Another Wegman plagiarism

At the time of our last discussion, Edward Wegman, a statistics professor who has also worked for government research agencies, had been involved in three cases of plagiarism: a report for the U.S. Congress on climate models, a paper on social networks, a paper on color graphics.

Each of the plagiarism stories was slightly different: the congressional report involved the distorted copying of research by a scientist (Raymond Bradley) whose conclusions Wegman disagreed with, the social networks paper included copied material in its background section, and the color graphics paper included various bits and pieces by others that had been used in old lecture notes.

Since then, blogger Deep Climate has uncovered another plagiarized article by Wegman, this time an article in a 2005 volume on data mining and data visualization. Deep Climate writes, “certain sections of Statistical Data Mining rely heavily on lightly edited portions on lectures from Wegman’s statistical data mining course at GMU. In turn, those lectures contain ‘copy-and-paste’ material from a variety of sources, some partially attributed and some not at all.”` It looks pretty bad. And, as with the other cases of plagiarism, sometimes the small changes they made caused errors that were not in the original sources. Ouch!

One of the authors Wegman stole from was Brian Everitt. Couldn’t Wegman have just invited Everitt to be a coauthor of his article? To steal his work, that’s sooooo tacky. Continue reading

A (not quite) grand unified theory of plagiarism, as applied to the Wegman case

A common reason for plagiarism is laziness: you want credit for doing something but you don’t really feel like doing it–maybe you’d rather go fishing, or bowling, or blogging, or whatever, so you just steal it, or you hire someone to steal it for you.

Interestingly enough, we see that in many defenses of plagiarism allegations. A common response is: I was sloppy in dealing with my notes, or I let my research assistant (who, incidentally, wasn’t credited in the final version) copy things for me and the research assistant got sloppy. The common theme: The person wanted the credit without doing the work.

As I wrote last year, I like to think that directness and openness is a virtue in scientific writing. For example, clearly citing the works we draw from, even when such citing of secondary sources might make us appear less erudite. But I can see how some scholars might feel a pressure to cover their traces.

Wegman

Which brings us to Ed Wegman, whose defense of plagiarism in that Computational Statistics and Data Analysis paper is as follows (from this report by John Mashey):

(a) In 2005, he and his colleagues needed “some boilerplate background on social networks” for a high-profile report for the U.S. Congress. But instead of getting an expert on social networks for this background, or even simply copying some paragraphs (suitably cited) from a textbook on the topic, he tasked a Ph.D. student, Denise Reeves, to prepare the boilerplate. Reeves was no expert: her knowledge of social networks came from having taken a short course on the topic. Reeves writes the boilerplate “within a few days” and Wegman writes “of course, I took that to be her original work.”

(b) Wegman gave this boilerplate to a second student, Walid Sharabati, who included it in his Ph.D. dissertation “with only minor amendments.” (I think he’s saying Sharabati copied it.)

(c) Sharabati was a coauthor of the Computational Statistics and Data Analysis article. He took the material he’d copied from Reeves’s report and stuck it in to the CSDA article.

Now let’s apply our theme of the day, laziness: Continue reading

It’s bezzle time: The Dean of Engineering at the University of Nevada gets paid $372,127 a year and wrote a paper that’s so bad, you can’t believe it.

“As we look to sleep and neuroscience for answers we can study flies specifically the Drosophila melanogaster we highlight in our research.” 1. The story Someone writes: I recently read a paper of yours in the Chronicle about how academic … Continue reading

Academia corner: New candidate for American Statistical Association’s Founders Award, Enduring Contribution Award from the American Political Science Association, and Edge Foundation just dropped

Bethan Staton and Chris Cook write: A Cambridge university professor who copied parts of an undergraduate’s essays and published them as his own work will remain in his job, despite an investigation upholding a complaint that he had committed plagiarism.  … Continue reading