Foreign student rule-breaking: culture clash or survival skills? -TIMES HIGHER EDUCATION

Jon Marcus

North American administrators call high rates of plagiarism 'tip of the iceberg'. Jon Marcus reports

Gary Pavela remembers being surprised by the defiant reaction of a visiting student from China who he confronted over a clear-cut incident of plagiarism.

"But in my culture, we view it as honouring someone to use their words," the student told Mr Pavela, who is the director of academic integrity at Syracuse University in the US.

He thought about that for a moment before responding.

No, Mr Pavela told the student, there really was no cultural difference in that regard.

"All we're asking is that you honour them a little bit more by giving them the credit," he said.

Such conversations are becoming increasingly commonplace for administrators in the US and Canada, as North American universities aggressively recruit international students - and find that a disproportionate number of them break the academic rules.

In one study, the University of Windsor in the Canadian province of Ontario tracked how many foreign students were being cited for academic dishonesty compared with their Canadian classmates. It found that one in 53 international students had been charged versus one in 1,122 Canadians.

Even that, said Danielle Istl, Windsor's academic integrity officer, "is only the tip of the iceberg. We don't know how much goes on behind the scenes."

Most of the international students who wound up in the disciplinary process were accused of plagiarism, she added.

"To me, that isn't that surprising because you have students whose first language isn't English and they may struggle writing papers in English."

However, other studies have found that the most common offence perpetrated by foreign students is cheating in examinations.

But many of the misdemeanours are not deliberate, said Florida Doci, a student from Albania and an officer of Windsor's International Student Society.

"Most of the international students have not had to write a paper and follow the rules of referencing (before)," she said. "They happen to cheat or make mistakes like this because they don't know they're doing it. They're used to writing down whatever they read.

"I see it more as a problem that affects international students because of where they come from, rather than something they're doing intentionally." 

'Survival mechanism'

While administrators are hesitant to generalise further about what may be driving students from abroad to cheat, they acknowledge that cultural differences play a major role - although not the kind claimed by Mr Pavela's unrepentant student.

Twenty per cent of international students in the US come from China (up 30 per cent on last year alone) and 15 per cent are from India, the largest groups of foreign students in the country (the numbers are similar in Canada). Experienced administrators suggest that this has a lot to do with the rise in cheating.

In some countries - China and India included - "the climate for academic integrity is not strong", said Mr Pavela, a lawyer by training who has served as a consultant to the US State Department.

"It is not simply an issue of the deficiencies of students, but includes faculty who cut corners or who do not share any more of a commitment to academic integrity than students do," he added.

Cheating for such students, he said, "is a survival mechanism. They are part of cultures where you have to do what you have to do."

Compounding this is the pressure heaped on Chinese and Indian students by relatives and sponsors.

"Those pressures include the potential embarrassment of having to go home (having not) succeeded here," said Don McCabe, professor of management and global business at Rutgers Business School and founding president of the Center for Academic Integrity.

But Professor McCabe added that US and Canadian universities had to take their share of the blame, too.

"It's the fault of the institutions in the sense that they aggressively recruit these students and don't adequately orient them in the different traditions of academic integrity," he argued.

At Windsor, international undergraduates do receive orientation, including a separate programme for engineering and management students, and yet another focused on academic integrity and managing exams tailored to foreign graduate teaching assistants.

International students in master's programmes for management and engineering are also required to sign "academic honesty agreements".

There are plans for even more comprehensive measures to be introduced next year.

Mr Pavela said this was welcome, but cautioned that highlighting concerns about international students' honesty could cause further problems.

"The debate here includes whether there is a 'spotlighting effect' going on, that we are more likely to scrutinise people from a different culture," he said.

Peer reviewers satisfied with system : TIMES HIGHER EDUCATION

David Schley

But Sense About Science survey finds that two thirds of those polled think it is failing to detect plagiarism.

With the number of learned papers published each year rising to 1.3 million, the peer- review system might be expected to be fraying at the seams.
But an international survey of academics states that two thirds are satisfied with the current system for monitoring the quality of scholarly output, and 90 per cent of those who participate as reviewers remain keen to take part.
The findings were published by the charity Sense About Science at the British Science Festival, held at the University of Surrey, on 8 September.
Tracy Brown, the charity’s managing director, said the issue of whether the system was sustainable was a matter of “public as well as scientific interest”.
But while many of the survey’s findings are reassuring, concerns have been raised.
The vast majority of researchers polled say that peer review should detect plagiarism and fraud, but only about one third think it is doing so.
Similarly, while most respondents say that the system should be able to ensure that papers acknowledge any previous work used, only half think it does so effectively.
Despite these issues, participants caution that expecting reviewers to approach manuscripts with suspicion runs counter to the assumption of honesty and the spirit of collaboration in science.
They add that such a tactic would make the task of peer review unmanageable.
Adrian Mulligan, associate director of research and academic relations at Elsevier, said that the launch later this year of Crosscheck, a pan-publisher plagiarism-detection tool, could resolve some of the problems raised.
Given the principle of openness in science, there is a surprisingly strong desire for anonymity from reviewers, with a double-blind process considered to be most effective.
This consensus has been attributed to a desire to protect junior academics asked to review work by more senior colleagues. According to the survey, editors have warned that completely open reviewing reduced the number of people willing to participate and led to “lame” reviews of little value.
Although more than two thirds of the survey’s respondents state that training would be beneficial, Ms Brown said she was hesitant about the peer-review process being professionalised, as it was difficult to see how any qualification could meet the needs of different disciplines.
Instead, she advocated the nurturing of postdoctoral researchers and postgraduate students by more experienced peers, but noted with disappointment that very few reviews were currently undertaken collaboratively with junior colleagues.
A full report is due to be published in November – following peer review.
For more details, see: www.senseaboutscience.org.uk/index.php/site/project

Further survey findings
A third of respondents say they are happy to review up to five papers a year, with a further third happy to review up to ten.

On average, academics decline two papers each year, principally because they are outside their area of expertise, although workload is another frequently cited reason.

The average time taken to review a paper is six hours. However, there is a great deal of variability: one in every 100 participants in the survey claims to have taken more than 100 hours to review their last paper.

Retractions up tenfold - TIMES HIGHER EDUCATION

20 August 2009

By Zoë Corbyn

'Publish or perish' factor in withdrawal of science papers. Zoe Corbyn reports

The rate at which scientific journal articles are being retracted has increased roughly tenfold over the past two decades, an exclusive analysis for Times Higher Education reveals.

Growth in research fraud as a result of greater pressure on researchers to publish, improved detection and demands on editors to take action have been raised as possible factors in the change.

The study, by the academic-data provider Thomson Reuters, follows the retraction last month of a paper on the creation of sperm from human embryonic stem cells.

The paper, written by researchers at Newcastle University, was withdrawn by the Stem Cells and Development journal following its discovery that the paper's introduction was largely plagiarised.

The Thomson Reuters analysis charts the number of peer-reviewed scientific-journal articles produced each year from 1990 and the number of retractions.

It shows that over nearly 20 years the number of articles produced has doubled, but the number of retractions - still a small fraction of the literature - has increased 20 times. This is equal to a tenfold increase, factoring in the growth of articles.

The data are extracted from the Thomson Reuters Web of Science citation database, and apply to the journals covered by its Science Citation Index Expanded.

Whereas in 1990, just five of the nearly 690,000 journal articles that were produced worldwide were retracted, last year the figure was 95 of the 1.4 million papers published.

The growth has been particularly pronounced in the past few years, even factoring out 22 retracted papers authored by Jan Hendrik Schon, the disgraced German physicist, earlier this decade.

James Parry, acting head of the UK Research Integrity Office (UKRIO), said it was impossible to know for certain the reasons for the increase.

"It might reflect a real increase in misconduct or, more likely, an increase in detection compared with 20 years ago," he said.

He noted that while "most" retractions were for misconduct or questionable practice, "many" were the result of honest errors, such as an author misinterpreting results and realising the mistake later.

"Some editors have been very slow to spot misconduct and to take action when they do," he added.

Harvey Marcovitch, former chair of the Committee on Publication Ethics, welcomed the analysis. He said he had always thought that the number of retractions was small, but had never seen the figures before.

He hoped that the increased publicity scientific fraud had received in recent years had raised awareness - making scientists more likely to alert journal editors, and editors more prepared to investigate claims.

Editors, he agreed, had been notoriously reluctant to retract, for reasons ranging from "not having permission of authors, to being unsure about what retraction meant, to not knowing precisely what to do".

He said plagiarism software could also play a part in the rise - the British Medical Journal uses it to evaluate suspect papers, while Nature is trialling it for some papers and all review articles.

Both Mr Parry and Dr Marco-vitch stressed that misconduct was likely to be more common than the retraction figures suggest.

"Even on a conservative estimate of 1 per cent misconduct, we might expect 15,000 retractions a year, but we have a lot less," Mr Parry said.

"This suggests significant under-detection, which fits with what editors have told UKRIO."

He added that there was evidence that people still frequently quoted papers after they had been retracted. "The system is not working as well as it could," he said.

Aubrey Blumsohn, a former University of Sheffield academic and now a campaigner for greater openness in research conduct, said that only a "tiny proportion" of the papers known to have serious problems were retracted.

"Journal editors and institutions generally engage in a fire-fighting exercise to avoid retractions," he said.

"Anyone looking at this problem in detail knows of dozens of papers that are frankly fraudulent, but they are never retracted."

He said that the ways in which the scientific community "covers its tracks and prevents fraud being prosecuted" must be investigated.

Peter Lawrence, a scientist from the Medical Research Council's Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, speculated that more plagiarism and better detection had pushed up the retraction rate.

Blaming a culture of "publish or perish", he said: "It's now a desperate struggle for survival."

He added that there was overwhelming pressure to be published in big journals: "You need to sensationalise results, be economical with rigour, and hype, hype, hype."

zoe.corbyn@tsleducation.com

Research, page 21

WIDESPREAD MISCONDUCT

A new study assesses the reasons for more than 300 journal retractions over the past 20 years.

The analysis looks at 312 cases of withdrawals listed in the PubMed database between 1988 and 2008. The authors, Liz Wager, chair of the Committee on Publication Ethics, and Peter Williams, research fellow in the department of information studies at University College London, found that 25 per cent were due to plagiarism or falsified data and 26 per cent were due to honest errors. The reasons for the other retractions were not given.

The study, Why and How Do Journals Retract Articles?, is due to be presented in September to the Sixth International Congress on Peer Review and Biomedical Publication in Vancouver.

It follows a paper published this year in the PLOS One journal that aggregates studies on how frequently scientists falsify research. It says that about 2 per cent admitted to having fabricated, falsified or otherwise modified data or results "at least once". Almost 34 per cent admitted to "questionable research practices".

The paper, How Many Scientists Fabricate and Falsify Research? A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of Survey Data, is written by Daniele Fanelli, Marie Curie research fellow at the University of Edinburgh.

CODE OF PRACTICE: TAKE THE PLAUDITS AND THE BRICKBATS

Anyone listed as an author on a paper should be prepared to take "public responsibility" for the work, a body that battles research misconduct advises.

The advice is featured in a code of practice for research, due to be launched next month by the UK Research Integrity Office (UKRIO).

The code is designed to help universities formulate institutional guidelines.

"Researchers should be aware that anyone listed as an author should be prepared to take public responsibility for the work, ensure its accuracy and be able to identify their contribution to it," it says.

James Parry, acting head of the UKRIO, said the document would provide "broad standards and principles" for best practice in research.

It follows a case at Newcastle University, which is investigating the plagiarised introduction of a stem-cell paper listing eight authors. The paper was retracted from the Stem Cells and Development journal last month after the problem came to light.

A research associate who has since left the university was blamed for the error, but leading scientists have criticised the senior authors involved for not taking responsibility.

For a copy of the UKRIO code: www.ukrio.org.

Allow me to rephrase, and boost my tally of articles: THE

Rebecca Attwood

Scholars are passing off old work as new to drive up publications counts.

Pressure to publish is pushing many academics to plagiarise large volumes of their own work by "dressing up" their old research to appear as if it were new, a study has found.

Researchers using text-matching software have highlighted the phenomenon of "self-plagiarism", in which academics recycle sections of their previously published work without proper citations.

Scholars who engage in the practice, which undermines academia's pursuit of original knowledge, can gain an unfair career advantage over their more honest colleagues, the researchers say.

A pilot study by Tracey Bretag and Saadia Carapiet from the University of South Australia found that 60 per cent of authors in a random sample of 269 papers from the Web of Science social science and humanities database had self-plagiarised at least once in the period 2003-06. Self-plagiarism was defined "quite generously" as occurring when 10 per cent or more text from any single previous publication was reused without a citation.

"The truth is that if these authors had self-cited in each case, it is unlikely that the editors would have published their work because they would have seen that it had all been published before," Dr Bretag said.

Dr Bretag, who presented a paper on her research last week at the Joint Information Systems Committee's Third International Plagiarism Conference at Northumbria University, believes academics need clearer rules. "I think we ask more of our students than we do of ourselves," she said.

"This issue underpins everything we do as academics. Are academics here to churn out paper after paper saying the same thing over and over again? Academic work is supposed to be original knowledge creation. But as long as you reward this behaviour, it is very hard to change it."

Her findings were likely to represent only the tip of the iceberg, she said, because the study ignored dual or duplicate publication, in which identical articles are printed in different journals. A number of recent studies in medicine and health sciences have found dual-publication rates of about 3 per cent.

John Barrie, chief executive of iParadigms and the man who developed the technology behind Turnitin, the plagiarism-detection software, described self-plagiarism as a "huge" problem.

"Academics receive tenure based on their publications - it is publish or perish. That system creates this massive conflict of interest," he said.

"Anybody who has done any research knows it is very difficult to do. You just can't crank out five, ten papers a year unless (...) you have a research team of 20 people."

This month sees the launch of CrossCheck, an anti-plagiarism system for academic journals created by iParadigms to help publishers verify the originality of submitted work. It will cover 20 million journal articles from major publishers including Elsevier, Nature Publishing Group, Oxford University Press and Sage.

Liz Smith, the head of journal development at Elsevier, said: "Self-plagiarism does happen - it actually happens frequently, I think. We see redundant publication, when the same data are given a different slant, and we've had to withdraw papers that have turned out to be duplicates or near duplicates."

CrossCheck will help editors to spot many types of ethical infringement, she said. "It doesn't matter whether you are duplicating someone else's text or your own, if it is in the CrossCheck database, or on the web, it will be picked up."

rebecca.attwood@tsleducation.com.

Plagiarists face clampdown : TIMES HIGHER EDUCATION

Phil Baty
More cases of academic fraud come to light as institutions embrace zero-tolerance culture, reports Phil Baty.>>>