If those chatbots had existed back in 2006, they would’ve made Ed Wegman’s job a lot easier.
Say what you want about Brian Wansink, he had to come with the ideas for those experiments, even if maybe he didn’t actually do them. All Weggy did was copy from wikipedia. Chatbot could do that much easier, and nobody would’ve detected anything—it would’ve just been one more contentless article filling up journal space.
The larger point here is that mindlessly recycling work done by former researchers is, for many academics, their entire career. I guess a bit of schmoozing is part of the job as well. But I’m sure that’s programmable too.
“All Weggy did was copy from wikipedia.”
Wegman was never accused of copying from wikipedia. The copying was done by a student who was identified but not named, with this story (which I copied from wikipedia):
“Following the GMU inquiry, the student issued a statement that she had been ‘Dr. Wegman’s graduate student when I provided him with the overview of social network analysis, at his request. My draft overview was later incorporated by Dr. Wegman and his coauthors into the 2006 report. I was not an author of the report.” She had met with a GMU misconduct committee, and said that ‘My academic integrity is not being questioned.””
That was all in the stupid social networking part of the paper which never meant anything anyway. As to claims of plagiarism in the climate part of the report, the part that should interest statisticians, wikipedia has this:
“George Mason University provost Peter Stearns announced on 22 February 2012 that charges of scientific misconduct had been investigated by two separate faculty committees, and that the one investigating the 2006 Wegman Report gave a unanimous finding that “no misconduct was involved”. Stearns stated that “Extensive paraphrasing of another work did occur, in a background section, but the work was repeatedly referenced and the committee found that the paraphrasing did not constitute misconduct.”
I actually read all the material behind this at the time, although the details have grown a bit fuzzy and the committee report is no longer available to the public. While the primary product of university investigation committees is whitewash, the committee at GMU was under intense pressure to convict yet simply had nothing that was even suspicious to work with. Everything revolves around the “background” section of the report describing the basics of tree ring climatology. Wegman wanted to use a statement he saw in a background section in a Raymond Bradley publication that was unattributed. He assigned a grad student to go find an attribution, but the statement went back to a 1960s textbook and it was not clear if the textbook passage was original. Wegman described at length to the committee how he agonized over the textbook quote, before simply following Bradley, only to have Bradley later accuse him of plagiarism despite having made the same decision in his own publication.
Using material written by a student, without attribution, is just another type of plagiarism.
Matt:
Weggy was listed as the author of an article which had material copied from Wikipedia—copied with errors added, in fact. As the author of the article, the incompetent copying is his responsibility. It’s kinda like, oh, I dunno, suppose someone hires you to build a house, you build the house, and it collapses. Then you say, no, you subcontracted out the house building to someone else who was incompetent. I still say you built a house that collapsed. You subcontracted it, but you’re the builder of record. If people knew that you were going to subcontract out the process, they could’ve saved a lot of money and cut out the middleman.
So, does that apply to the recent cases where it was research assistants who falsified the data for those 2 famous researchers? They both used the excuse that their RAs did it – which I find somewhat unconvincing. Are they less responsible or equally responsible for the misdeeds?
It’s quite different but in my opinion the prominent researchers are less culpable than Wegman in that there is more evidence that the former (prominent scientists) were acting in good faith (it depends which particular “2 famous researchers” you were referring to btw!).
The Wegman case is marked by its sordid nature although it does give us some warnings about how we have to guard against political interference in science. The levels of hypocrisy were truly weapon’s grade. Wegman and Said were journal editors in which they were tasked to maintain standards of honesty and scholarship, but seem to have assumed that those didn’t apply to them. They denigrated climate scientists with a dreary “network analysis” in which they grouped and labelled sets of researchers as “cliques”, without it seeming to dawn on them that they (perhaps with Senator Barton) represented a rather prominent clique. And Senator Barton, the protector of Conservative values, was undone by his sexual shenanigans.
Each of them ultimately fared less well than the recent prominent researchers who lost papers due to apparent figure manipulations/fabrications within their research groups, but that seems realistic to me given the respective circumstances. Wegman and Said were relieved of their editorship of WIRES and Wegman was admonished publicly by his Uni Provost and had a letter of reprimand publicly placed on his file; Wegman and Said had their paper retracted. Said seems to have given up what she presumably thought would be a profitable academic career (she and Wegman never produced the Climate Science book they were going to write). Barton was sidelined by his constituency (as a result of his hypocrisy of course). Wegman was also rather thrown under the bus by McIntyre McKitrick whose “analysis” Wegman apparently bought into wholesale (“valid” and “compelling”) without realizing (apparently) it’s dismal flaws.
For reasons I can’t fully put my finger on my feeling is that Wegman came out of this quite badly partly because he allowed himself to be taken in by other’s agendas – will be great if an authoritative account is ever produced – or an opera!
“As the author of the article, the incompetent copying is his responsibility.”
I never disputed that. At a minimum, copying from wikipedia, which is the claim you made, requires hitting the copy and paste button. He never did that, he did not direct anyone to do that, and there is no evidence that he knew it had been done. The case against him would be completely different if there were any evidence for any of that. Instead, it looks like a classic cluster.
We can see here that the maxim “never assume fraud when incompetence suffices” is not equally applied.
If folks take the time to read what John Mashey and “Chris” posted, it makes my case about what weak sauce these allegations actually were. Continual deflections to the social science part so as to obscure the climate part, and a laser focus on paraphrasing in the background section.
Instead of all the prevaricating and hairsplitting, maybe one of his critics will have the courage to directly endorse the implicit claim they are making, that Wegman plagiarized in the background section on the hopes that the senators would see him as an expert in tree ring climatology. But of course they will only imply this, because they know the claim would be seen for what it is – beyond ridiculous.
I don’t buy your “classic cluster” Matt. The style of plagiarism, especially plagiarism by paraphrasing, is a pretty clear sign of intent and there are multiple examples – loads in the Wegman report but also in the retracted paper and other examples that Andrew linked to in his top post (follow his link and then follow the link in his previous post).
Not sure what you mean – that’s certainly not an “implicit claim” of mine and I obviously have no idea what was in his mind. If forced to opine I’d say that since the whole episode was something of a sham, that he didn’t consider much effort at professionalism was necessary – why bother? OTOH, I’m curious to know Yasmin Said’s influence in events since she seems to be associated with most of the plagiarism episodes.
Matt:
I don’t know what you’re talking about in the last paragraph. There’s no prevaricating or hairsplitting. Weggy put his name on multiple papers where material was copied without attribution from other sources. One of these was a hilariously botched copy of a wikipedia article. It’s just pitiful, and it’s an embarrassment to the field of statistics that he was once considered a prominent figure in the field.
“There’s no prevaricating or hairsplitting.”
Have you read any of the material beyond skimming Deep Climate’s piece?
To be informed, you should at least sample from the counterarguments. The story is fascinating, although quite dated at this point.
At a minimum, you would need to read these two posts:
https://climateaudit.org/2010/10/18/bradley-copies-fritts/
https://climateaudit.org/2010/10/20/bradley-copies-fritts-2/
Disclaimer: I actually detest Steve McIntyre and probably wouldn’t like Wegman either. But I also detest Richard Goldschmidt while admiring his work. You have blogged about this dilemma with Ronald Fisher.
Hairsplitting: Claiming Wegman plagiarized Bradley when there is better evidence that Bradley plagiarized Fritts, and Wegman tried to deal with the mess.
Prevaricating: Claiming that Wegman not only plagiarized Bradley, but that he added “errors” when what he did was revert to the language in the original Fritts rather than using Bradley’s edits. There are plenty of other instances like this, leading McIntyre to advise that when it comes to statements from the self-named “Hockey Team” (which included Bradley), it is essential to “watch the pea.”
Re plagiarism, really the most striking thing is McIntyre’s discussion of Deep Climate calling Bradley’s work “seminal” when it is was copied from Fritts. Looks like Deep Climate actually thought that Bradley wrote the material. Isn’t that when plagiarism gets serious, as opposed to a statistician using a general attribution statement rather than in-line citations for background material from a textbook?
Chris first wrote:
“The style of plagiarism, especially plagiarism by paraphrasing, is a pretty clear sign of intent and there are multiple examples […]”
Intent to what? Specifically, if not to suggest that he was a tree ring expert, then what? This is exactly what I was talking about.
Later Chris wrote:
“Not sure what you mean – that’s certainly not an “implicit claim” of mine and I obviously have no idea what was in his mind.”
It sure looks to me like your use of the word “intent” in the first quote is an implicit claim about what was in his mind, and specifically that he wanted to be seen as an expert in tree rings. What am I missing?
I attempted to do as you recommended and follow Andrew’s top link and then the link from there, but I am confused about the second link. Nothing goes to any examples other than the Said cluster or the Bradley sham. I did find where Andrew wrote “Wegman and Said have a long track record of plagiarism from Wikipedia and elsewhere.” But it’s all in the one paper that Deep Climate wrote about, right? And we now know that Wegman himself didn’t do it, right? I’ve been around the blog for a while and read many Wegman posts but am still waiting for examples beyond the Wegman/Said disaster. Everyone refers to “multiple examples,” may I see one that does not come from the Wegman/Said paper that proves that Wegman is a serial plagiarizer?
Matt:
You ask, “Have you read any of the material beyond skimming Deep Climate’s piece?”
I’ve never read Deep Climate’s piece? I don’t know what you’re referring to, but I guess it probably came up on the blog 15+ years ago when we were first discussing Weggy. Again, the dude put his name on multiple papers where material was copied without attribution from other sources. One of these was a hilariously botched copy of a wikipedia article. There’s no “counterarguments” to this. At the time I looked into the wikipedia material and it was pretty clear that it was not written by Weggy, and indeed it was written before he ever put his name to the copy, to which his only value added was negative, in two senses: (a) not acknowledging the source, and (b) adding an error. Nobody was holding a gun to his head telling him to copy this material and add an error. It would’ve been soooo easy for him to just write, “As Wikipedia says . . .”, and go from there. It was his choice not to do so. This has nothing to do with “Deep Climate” or anything else. Weggy made some bad decisions. I assume it’s the usual thing with copying-without-attribution: someone wants the credit but doesn’t want to put in the work, and the result is a pile of crap. I highly recommend that students, faculty, and everyone else give attribution when copying material. It really is the way to go. Thomas Basbøll and I even wrote an article about the topic: https://www.stat.columbia.edu/~gelman/research/published/GelmanBasbollAmericanScientist.pdf
If you want to have a political argument with “Deep Climate” or whatever, go for it! I don’t recommend you wasting your time defending someone who incompetently copies from Wikipedia. I’m not kidding when I say that Wegman doesn’t deserve your loyalty on this one.
Thanks Matt; I expect the “seminal” description of Bradley’s book relates to the fact that it is an expert compilation of the entirety of Paleoclimatology as it was known at the end of 20th century (I’m looking at the 1999 2nd edition). It’s a mammoth effort in 12 chapters across nearly 600 pages and its seminal nature might be appreciated by the fact that the two editions have been cited over 2500 times.
I’m not getting the problem with the issue about reproducing Figures that is the focus of the complaint in the first of your links. That’s pretty normal in books and reviews – that data figures are reused from their primary sources. That’s totally non-problematic so long as the sources are properly cited. They are. Bradley’s book has 308 figures (more or less; might have slightly mis-added) and in the Dendrochronology chapter there are 33 figures, eleven of which are from one of four of Fritts books/published papers.
Each of these is properly cited and linked to the correct reference. PP 595-599 is a list of copyright permissions for the data used from other sources including the figures from the work of Fritts, and you can be sure the publisher will have rules about properly assigning copyright in reused material.
I haven’t looked at the original sources and so haven’t checked that Figure legends are reused verbatim, but I’ll take it as read that they are. The sources of legends are properly cited along with the Figures so that seems OK to me to. One could go either way with this. In general I’m likely to write a new legend if the figure isn’t reproduced exactly as the original or obviously if it becomes part of a multi-panel figure.
The second link isn’t terribly convincing as an insinuation of plagiarism either. The first example (Bradley p 346/Fritts p 353) does look like a copy of two sentences) and might be worth following up.
The second example concerning “two quite distinct sentence and paragraph styles” isn’t problematic to me at all. In the first paragraph (no academic references) Bradley is making general statements (based on his expertise I expect) and refers to a figure. In the second paragraph he qualifies his general interpretation with some specific exceptions which he of course references. So a para without references followed by one with references isn’t at all sinister.
The third example wouldn’t be considered plagiarism either IMO. Bradley and Fritts are both describing and interpreting a figure. E.g. if Fitts says “The vertical line in Fig 7.13 indicate the 0.95 confidence intervals used to test variable significance” and Bradley says ”Note that the 95% confidence limits on these weights are small since they are based on only one variable.” That’s not plagiarism just because they each are describing a feature of a common figure.
Just to clarify the above: That’s right, I’ve never read “Deep Climate’s piece.” Indeed, I have no idea what it is. Or maybe I read it 15 years ago and forgot it. In any case, it’s not what I’ve been writing about.
These are the links to Andrew’s previous blog articles I was referring to
https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2011/09/19/another-wegman-plagiarism-copying-without-attribution-and-further-discussion-of-why-scientists-cheat/
https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2011/06/08/further_wegman/
https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2011/05/20/why_no_wegmania/
When I said “intent” I meant as opposed to “accident”. It does happen that students inadvertently forget to realize that they copied and pasted something and they might get away with this once with a warning (an “accident”).
On the other hand if a student copies something and then dicks around with it to add/change/remove words – reorder phrases and so on, then that’s a pretty strong indicator of “intent” – intent to pass something off as their own that isn’t actually their own work.
I think I found Chris’ second link, the one that goes to “Another Wegman Plagiarism” here:
https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2011/06/08/further_wegman/
Yeesh, what a mess! I’m going to go ahead and give John Mashey the benefit of the doubt and assume that at the time he wrote this stuff, he was fooled by Bradley into thinking that Bradley authored the material in question when it was instead copied from Fritts. But it changes everything.
In that post, Andrew wrote:
“If only Wegman et al. had just written that they had read Bradley’s report, then cited it, then explained why they disagreed. […] What Wegman was doing was worse, as he was actually manipulating Bradley’s words, but it has that same annoying indirect manner.”
But this is just nonsense that follows from Mashey being fooled. Wegman knew Bradley had copied Fritts, but BRADLEY had made his own changes to the original. One thing Bradley did was omit the mention of carbon dioxide as a variable that can affect tree ring growth (tree growth rate increases with CO2 concentration). So Wegman put it back in – it’s not a scientific dispute – and made some other changes to better reflect the original text, not Bradley’s interpretation. Yet Wegman’s critics ridiculed him for not even being able to plagiarize properly, and that ridicule continues on this blog to this very day.
Now that you know what actually happened, I invite readers to go back and read the post I linked to at the top of this comment and form your own opinion.
Meanwhile, I’m still looking for that second example of plagiarism beyond the Wegman/Said paper.
Think we’re done with this topic now (I hope!). The bottom line is that it was Wegman who was sanctioned by his University for unprofessional practices, had a letter of reprimand put on his file and had a paper retracted as a result of copying other’s work without proper attribution.
The efforts in that blog you linked to, to pretend that it was Dr. Bradley who plagiarised are pretty desperate; I’d be wary of engaging sources that choose preferred outcomes and then attempt to “construct” evidence in support (incidentally, the approach that Dr. Wegman seems to have taken in his “assessment” of paleotemperature reconstructions).
IMHO from about the time of the paleoproxy report episode and including this, Wegman and Said rather shot themselves/each other in the foot by choosing to engage with topics on which they had little expertise (perusal of their papers in GoogleScholar) “This week we’re experts in identification of glasses in forensic science; this week we’re experts in color theory and design; this week we’re experts in global warming science; this week we’re experts in social network analysis” etc., and so they were really forced to rely on other’s work to fill in the background on the topic they’d chosen to publish on, which turned out to have been a problem for them (tho it needn’t have been).
If I might be allowed one more (which is actually both funny and disturbing – people’s careers were being messed with), this gives some insight into Dr. Wegman’s approach to scientific professionalism at the time.
Anyway, the Wegman Report (WR) seems to have been set up as a “beauty contest” between Mann’s 1999 paleoproxy analysis (Boo!) and the criticizing “MM” analysis (Yeah!), and this was achieved in part by ignoring Dr. Mann’s research on paleoproxies subsequent to his 1999 paper; since MM had been chosen the winner from the outset (its warts not even superficially examined by Wegman) the result of the beauty contest wasn’t in doubt.
Some idea of the rigour with which Wegman addressed Mann’s post-1999 work can be gleaned from this exchange between Senator Stupak and Dr. Wegman at the Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations of the Committee on Energy and Commerce House of Representatives in 2006:
MR. STUPAK. Okay. Let me ask you this question. Have you reviewed any of Mr. Mann’s later refinements of his 1999 report?
DR. WEGMAN. I have reviewed some level of detail, not in intense level of detail, the continuing papers, most of which are referenced–in fact, the ones that are referenced–
MR. STUPAK. Did he refine his data and his methodology?
DR. WEGMAN. My take on the situation is that rather than accept the criticism that was leveled, he rallied the wagons around and tried to defend this incorrect methodology.
MR. STUPAK. But did he refine his methods in later studies that he conducted, not whether he rallied the troops? Did he refine his methods? Was his job more accurate as he went on with later reports?
DR. WEGMAN. I believe that he does not acknowledge his fundamental mistake and that he has developed additional papers with himself and his colleagues that try and defend the original hockey stick shape.
MR. STUPAK. Do you know that or are you just guessing?
DR. WEGMAN. I am guessing that.
MR. STUPAK. Okay. Statisticians, should they guess or should they have facts to–
DR. WEGMAN. That is called statistical estimation, yes.
MR. STUPAK. I see. Or a cartoon.
I already conceded that Wegman’s reprimand for the social science debacle was deserved. It was a string of really dumb decisions mixed with incompetence. Not sure why every response needs to bring it up again when the only issue being argued is the role of Bradley in Wegman’s climate critique.
The GMU investigation committee came armed with a raft of fabricated accusations from Bradley and his supporters. When Wegman was given his first chance to talk, he talked about Fritts. He described the entire process of choosing material and how he cited it, with full documentation including e-mails to and from the grad students. He also showed messages advising him to avoid in-line citations in the background section of the Congressional Report. He explained how he was simply giving background on how Mann developed a climate graph from tree rings, and that it was tangential to his critique. One of the grad students found out that Bradley copied Fritts. Wegman then showed the original Fritts material, the material Bradley copied from Fritts with edits, and his own material side-by-side. He showed how he reverted to the original in places. He showed the general attribution to Fritts, nice and proper. Game over. He won in a rout.
I see now how messages from John Mashey led to Andrew’s opinions about Wegman. And yet, Mashey was completely wrong about the role played by Bradley, leading Andrew to mistakenly believe that Wegman should have engaged Bradley about material authored by Fritts.
Ah yes.. the creepy “blame the student excuse”. Wegman as corresponding author has responsibility for ensuring that his paper conforms to acceptable practices.
.
15 minutes of Googling finds the following:
If one reads the letter written by George Mason Provost Peter Stearns to the University faculty it’s quite clear that their investigations did find plagiarism in the 2008 article (with Said):
Stearns writes in his letter: “Concerning the Computational Statistics article, the relevant committee did find that plagiarism occurred in contextual sections of the article, as a result of poor judgment for which Professor Wegman, as team leader, must bear responsibility. This also was a unanimous finding. As sanction, Professor Wegman has been asked to apologize to the journal involved, while retracting the article; and I am placing an official letter of reprimand in his file.”
Peter Stearns letter to faculty can be found on the RetractionWatch site:
https://retractionwatch.files.wordpress.com/2012/02/stearnslettermashey.pdf
“…wanted to use a statement…” yeah, right! In fact the degree of plagiarism – direct and patchwork and some rather heroic paraphrasing can be seen in a side by side comparison (link below) of Wegman’s text and Bradley’s which he plagiarised. Interested readers can look at this here. In my University that level of plagiarism would have serious consequences for a student.
Note btw that the paraphrasing as an attempt to hide copying is particularly revealing of a knowing level of deceit.
https://deepclimate.files.wordpress.com/2009/12/wegman-bradley-tree-rings.pdf
1) The plagiarism and numerous other problems of the Wegman Report (WR) are dissected in great detail in:
Strange Scholarship in the Wegman Report (250p), which triggered articles by Dan Vergano in USA today, etc:
https://www.desmog.com/wp-content/uploads/files/STRANGE.SCHOLARSHIP.V1.02.pdf
About 1/3 of the WR pages included plagiarism, as detailed in side-by-side comparisons, either here, or in various cited blog posts by Deep Climate. See SSWR pp.47-48 for an overall chart of the various plagiarisms.
Wikipedia: WR p.16 copied some texts on noise & ARMA (this must have been done by Said, Wegman surely knew it).
Wikipedia: WR p.17 had intro on social network analysis (SNA) , but most of the SNA section pp17-22 was contributed by Denise Reeves, but copied (with errors) from two well-known SNA textbooks [WAS1994, DEN2005].
SSWR pp.143-159 goes through the flows from those textbooks, through the WR, Said, Wegman, Sharabati, Rigsby (2008) (CSDA paper that got retracted). They basically treated text as community property.
Wegman claimed he thought that was Reeves’ original work, and it got reused in the CSDA paper that was retracted in 2011, but she was not credited, so even if had been her original work, the CSDA paper would have plagiarized her.
This has some more explanation of what happened, after the CSDA paper was retracted:
Strange Tales and Emails: Said, Wegman, Sharabati, Rigsby (2008)
https://www.desmog.com/wp-content/uploads/files/strange%20tales%20v%201%2001.pdf
Back to WR, which didn’t just have plagiarism, but egregious falsification.
WR pp.13-14 on tree rings are mostly taken from Bradley(1999) (whose title they misspell in reference), but the book is only cited at the end, in such a way you’d never guess most of the preceding text was plagiarized:”See Bradley (1999) for a discussion of the fitting and calibration process for dendritic-based temperature reconstruction”
There was also falsification (i.e., academic/journalistic fraud), as per short (12p)
Strange Falsifications in the Wegman Report
https://www.desmog.com/wp-content/uploads/files/strange%20falsifications%20V1%200.pdf
If unfamiliar with general rules about error->misconduct->fraud, see p.1:
Two of the most egregious are F10 and F11 on SFWR p.8.
One of the most *eminent* paleoclimate scientists wrote that it was possible to extract climate data from tree rings, and explains the gory details of challenges and how they are dealt with…
novices *directly invert* Bradley’s key conclusions to claim tree rings are unusable … amidst text they adapted from Bradley.
BTW, I asked Ray once how they missed all this, and he said he’d only glanced at the introductory material, and the right sorts of words were there, and quickly went on to the statistical discussions.
Nobody really looked hard at the paleo intro text until Deep Climate did.
GMU handled Bradley’s (and others’) complaints about as badly as possible, among other things stimulating an unusual, ferocious critque in a Nature editorial.
Provost Stearns even lied about having two committees (to try to explain how GMU had to admit to plagiarism in CSDA paper already retracted, but not for the same text in WR. (We know from FOIA). pp.35-36 has Stearns’ entire letter, dissected. He sent a letter to GMU faculty … but not to any of the complainants…
For discussion of that whole mess, see:
See See No Evil, Speak Little Truth, Break Rules, Blame Others
https://www.desmog.com/2012/08/20/see-no-evil-speak-little-truth-break-rules-blame-others/
and the referenced 69p PDF:
https://www.desmog.com/wp-content/uploads/files/see.no_.evil_.speak_.little.truth_.pdf
Of course, the Wikipedia plagiarism that Andrew was referencing wasn’t in the WR or CSDA, but in Wiley WIRES:CS journal of which Wegman, Said (and Scott) were Co-Editors-in-Chief. After Deep Climate’s initial discoveries, others found more, we complained to Wiley … which let them quietly rewrite without acknowledgement of fault.
More complaints were made, all the way to the Board, and eventually Wegman & Said just disappeared from the masthead in 2012.
Wegman and Said had claimed the WR was pro bono, but the CSDA paper had cited Federal grants that had nothing to do with climate or SNA, so I checked bios and sent FOIAs to granting agencies… which takes a while, and in fact, they’d claimed the WR for credit (and in fact, many other activities unconnected with the grants, which seemed to be treated as slush funds). Wegman also had proposed a grant in 2009, but it was rejected, LUCKILY, as it had pervasive plagiarism.
(Normally, accepted grant proposals are public, rejected ones are not … but in response to a 2010 FOIA by Dan Vergano for other material, Wegman had sent all the correspondence for this proposal. I say luckily, as
I sent the full report to GMU (and Federal agencies) in 2013, but wrote a serious of 4 blog posts, starting here (with links to the other 3):
https://www.desmog.com/2013/05/20/foia-facts-1-more-misdeeds/
GMU never told me anything, but I learned later this caused trouble for Wegman, probably because allegations of Federal grant misuse are taken more seriously than mere academic fraud.
I didn’t post the full report then, but after Wegman and Said sued me for $2M in 2015, more information emerged, and I updated the 170p report and published it:
FOIA Facts: Ed Wegman, Yasmin Said, George Mason University
https://www.desmog.com/wp-content/uploads/files/FOIA.Facts_.pdf
Appendix B, pp.26-34 discussed grant rules, grant fraud and contracts.
p.29 shows an NSF document, which says: “Plagiarism…if you accept an award based on a proposal that includes plagiarism, you may have committed a felony.” That’s why I said LUCKILY above. In any case, as documented in excruciating detail, I alleged Wegman & Said used funds in ways that violated the rules.
The 2015 lawsuit was described in this post with linked PDF:
https://www.desmog.com/2015/05/19/ed-wegman-yasmin-said-milt-johns-sue-john-mashey-2-million/
This was an incompetent, bogus lawsuit in the wrong venue (local VA court next to GMU). My lawyers thought it was one of the dumber filings they’d ever seen, got it removed to Federal court, and they voluntarily withdrew a few days before the first hearing. Amusingly, their lawyer, Milt Johns, had been a law partner of Ken Cuccinelli (if unfamiliar, look him up).
To this day, I do not *know* why Wegman, once a credible academic, leapt into an unfamiliar area (with the WR), and then repeated engaged in acts of well-documented misconduct, although the FOIA Facts PDF p.81 has a possible hint in Wegman’s 2005 talk for John Chambers’ Bell Labs Retirement, in which Wegman lamented drying up of usual funding sources. A few months later is when he committed to do the WR.
John,
In partial answer to the question in your last paragraph, “why Wegman, once a credible academic, leapt into an unfamiliar area . . . then repeated engaged in acts of well-documented misconduct”: It’s my impression that Wegman never did interesting original research, that his entire career was a sort of chatbot exercise where he wrote articles regurgitating things he’d read and heard from other sources. So, in that sense, repeatedly copying without attribution was not such a leap.
Interesting perspectuve, and of course you’d have expertise I don’t.
My comment was based on inferences from facts I could see, plus private communications from some good statisticians who had respected Wegman and had even been friends, but thought something went wrong between 2000-2005.
On facts:
You might take a quick look starting at p.50:
https://www.desmog.com/wp-content/uploads/files/FOIA.Facts_.pdf#page=50
I analyzed Wegman’s 2010 C.V. https://web.archive.org/web/20100609135746/http:/www.galaxy.gmu.edu/stats/faculty/wegman.resume2.pdf
a) He had a decent record getting grants (and yes, I know, getting grants & doing good original work are not necessarily the same :-)).
b) p.58- analyzed his publications, especially from the relevant 2000- period.
The P### codes match the ### in his C.V. pp.14- 23. Most of the papers were on topics where I couldn’t assess the originality of quality.
c) The chart on p.2 shows Wegman-claimed works for one Army grant, somewhat similar to those he’d successfully gotten earlier. Dark blue are papers that fit, lighter blue talks that fit (above the white bar).
Below the bar are miscellaneous (orange), alocholism (green) and climate (red). Basically, the kind of work he’d been doing (dark blue) started evaporating in 2005 in favor of other things.
d) In SSWR pp.73-75 I’d done a quick coauthorship analysis, starting by listing his PhD students, then listing all the papers. https://www.desmog.com/wp-content/uploads/files/STRANGE.SCHOLARSHIP.V1.02.pdf#page=73
In early decades, he seemed to coauthor with a wide variety of people, but 2005-2010, it seemed he was mostly working with students, especially Said.
e) SSWR p.79, IFNA sometimes seemed a bit GMU-centric, but I know a few of the people who participated who I think are pretty good. Of course, the 2010 IFNA went completely off the rails, with Don Easterbrook, Jeff Kueter, Fred Singer (plus Said opining on Climategate). As I wrote, p.76:
“These conferences seem worthy and interesting interdisciplinary efforts. I might have attended during the 1990s when working at Silicon Graphics, a 1997 sponsor.”
Anyway, you may well be right that his earlier work wasn’t particularly innovative, I didn’t look at that much, and wouldn’t know, although some papers seemed to be well-cited, but clearly, 2005-onward was downhill, with some papers clearly weak or problemmatic.
What plagiarism did he do prior to the paper discussed above?
For multi-author papers, it is hard to know who did the actual plagiarizing unless the author(s) admit to it, but the lead and/orsenior author always bears some responsiblity (rather than trying to wish it away).
See pp.26-32 for some more examples, including the earliest one I know off, a 1996 tech report by Wegman, et al, that seemed to re-use 2 paragraphs from a 1995 GMU CMPSC PhD dissertation in which Wegman was uninvolved, by author unmentioned.
p.26 introduces the case, p.27 shows the side-by-side, in our usual style, blue for identical word-for-word in-order, yellow for tirival changes.
https://www.desmog.com/wp-content/uploads/files/see.no_.evil_.speak_.little.truth_.pdf
Now this is vanilla introductory material, not original research, so it may have originated in some earlier antecedent.
As noted there, similar text showed up in Wegman’s student al-Shameri’s dissertation and his later patent.
As well-documented, there seemed to be a behavior pattern of (someone) doing copy-paste-edit, and then the resultign texct getting reused in later papers/dissertations.
Interesting to learn that you were sued – just like the recent (and ongoing) Gino episode. Gino used different lawyers and has sued for $25 million. I can’t speak to whether it is a frivolous lawsuit, but at least she asked for more money (even adjusted for inflation). I guess “methodological terrorists” are becoming fair game – I’d better learn to be quiet, just like keeping road rage to myself out of fear of retaliation.
Of course, documenting and reporting clear plagiarism of the most provable kind, i.e., copy-paste-edit of substantial text, possibly with changes to eliminate unwanted conclsusions, is hardly “methodological terrorism.”
Here’s another example, in this case of a certain Supreme Court Justice’s dissertation * book:
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/gorsuch-2004-2006-from-kuzma1984-classic-copy_b_58ec4669e4b0145a227cb7f9
As usual, blue = word-for-word, in-order, yellow = trivial edits, but here pink = deletions of text from a fairly neutral antecedent to remove anything sympathetic to a couple facing a difficult choice.