Uh oh, lots on research misconduct lately. Newest news is that noted Wikipedia-lifter Ed Wegman sued John Mashey, one of his critics, for $2 million dollars. Then he backed down and decided not to sue after all.
Best quote from Mashey’s write-up:
None of this made any sense to me, but then I am no lawyer. As it turned out, it made no sense to good lawyers either . . .
Lifting an encyclopedia is pretty impressive and requires real muscles. Lifting from Wikipedia, not so much.
In all seriousness, this is really bad behavior. Copying and garbling material from other sources and not giving the references? Uncool. Refusing to admit error? That’ll get you a regular column in a national newspaper. A 2 million dollar lawsuit? That’s unconscionable escalation, it goes beyond chutzpah into destructive behavior. I don’t imagine that Raymond Keene Bernard Dunn would be happy about what is being done in his name.
> Refusing to admit error? That’ll get you a regular column in a national newspaper.
And, so long as you generate page views and page views generate revenue, your editor and other higher-ups will be perfectly content to look the other way. Related questions: Does The Times have factcheckers on staff? If so, is it in their job description to check facts? (Or perhaps factchecking doesn’t apply to op-ed pieces at The Times.)
> A 2 million dollar lawsuit? That’s unconscionable escalation, it goes beyond chutzpah into destructive behavior.
So now can the Climate Science Legal Defense Fund sue Wegman and Said to recover their costs?
Anti-SLAP (Strategic Lawsuit Against Participation) motions are allowed in some states (this was used by Adelman, defendant in the lawsuit that has come to be known as the Streisand effect–he won $175,000 in legal fees, even as the original complaint (invasion of privacy) was never heard). Incidentally, most umbrella policies cover slander and libel–I highly recommend these for anyone with any assets or else the insurance company just pays off the limit of your policy in any large claim and walks away.
Thanks, but actually, I just came across a better line.
I’d sent Wiley a few quick notes on Said and Wegman(2009), aand Ted Kirkpatrick (Simon Fraser U) worked up a side-by-side comparison (10p) of that, sent it to Wiley, but never published it (until now, when I’d been collecting all the interactions with Wiley.)
Later, Deep Climate did an independent and even more exhaustive analysis (34p) and published it.
But Ted went into some of the quality issues besides plagiarism, and I liked this, especially the last sentence below:
‘5. The remaining sections of the article are simply examples of terrible writing, featuring phrases such as “intensively mathematically based optimization”, “binary or bit strings”, and “a method of trial-and-error problem-solving technique” …
I didn’t search for antecedent versions of these sentences because I didn’t want to admit that there might be other publications with writing this bad.’
By the way, Wiley’s characterization of this stuff, from Helen Bray, Communications Director in UK, 06/21/12 was:
‘we investigated and the results of the investigation were that a number of secondary sources used in the reviews could have been cited more clearly, but that there was no evidence of intention to deceive in relation to the use of such sources. …
The reviewer of Roadmap for Optimization concluded that there was no great overlap of the original article with other sources and that some of the critical comments made about the article were exaggerated.” 06/21/12, Section Q.4.1
For the back and forth with her, the only person who would respond during 2012, try pp.97-104 of the big PDF @DeSmog post.