that manuscript. </span></div>
.http://www.blogger.com/profile/12823637254709580027noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1339216787628190681.post-41690954457580762192013-10-07T22:00:00.000+03:002013-10-09T10:07:15.967+03:00Credibility of Science Journals Under Scrutiny - LV Guardian Express<a href="http://guardianlv.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/Don%E2%80%99t-Like-Snake-Oil-Stop-Buying-It.png" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="Don’t-Like-Snake-Oil-Stop-Buying-It" class="size-medium wp-image-136785 aligncenter " src="http://guardianlv.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/Don’t-Like-Snake-Oil-Stop-Buying-It-450x450.png" height="320" width="320" /></a><br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Normally, the discovery of a potential new treatment for cancer would be considered good news; but when the study conducted on the substance is fake, and deeply flawed because it is meant to raise the eyebrows of, and be rejected by science journals, and it is still accepted for publication, the credibility of the peer review process comes under scrutiny.</span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><b><a href="http://www.sciencemag.org/content/342/6154/60.full" target="_blank">In an article published by Science magazine</a></b>, John Bohannon details how he sent deeply flawed studies with false data to 304 purported open access scientific journals. Not only that; but he sent them under the names of fictitious researchers at made-up universities in order to not give himself away by sending the same manuscript to all the journals he targeted in his investigation. He found that many of these journals were willing to publish his paper as long as he paid a fee. Some asked for minor changes, such as a different format or presentation of the data, longer abstracts, etc.; but did not criticize the bunk science behind the study.</span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Bohannon decided to proceed with this course of action after investigating one particular publisher, and finding out that one of its reviewers had only been asked to peruse one paper in the four years that she has been listed as being affiliated with the journal. Moreover, she asked for that study to be rejected for publication, and yet the manuscript was given the green light by the journal’s editorial staff. After that, the reviewer asked to have her name removed from the journal’s masthead, and yet, she is still listed as a reviewer for that journal.</span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Bohannon then wrote the paper he was going to use as bait, with huge flaws in the data he falsified, for example, the treatments that were being tested were only applied to cancerous cells, so that if they were also toxic to healthy cells, that would nullify their medicinal usefulness; however, the fictional study did not explore this possibility.</span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">In order to not give himself away, Bohannon did not submit the same study to all the “scientific journals” he targeted. Instead, he replaced the names of different lichens, their extracts, different types of cancers, and different researcher and university names in each submission. Many feel as though his last step was unnecessary, really, as the publishers should have rejected the manuscript on the basis of the bunk science behind it alone in order to maintain their credibility. Also, a big red flag that calls for more scrutiny is that neither the researchers, nor the universities where they conducted the supposed studies exist, and a simple Google search would have revealed that fact.</span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">When examining an issue such as this, we must explore its root causes as well, and one of the main ones, according to the interactive <a href="http://scicomm.scimagdev.org/" target="_blank">map</a> that Bohannon’s investigation generated is that in India, in particular, professional scientists are under a lot of pressure to publish research in order to get coveted jobs or promotions, and most of these so-called journals that bypass the peer review process in exchange for money are based there.</span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">So why does any of this matter? After all, why should we care about nerds reading research papers written by other nerds? It matters because the nerds supposed to be reading the papers are not actually reading them, and that leads to bunk science being accepted at face value by your insurance company, your doctor, and your lawmakers, even though in many cases it is deeply flawed. That is how charlatans can convince you, for example, that common vaccines are giving your children autism, a “fact” of which there is absolutely no convincing scientific proof, and which leads to outbreaks of disease that should long ago have been eradicated by now, such as the whooping cough outbreak that occurred in 2010 (the largest in California since 1947,) or the more recent measles outbreak in Texas just last month.</span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">In addition, most of us have no use for such scientific studies in our daily lives; but snake oil salesmen constantly try to hijack the peer review process to try to sell us sham cures for people that are so desperately holding onto life that they are basically grasping at any straw offered to them. Also, scientific studies are constantly being used as guide rails for policy within the medical establishment and government. It behooves us, collectively, to make sure such academic papers are held to the same high standard as laws are, because they just might become law.</span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">There are safeguards against such unscrupulous publishers, such as the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) started by Lars Bjørnshauge, a library scientist at Lund University in Sweden, which aims to list credible scientific journals, and a <a href="http://scholarlyoa.com/publishers/" target="_blank">list</a> compiled by Jeffrey Beall, library scientist at the University of Colorado, with the objective of discrediting scientific journals that aim to publish any studies without first reviewing them as long as the authors of the “scientific papers” can pay the corresponding fees.</span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Unfortunately, Bohannon’s investigation found that there is some overlap between those two lists. This should serve as a caveat to all persons with a critical mind that the peer review process is being compromised, and it is wise to scrutinize carefully everything one reads even if it is published in a “scientific journal” functioning under the thinnest veneer of credibility.</span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><i><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">By Milton Ruiz</span></i></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><a href="http://www.sciencemag.org/content/342/6154/60.full" target="_blank">Source 1</a></span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><a href="http://dcprogressive.org/2013/10/07/whooping-cough-2010-outbreak-due-to-vaccine-refusal/" target="_blank">Source 2</a></span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><a href="http://edition.cnn.com/2013/09/12/health/worst-measles-year/index.html" target="_blank">Source 3</a></span></div>
.http://www.blogger.com/profile/12823637254709580027noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1339216787628190681.post-12637845443755270192013-10-03T21:42:00.000+03:002013-10-08T21:52:14.055+03:00Some Online Journals Will Publish Fake Science, For A Fee - NPR<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"> <a href="http://www.npr.org/people/2100771/richard-knox" rel="author">Richard Knox</a> </span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Many online journals are ready to publish bad research in exchange for a credit card number.</span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">That's the conclusion of an elaborate sting carried out by <i>Science</i>, a leading mainline journal. The result should trouble doctors, patients, policymakers and anyone who has a stake in the integrity of science (and who doesn't?).</span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">The business model of these "predatory publishers" is a scientific version of those phishes from Nigerians who want help transferring a few million dollars into your bank account.</span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">To find out just how common predatory publishing is, <i>Science</i> contributor John Bohannon sent a deliberately faked research article 305 times to online journals. More than half the journals that supposedly reviewed the fake paper accepted it.</span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">"This sting operation," Bohannan<b> <a href="http://www.sciencemag.org/content/342/6154/60.full">writes</a></b>, reveals "the contours of an emerging Wild West in academic publishing."</span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Online scientific journals are springing up at a great rate. There are thousands out there. Many, such as <b><a href="http://www.plosone.org/">PLoS One</a></b>, are totally respectable. This "open access" model is making good science more accessible than ever before, without making users pay the hefty subscription fees of traditional print journals.</span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">(It should be noted that <i>Science</i> is among these legacy print journals, charging subscription fees and putting much of its online content behind a pay wall.)</span><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"> </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">But the Internet has also opened the door to clever imitators who collect fees from scientists eager to get published. "It's the equivalent of paying someone to publish your work on their blog," Bohannan tells Shots.</span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">These sleazy journals often look legitimate. They bear titles like the<i> American Journal of Polymer Science</i> that closely resemble titles of respected journals. Their mastheads often contain the names of respectable-looking experts. But often it's all but impossible to tell who's really behind them or even where in the world they're located.</span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Bohannan says his experiment shows many of these online journals didn't notice fatal flaws in a paper that should be spotted by "anyone with more than high-school knowledge of chemistry." And in some cases, even when one of their reviewers pointed out mistakes, the journal accepted the paper anyway — and then asked for hundreds or thousands of dollars in publication fees from the author. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><img alt="This journal offered to publish a fake cancer research paper for a $1,000 fee." class="img" src="http://media.npr.org/assets/img/2013/10/03/jecar-acceptance_custom-8cc39019302fadf290074bcc1c1aadb0355cf04d-s2-c85.jpg" height="320" style="display: block;" title="This journal offered to publish a fake cancer research paper for a $1,000 fee." width="274" /></span></div>
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"></span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">A journalist with an Oxford University PhD in molecular biology, Bohannan fabricated a paper purporting to discover a chemical extracted from lichen that kills cancer cells. Its authors were fake too — nonexistent researchers with African-sounding names based at the fictitious Wassee Institute of Medicine in Asmara, a city in Eritrea.</span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">With help from collaborators at Harvard, Bohannan made the paper look as science-y as possible – but larded it with fundamental errors in method, data and conclusions.</span></div>
<div class="caption" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">For starters, the purported new cancer drug was tested on cancer cells – but not healthy cells. So there's no way to tell whether its effect was cancer-specific, or if it's simply toxic to all cells.</span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">A graph in the paper purports to show that the more lichen drug that was added to test tubes of cancer cells, the more effective it was at killing. But in fact the actual data show no such difference.</span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Bohannan says it wasn't easy to write a convincing fake. Initially he made the data "too crazy," he says. His Harvard collaborators worried it made the paper look too interesting. "So we rewrote it, making boring rookie mistakes," he says.</span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">The final touch was to make the paper read as though it had been written by someone whose first language is not English. To do that, Bohannan used Google Translate to put it into French, then translated that version back into English.</span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">In the end, the paper's fictitious authors got 157 acceptance letters and 98 rejections – a score of 61 percent. "That's way higher than I expected," Bohannan says. "I was expecting 10 or 15 percent, or worst case, a quarter accepted."</span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">For the privilege of being published, the paper's authors were asked to send along a publishing fee of up to $3,100.</span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">The highest density of acceptances was from journals based in India, where academics are under intense pressure to publish in order to get promotions and bonuses.To learn the location of online journals that accepted or rejected Bohannan's paper, see this <b><a href="http://scicomm.scimagdev.org/">interactive global map</a></b>.</span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Bohannan says the exercise is a damning indictment of the way <b><a href="http://guides.lib.jjay.cuny.edu/content.php?pid=209679&sid=1746812">peer review</a></b> works (or doesn't) at many online journals. Peer review is the time-honored system of having outside experts comb through submissions to identify flaws in method, data or conclusions. It's the way scientific journals do quality control.</span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">"Peer review is in a worse state than anyone guessed," he says.</span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Bohannan says he doesn't mean to suggest that the whole business model of online open-access journals is a failure. "You can't conclude that from my experiment, because I didn't do the right control – submitting a paper to paid-subscription journals," he says.</span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">As he acknowledges, it's not as if peer review is always up to snuff at subscription journals – even the top subscription journals have been embarrassed by lapses in their peer review processes. But he says online publishing makes poor-quality journals easier to set up. And the sheer volume of online publications these days makes it harder to distinguish between legitimate and shady journals. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><img alt="Another journal asked the authors to wire 80 Euros to a Turkish bank." class="img" src="http://media.npr.org/assets/img/2013/10/03/jppa-2013-06-023-kuumwa-yahoo-com_custom-4687ed355b93f516a182549fc0a239402f88d833-s2-c85.jpg" style="display: block;" title="Another journal asked the authors to wire 80 Euros to a Turkish bank." /><a class="enlargebtn enlarge-smallscreen" href="http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2013/10/03/228859954/some-online-journals-will-publish-fake-science-for-a-fee#" title="Enlarge"></a></span> </div>
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><b><a href="http://ucdenver.academia.edu/JeffreyBeall">Jeffrey Beall</a></b> of the University of Colorado wasn't surprised in the least by the outcome of Bohannan's sting. "He basically found what I've been saying for years," he tells Shots.</span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">A growing number of online open-access journals "are accepting papers just to earn publishing fees, and as a result science is being poisoned by a lot of bad articles," Beall says.</span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Beall, a research librarian, is a self-appointed watchdog over open-access publishing. He maintains a<a href="http://scholarlyoa.com/publishers/"> <b>list</b></a> of what he calls "predatory publishers" – those who "exploit the open-access model of publishing for their own profit."</span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"></span><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">He points out that online publishers operate under an incentive that's just the opposite of traditional scientific journals. Print journals have rigid constraints on how many articles they can publish, so they have to screen out all but the best. And they have subscribers to keep happy, so they have to cultivate reputations as curators of high-quality research.</span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">But online journals don't have to worry about subscribers; they make their money by charging contributors – who have a strong incentive to get published. So "the more papers they publish the more money they make," Beall says.</span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Two big questions arise out of all this: What damage is done by publish-anything journals? And what can be done about it?</span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">The potential damage is both far-reaching and difficult to quantify. Bohannan points out that universities and government agencies, particularly in developing countries, may hire researchers based on resumes packed with sleazy citations. Determining which of those CV entries is high-quality and which aren't is no easy task.</span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=1339216787628190681" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"></a><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Beall notes that lawyers often use scientific citations in briefs and trials. Government officials draw on published research to set policy. Drug companies have a strong incentive to manipulate research to bolster their claims. And researchers may be led down futile paths on the basis of poor research.</span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">As to what can be done, Beall says poor-quality research can probably only be driven out by naming and shaming.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Bohannan thinks there might be a sort of<i> Consumer Reports</i> to survey the quality of online journals and call out those that fall short. And he thinks maybe such an enterprise might regularly carry out stings like his to keep everyone in the field on their toes</span>.</div>
.http://www.blogger.com/profile/12823637254709580027noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1339216787628190681.post-42360993476788769782013-07-26T12:52:00.001+03:002013-07-26T12:54:19.908+03:00What’s the difference between plagiarism and “unintended and unknowing breach of copyright?” - Retraction Watch<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">In our work here at Retraction Watch, we’ve seen a number of euphemisms for plagiarism. (See <a href="http://www.slideshare.net/ivanoransky/3rd-worl">slides 18-22 of this presentation</a> for a selection.) Today, in following up on a <a href="http://retractionwatch.wordpress.com/2013/06/21/authors-of-retracted-sex-paper-won-ig-nobel-for-mri-study-of-coitus-and-had-another-retraction/">case we covered last month</a>, we’ve learned of a new way to avoid saying the dreaded p-word.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">We reported in June that sex researcher Willibrord Weijmar Schultz had retracted two papers. One was for “<a href="http://retractionwatch.wordpress.com/2013/06/21/authors-of-retracted-sex-paper-won-ig-nobel-for-mri-study-of-coitus-and-had-another-retraction/">substantial overlap between this paper and an earlier published paper by Talli Yehuda Rosenbaum</a>,” while the other was for “<a href="http://retractionwatch.wordpress.com/2013/06/20/21-year-old-article-on-the-sex-lives-of-women-with-cancer-retracted-for-data-misuse/">breach of warranties made by the authors with respect to originality</a>” and failure to cite a dissertation.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Two more retractions from Weijmar Schultz, for exactly the same
reasons as the second one above, have just appeared. One was of a <a href="http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14681994.2013.823720#.UfEC-6z4K2J">1991 paper in </a><i><a href="http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14681994.2013.823720#.UfEC-6z4K2J">Sexual and Marital Therapy</a> </i>(now <i>Sexual and Relationship Therapy</i>), while the other was of a <a href="http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/0092623X.2013.825146#preview">2003 article in the</a> <i>Journal of Sex & Marital Therapy</i>.</span></div>
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The <i>Journal of Sex & Marital Therapy</i> notice reads as follows: <a href="http://retractionwatch.wordpress.com/2013/07/25/whats-the-difference-between-plagiarism-and-unintended-and-unknowing-breach-of-copyright/" target="_blank">>>></a></span></div>
.http://www.blogger.com/profile/12823637254709580027noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1339216787628190681.post-34299656273401517592013-07-04T08:09:00.000+03:002013-07-06T08:10:54.185+03:00May university rankings help uncover problematic or fraudulent research?<div style="text-align: justify;">
<i><b><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Paul Wouters </span></b></i></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Can one person manipulate the position of a whole university in a university ranking such as the <a href="http://www.leidenranking.com/ranking">Leiden Ranking</a>? The answer is, unfortunately, sometimes yes – provided the processes of quality control in journals do not function properly. A Turkish colleague recently alerted us to the position of <a href="http://www.ege.edu.tr/">Ege University</a> in the most recent Leiden Ranking in the field of mathematics and computer science. This university, not previously known as one of the prestigious Turkish research universities, ranks second with an astonishing value of the PP(top 10%) indicator of almost 21%. In other words, 21% of the mathematics and computer science publications of Ege University belong to the top 10% most frequently cited in their field. This means that Ege University is supposed to have produced twice the amount of highly cited papers as expected. Only <a href="http://www.stanford.edu/">Stanford University</a> has performed better.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">In mathematics and computer science, Ege university has produced 210 publications (Stanford wrote almost ten times as much). Because this is a relatively small number of publications, the reliability of the ranking position is fairly low, which is indicated by a broad stability interval (an indication of the uncertainty in the measurement). Of the 210 Ege University publications, no less than 65 have been created by one person, a certain Ahmet Yildirim. This is an extremely high productivity in only 4 years in this specialty. Moreover, the Yildirim publications are indeed responsible for the high ranking of Ege University: without them, Ege University would rank around position 300 in this field. This position is therefore probably a much better reflection of its performance in this field. Yildirim’s publications have attracted 421 citations, excluding the self-citations. Mathematics is not a very citation dense field, so this level of citations is able to strongly influence both the PP(top10%) and the MNCS indicators.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">An investigation into Yildirim’s publications has not yet started, as far as we know. But suspicions of fraud and plagiarism are rising, both in Turkey and abroad. One of his publications, in the journal <i>Mathematical Physics</i>, has recently been retracted by the journal because of evident plagiarism (pieces of an article by a Chinese author were copied and presented as original). Interestingly, the author has not agreed with this retraction. A fair number of Yildirim’s publications have been published in journals with a less than excellent track record in quality control. The Elsevier journal <i>Computer & Mathematics with Applications</i> (11 articles by Yildirim) has recently retracted an article by a different author because it turned out to have “no scientific content”. Actuallly, it was an almost empty publication. According to Retraction Watch, the<a href="http://retractionwatch.wordpress.com/2012/04/17/math-paper-retracted-because-it-contains-no-scientific-content/#more-7311"> journal’s editor Ervin Rodin</a> has been replaced at the end of last year. He was also relieved from his editorial position at the journal <i>Applied Mathematics Letters – An International Journal of Rapid Publication</i>, another Elsevier imprint. Rodin was also editor of <i>Mathematical and Computer Modelling</i>, in which Yildirim published 5 articles. The <a href="http://www.journals.elsevier.com/mathematical-and-computer-modelling/">latter journal</a> currently does not accept any submissions “due to an editorial reconstruction”.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">How did Yildirim’s publications attract so many citations? His 65 publications are cited by 285 publications, giving in total 421 citations. This group of publications has a strong internal citation traffic. They have attracted almost 1200 citations, of which a bit more than half is generated within this group. In other words: this set of publications seems to represent a closely knit group of authors, but they are not completely isolated from other authors. If we look at the universities citing Ege University, none of them have a high rank in the Leiden Ranking with the exception of Penn State University (which ranks at 112) that has cited Yildirim once. If we zoom in on mathematics and computer science, virtually all of the citing universities do not rank highly either, with the exception of Penn State (1 publication) and Gazi University (also 1 publication). The rank position of the last university, by the way, is not so reliable either, as indicated by the stability interval that is almost as wide as in the case of Ege University.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">The bibliometric evidence allows for two different conclusions. One is that Yildirim is a member of a community which works closely together on an important mathematical problem. The alternative interpretation is that this group is a distributed citation cartel which not only exchanges citations but also produces very similar publications in journals that are functioning mainly as citation generating devices. A cursory look at a sample of the publications and the way the problems are formulated seems to support the second interpretation more than the first.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">But from this point, the experts in mathematics should take over. Bibliometrics is currently not able to properly distinguish sense from nonsense in scientific publications. Expertise in the field is required for this task. We have informed the rector of Ege University that the ranking of his university is doubtful and requested more information from him about the position of the author. We have not yet received a reply. If Ege University wishes to be taken seriously, it should start a thorough investigation of the publications by Yildirim and his co-authors.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">If you see other strange rankings in our Leiden Ranking or in any other ranking, please do notify us. It may help us create better tools to uncover fraudulent behaviour in academic scholarship.</span></div>
.http://www.blogger.com/profile/12823637254709580027noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1339216787628190681.post-28862172664651189852013-06-03T18:08:00.000+03:002013-06-08T18:09:55.985+03:00Journal retracts paper for plagiarism, but mathematician author doesn’t agree - Retraction Watch<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">The <em>Journal of Mathematical Physics</em> has retracted a paper by a prolific mathematician in Turkey who doesn’t agree that he plagiarized.</span>
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Here’s the <a href="http://jmp.aip.org/resource/1/jmapaq/v53/i10/p109901_s1?view=fulltext&bypassSSO=1">notice</a>, for “Homotopy perturbation method to obtain exact special solutions with solitary patterns for Boussinesq-like <em>B</em>(<em>m</em>,<em>n</em>) equations with fully nonlinear dispersion:”<span id="more-14450"></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">The Editor wishes to retract the article<sup><a href="http://jmp.aip.org/resource/1/jmapaq/v53/i10/p109901_s1?view=fulltext&bypassSSO=1#c1" name="citeref_c1" rel="c1">1</a></sup> because extensive passages in it, including results claimed to be new, are identical to material in a previously <a href="http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0960077904000165">published paper by Yonggui Zhu</a>. The author has not agreed to this retraction.</span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">The paper has been cited four times, according to Thomson
Scientific’s Web of Knowledge, including once by another paper by the
author, and once by the retraction.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">The author of the JMP paper, Ahmet Yildirim, earned his PhD in 2009 and has <a href="http://www.sapub.org/journal/editorialdetails.aspx?journalid=1070&personid=16145">published an impressive 279 papers</a>. We’ve asked why he didn’t agree to the retraction, and will update with anything we learn.</span></div>
.http://www.blogger.com/profile/12823637254709580027noreply@blogger.com