Short links

Here are some diverse and interesting links from the world of academic misconduct:

• Research misconduct in Australia: The article in Mark Israel's Blog "The Conversation" lists a number of cases of research misconduct that have been made public in Australia, including a recent one at the University of Queensland.
  "Bruce Murdoch and Caroline Barwood resigned from the University of Queensland in 2013 after a whistleblower claimed that they had not undertaken an experiment on Parkinson’s, despite reporting results in various journals. [...] The university failed to find any evidence that the experiment had been conducted. Instead, it discovered duplicate publication, statistical error and misattribution of authorship."
• The new president of the German "Federation of Expellees" organization, (Bund der Vertriebenen), Bernd Fabritius, is originally from Romania (he belongs to the German minority there) and did his doctorate in Hermannstadt/Sibiu and in Tübingen. A fascinating 54-page documentation of text parallels and other problems with this thesis was published recently online.
  
  
  The text was photographed using pens to mark the text and then boxes and explaining text were added to the pictures. A discussion of the documentation (in German) can be found in the Blog Erbloggtes.
• The Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences in Germany considered awarding former Minister of Education Annette Schavan (who was found to have plagiarized in her dissertation) the Leibniz medal which is given in honor of outstanding service for the promotion of the goals of the Academy („zur Ehrung besonderer Verdienste um die Förderung der Aufgaben der Akademie“). Apparently, though, there was no unanimous vote, and the discussion leaked its way into the newspapers. There is also more biting commentary on the research group "Zitat und Paraphrase" (quotation and paraphrase) in the Causa Schavan blog ([1] - [2], in German)
• Dr. med. plagiat: The German newspaper Handelsblatt has an extensive report on the plagiarism scandal in medicine at the University of Freiburg, the University of Münster and the Charité. 
• There is a call for papers out (abstract submission deadline: November 16, 2014) for an international conference on plagiarism at the Mendel University in Brno, Czech Republic 10 - 12 June 2015 "PLAGIARISM ACROSS EUROPE AND BEYOND" (http://plagiarism.cz/ Disclosure: I am on the program committee).
  
• I found an IFQ report (in German) from 2006 on the history of doctorates in Germany with some interesting statistics on the prevalence of doctorates in various fields.
• It seems that Elsevier has been charging 30$ for copies of book chapters that consist only of one page containing the wording "This page intentionally left blank". A tongue-in-cheek systematic review has been published, and indeed, if one googles "This page is intentionally left blank" together with "site:http://www.sciencedirect.com" there are 55 hits across a wide spectrum of fields. Apparently, the automatic publishing system has trouble with blank pages, or else the blank pages were not caught during the rigorous peer review.
• Widely off topic: There is even a Lego figurine for a university graduate in a cap & gown.

Nature wins libel trial

Nature won a long-running libel suit in July brought against them in England by Mohamed El Naschie on account of the following article (which is now back online) by Quirin Schiermeier : Self-publishing editor set to retire: Criticism grows over high number of self-penned articles in physics journal. (Published online 26 November 2008 in Nature 456, 432 (2008) | doi:10.1038/456432a)

Nature has both published a report on the outcome of the suit and an article by the author of the original article describing the process. The main focus of the 2008 article had been about how El Naschie had been self-publishing in an Elsevier journal (Chaos, Solitons and Fractals), of which he was editor-in-chief, at a very unusual rate, and that he was retiring from this position. Schiermeier was looking into how exactly this enormous publishing output was happening.

Schiermeier was also curious to know more about this person, as there were a number of blogs that were criticizing him, for example the El-Naschie Watch, but that were being threatened with litigation. Threats of legal action in science are often in inverse proportion to the scientific value of the contested results.  Schiermeier notes:

Still, unlike other science journalists, such as Simon Singh, who had previously had to go through the libel ordeal on their own, I was in the comparatively comfortable situation that my employers had the resources, the stamina and the willpower to take the case on.

Síle Lane, a campaigns manager at Sense About Science in London, is reported by Nature as noting that "[i]ndividuals who lack the financial support of an institution capable of defending against a libel action will probably look at the amount of time and money it took to defend this case and decide that they shouldn’t speak out."

The judgement ([2012] EWHC 1809 (QB)) is available online at Nature and its 91 pages make a fascinating read. I think it should be required reading for anyone dealing with the scientific publishing process, peer review, impact factors, or junk journals and vanity publishing.

The Honorable Mrs. Justice Sharp, DBE, the judge for this suit, should have been made DBE for her thorough analysis of the situation, but she already is. She looked at the norms of scientific publishing, the peer review system, an the problem of journal self-citation by calling on expert witnesses.

In paragraph 90 we see that El Naschie published 58 papers in 2008 (the year he was being forced to step down as editor). That would be more than one paper a week, and the next most frequent published author at the journal that year had only 9 publications. The next paragraphs contain some fascinating statistics comparing the publication record of other editors-in-chief of top-rate journals. 

In paragraph 114 in response to El Naschie's statement that no peer group existed for assessing his theories, so his only recourse was to self-publish, Sharp states: "We are not living in the age of Galileo. Scientists or those with a keen interest in science as informed amateurs are free to publish and thus disseminate their ideas to the outside world: and in the age of the internet, there are many platforms by which they can do so."

Paragraph 120 details the expert witness of Professor Neil Turok, professor for applied mathematics and theoretical physics. His gruesome task was to actually read and analyze all 58 papers published by El Naschie in 2008 in the journal in question. What an enormous amount of effort!

120.
Through Professor Turok, it is said by the Defendants that on analysis, the 58 papers or articles contained the following defects:
i) A failure to define terminology and concepts, including in particular a failure to present the principles and equations of “E-infinity theory” and the predictions which are said to be deduced from it;
ii) Strongly expressed conclusions, unsupported by any, or any intelligible process of logical reasoning; in particular, the repeated unexplained reliance on numerical coincidences in support of the assertion that the Claimant’s “E-infinity theory” is correct;
iii) Statements which are meaningless or obscure, even to a readers with expertise in the field of theoretical physics;
iv) Statements which are simply wrong;
v) Elementary errors of spelling and grammar;
vi) A lack of any, or any substantial, contribution of new knowledge to the field;
vii) An excessive degree of citation of other articles written or co-written by the Claimant, in particular in order to justify assertions which should have been
supported by self-contained argument or references to the work of independent authors (the articles published by the Claimant in CSF in 2008 contained approximately 301 citations of his own articles in CSF, including citations of “in press” articles: i.e. those articles which were due to be, but which had not at the material time, been formally published);
viii) The use of those articles to advertise other articles by the Claimant.

The judgement then goes on to examine each and every one of these defects. In paragraph 122 already Sharp notes: "But to paraphrase Samuel Johnson, you do not have to be a carpenter to see when the legs of a table are uneven, or even to see that it has no legs at all." On questioning about peer review, Turok states in paragraph 169: "Peer review is essentially what separates theoretical physics from chaos."

It goes on, paragraph after paragraph detailing the bizarreness of the case. This includes the witness Anke Boehm who worked for El Naschie insisting that it was not the policy of the journal to keep reviews and papers once they had been published (paragraph 182) and then speaking of "deleting" the reviews when El Naschie insisted that everything was only done on paper and the he does not use email.  Paragraph 290 notes that El Naschie admitted that some of the people who were speaking for him or working at the journal just did not exist.

The judgment also includes material from Elsevier that makes it clear that even they found the journal problematic (paragraph 228). An internal review of the journal is quoted as stating “Although the journal has a growing impact factor, we are concerned that this is too dependent upon self-citation […] The journal appears to have a high acceptance rate with many accepted papers coming from China." I don't normally praise Elsevier, but I am glad to see that they took the initiative here in terminating the editorship of El Naschie.

I wish to thank Nature for standing up for the name of science reporting and against junk journals! It cost them much time and money, I do hope that they can get the money for the lawyers back from El Naschie, which will probably not be an easy task.

Elsevier Published Ghostwritten Papers

The New York Times reports that the publisher Elsevier (I have previously blogged about them publishing fake journals for pharmaceutical compnaies) published some of 26 scientific papers that the pharmaceutical company Wyeth paid ghostwriters to write about some of their products. The ghostwriters come from so-called "medical writing companies".

This has come to light from legal research involved in more than 8000 lawsuits directed at Wyeth.

The article in the NYT demonstrates the exact ghostwriting process for one of the papers, and names the unethical professor supposedly having written the paper. She insists that she contributed to the paper by phone and not just by the email messages that have been secured, and that the paper reflects her views on the topic.

Where do we draw the line, and how do we prevent this from happening? The paper is surely on her CV.

Fake Journals

Now we not only have fake conferences and invented publications. If you have enough money (as pharmaceutical companies do), you can just purchase your own fancy-schmancy, scientific-sounding journal from a reputable publisher. Or shall we say, previously reputable. Now that six of their thousands of journals have been identified as fakes, maybe we should just assume that the rest are also problematic and proceed to take our papers to Open Access journals.

But let's start at the top. Many blogs (such as bioethics.net) and The Scientist reported that pharmaceutical company Merck was behind the "Australasian Journal of Bone and Joint Medicine". It looked like a real journal. It had real-looking articles in it, although they were reprints or summaries of other journal's research, all strangely enough favorable about Merck products. Summer Johnson on the bioethics blog points out the problem with this:

What’s wrong with this is so obvious it doesn’t have to be argued for. What’s sad is that I’m sure many a primary care physician was given literature from Merck that said, “As published in Australasian Journal of Bone and Joint Medicine, Fosamax outperforms all other medications….” Said doctor, or even the average researcher wouldn’t know that the journal is bogus. In fact, knowing that the journal is published by Elsevier gives it credibility!

Right. Elsevier used to be a respected name in scientific publishing. The Guardian quotes a spokesman as saying that the publisher does not consider this a journal, as it is a compilation of reprinted articles. Then why does it have the word "Journal" in its title?

Laika's MedLibLog goes on to explain how some of the articles that were reprinted got themselves published in the first place: the company sponsors the research, and then employees of the company offer manuscripts to the academic investigators, who put their name on the paper (and sometimes forget the footnote explaining who paid for the research). So we have a "journal" with reprints of ghostwritten articles.

The Scientist has now found 6 similar journals:

• the Australasian Journal of General Practice
• the Australasian Journal of Neurology
• the Australasian Journal of Cardiology
• the Australasian Journal of Clinical Pharmacy
• the Australasian Journal of Cardiovascular Medicine, and
  
• the Australasian Journal of Bone & Joint Medicine.
  

Elsevier would not tell The Scientist the names of the companies sponsoring these titles.

Yes, the mother company regrets what its Australia division has been up to. And the people responsible apparently don't work there any more.

But how can we know for sure that the next Elsevier journal that we hold in our hands is legit? That it declares all of its interests and who paid for and wrote the research?

Can we now declare the peer-review system for journal articles officially broken? Can we also quit counting number of articles and impact factors and just have people submit the 3 of 5 most important papers they have written when they are evaluated?

Oh, the Elsevier statement is linked from their home page....