WCRI 2019 - Day 1b

Day 0 - Day 1a - Day 1b - Day 2 - Day 3

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Quite refreshed from a long night's sleep and reluctant to venture out into the rain, here's the rest of Day 1 of the WCRI conference 2019!

Session: Principles and Codes 2

Daniel Barr, RMIT University, Melbourne
"Research integrity around the Pacific rim: developing the APEC guiding principles for research integrity"

They looked at integrity systems across the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) area and collated a close consensus of guidelines:

• Research integrity systems appear diverse, multi-faceted and dynamic
• Principlies-based policies appear common, but are not uniform
• Limited coordination of institutions with some exceptions
• Varied roles in leading or influencing research integrity systems

They did a survey with 499 responses, but 85 % of the respondents were from Mexico, so they had to split their analysis on Mexico and not-Mexico. They also conducted a workshop with various participants. In honor of the memory of Paul Taylor they have developed the Draft APEC Taylor Guiding Principles for Research Integrity that are a top priority for avoiding breaches.

Honesty, Responsibility, Rigour, Transparency, Respect, Fairness, & Diversity

The topic of Diversity was a principle that came out of the workshop.

Natalie Evans was supposed to speak about "Research integrity and research ethics experiences: a comparative study of Croatia, the Netherlands, and Spain" but there was some planning mix-up so Jillian Barr took over and spoke about research integrity in Australia, which was a shame for me, because that is what she talked about at the pre-conference workshop.

Dr. Sonja Ochsenfeld-Repp has been Deputy Head of Division Quality and Programme Management, German Research Foundation, since 2016. She spoke about the new Draft Code of Conduct "Guidelines for safeguarding good scientific practice". The old white paper was first published in 1998 [as a reaction to a very large academic misconduct scandal, this was not mentioned], a revision is underway since 2017. 

I asked about how many researchers in Germany actually know about and understand these guidelines, she assured me that everyone does. My own experience shows that this is not the case, there are quite a number of university heads who are unaware of the procedures and guidelines set out, even if it is published on their own web pages. 

I spoke with another researcher afterwards who conducted an actual study investigating how many people did, indeed, know about and understand the guidelines. The results appear to be sobering, I'll see if I can get a hold of concrete results.

Sergey Konovalov, Russian Science Foundation, Moscow

Research ethics in Russia: challenges for the Russian Science Foundation

RSF has existed for 5 years now, but has less than 10% of the federal budget allocated for science. They audit the accounting of the grants: Business class instead of coach, fancy furniture for the bosses' cabin. They don't touch the scientific part, only if the expenses are related to the research.

I asked about Dissernet and if that shows that they need to look beyond the economics to the science itself. He says that they have zero tolerance for plagiarism, but the researchers are themselves responsible for the scientific correctness of what they research. I'm afraid that he doesn't understand my question.

Update 2019-06-18: Sergey writes: "Regrettably, I did not manage to answer your question about Dissernet and if that shows that we need to look beyond the economics to the science itself. Frankly speaking, Dissernet has nothing to do with the Russian Science Foundation activities as they check the the thesises and dissertations and we deal with the project proposals, which is somewhat different. 

Maybe, you missed the point that we do check not only financial part of the projects but also the scientific part (not by RSF staff but it is done by our expert council members), which is equally important to us.

We do not have much of plagiarism concerns but we strictly check the scientific acknowledgements (funding source should be properly indicated in the RSF-funded publications) and duplication of proposal contens submitted to RSF and other funding agencies [...]; these two scientific issues are in our view one of the most common examples of unethical behaviour of researchers in Russia. At least, in our experience (again, our programs cover only 10% of researchers and 15% of research organisations in Russia)."
Session: Predators

I am quite interested in the entire predatory publisher phenomenon, so I decided to attend this session, although there were at least two others in parallel with interesting talks. One was on Dissernet, the Russian plagiarism documenting group (but I know about them already) and the other one was a symposium on "Misdirected allegations of breaches of research integrity" with Ivan Oransky from RetractionWatch.

First up was Rick Anderson from the University of Utah, Salt Lake City with "Predators at the gates: citations to predatory journals in mainstream scientific literature". He identified some predatory journals that had published nonsense in sting operations and then took some papers from each of these journals. He then looked at citations to these papers in the Web of Science, ScienceDirect and PLOS. Yes, there were citations to some of these. I was a bit concerned that he didn't look at the papers themselves to see if they made sense, as misguided individuals will publish good science in bad places. 

Next was Donna Romyn, Athabasca University, St Albert, Canada (a virtual university) on "Confronting predatory publishers and conference organizers: a firsthand account".

She decided to attend a supposed predatory conference on purpose and to chart her journey. She submitted an abstract "At risk of being lured by a predatory publisher? Not me!". The paper was accepted within 24 hours, so there must have been rigorous peer-review done.... There was a bit of back and forth about her giving a keynote, she ended up with the exact same abstract but using a different title, "Safeguarding evidence-informed nursing practice from predatory publishers." She attended the conference and found about 60 people in attendance, many unaware of the nature of the conference. During the discussion the site thinkchecksubmit.org came up, it has a good checklist on what to look at before submitting a paper.

Miriam Urlings from Maastricht University, Maastricht, looked at "Selective citation in biomedical sciences: an overview of six research fields". She did a citation network analysis for papers in six focused research fields with around 100 relevant potential citations in order to see if there is citation bias. There were, however, only 1-2 citations for many of the publications and then highly cited ones in each area, so the results were not conclusive.

Eric Fong, University of Alabama, Huntsville (with Allen W. Wilhite) spoke on "The monetary returns of adding false investigators to grant proposals". He developed an interesting economic model for looking to see if adding false investigators (FI) to grant proposals increases the monetary value of total grants over a 5-year period. Then emailed 113.000 potential respondents and had a 9.5 % response rate. Their conclusion: if you add FI to your grants, you apply for more grants, but that does not lead to larger funding per grant application. However, adding FI significantly increases cumulative total grant dollars over a five-year period. 

Vivienne C. Bachelet, Universidad de Santiago de Chile (USACH), Santiago, spoke about the interesting problem of academics putting institutional affiliations on their bylines without actually being employed at the institution. "Author misrepresentation of institutional affiliations: exploratory cross-sectional case study on secondary individual data".

They focused on researchers giving a Chilean university as an affiliation for the year 2016 and tried to verify if the person was actually affiliated with the university. For around 40 % of the authors, it was not possible to verify their connection to the university. This private investigation, done with no funding, was commenced after it became known that one university in Chile was paying prolific, Spanish-speaking researchers, to add an affiliation with their university, presumably to increase some metric the university is measured by.

After this I attended the COPE reception. There was a lot of very good discussion there, and some publishers I had mentioned in my talk were very interested to hear more about my cases.

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A colleage (who wishes to remain unnamed) reported from a parallel session, here's her take on those presentations (edited to fit my format and fix typos):

Session: Prevention 1

Michael Kalichman, UC San Diego, San Diego
Research misconduct: disease or symptom?

He surveyed RIOs on their perceptions of cases, and got some data that research misconduct occurs in cases deficient in Good Research Practices (i.e. maybe what these courses really need to teach is record keeping).

He listed out 10 GPR or lackings and from ~30 RIOs (out of 60 emailed) what practices were in place in cases they had personally investigated. It’s to be expected, but very good talk.

Michael Reisig, Arizona State University, Phoenix
"The perceived prevalence, cause, and prevention of research misconduct: results from a survey of faculty at America’s top 100 universities."

He has a forensic background and corresponded with about 630 respondents about prevalence, causes, and prevention of research misconduct, and found ~50% people surveyed were very much in favor of formal sanctions to prevent future misconduct. 29 percent said that nothing works, and "30%” wanted an integrated approach. QRP pretty common. But the slides went too fast for numbers.

Sudarat Luepongpattana, National Science and Technology Development Agency, Thailand, Bangkok
"Research quality development of the Thailand National Science and Technology Development Agency"

Yet another survey, and found that researchers don’t really know that authorship entails.

Ignacio Baleztena, European Commission, Brussels
"National practices in research integrity in EU member states & associated countries"

I left during this. My understanding was that representatives from 14 countries were going to have meetings, and then more meetings, and then follow a flow chart of meeting and then produce a definition of research integrity. I was getting seriously jetlagged, but that’s the memory. I just don’t understand why we need YET ANOTHER document. Are there any rules of thumb for when these are useful? [This is an excellent observation. Everyone is producing their own documents (sometimes by gently plagiarizing other institutions documents) on academic integrity. But how do we breathe life into them, change the culture? --dww]

[She missed the last talk and went to another session. She caught the tail end of a survey on Finnish atttitudes toward QRP, who said that it was hard to find a definition of research integrity]

Session: Attitudes 3

De-Ming Chau, Universiti Putra Malaysia/Young Scientists Network-Academy of Sciences, Malaysia, Serdang
"Effectiveness of active learning-based responsible conduct of research workshop in improving knowledge, attitude and behaviour among Malaysian researcher"

He did a survey (small sample size) and found that researchers with more experience say they are more likely to “do nothing” if a colleague is engaging in research misconduct

He’s pretty impressive; an NAS grant got him started designing RCR in Malaysia, and the programs are being designed by early career researchers

End of Semester Roundup

Here are some links about plagiarism and academic misconduct from around the world that have been languishing in my inbox:

• A professor for African-American History at the Arizona State University in the US has been demoted from full professor to associate professor, according to the Phoenix New Times, after a second plagiarism scandal about his writing erupted. A  blog contains many more details about the plagiarism allegations. Retractionwatch also has an article about this case. The professor is said to have used, among others, sources many students find useful: Wikipedia.
• Writing in a blog at the Daily Pakistan Asif A. Malik points out a wonderful piece by physics professor Pervez Hoodbhoy from the Express Tribune from January 4, 2013. Hoodbhoy starts off with a thought experiment: "Imagine the following experiment aimed at improving Karachi’s police force: suppose that policemen are offered cash prizes for every criminal they kill in a police muqabala, given public recognition and told that promotions to higher posts hinge on their kill count." He spins the story out that, of course, the police would start shooting at anyone, just to increase their pay. That is, in essence, what is happening in academia, except that instead of a "kill count" there are the magic indicators "number of publications" and "citation index". Since 2002-2003 both the pay and promotion for professors in Pakistan depend on the number of papers published and the number of PhD and MSc students graduated. Surprise! These all increased!
  In 2012 Hoodbhoy wrote about the problem of telling the good from the bad, in the Express Tribune column in 2013 he noted that the apparent increase in quality proudly proclaimed by the Higher Education Council (HEC) "was only possible because many university teachers engaged in wholesale plagiarism, faked data and produced research that no one seems to have any use for. As academic ethics went into free fall, university administrators and the HEC turned a blind eye. The new policy — which required learning how to play the numbers game — had the effect of turning many professors into crooks and thieves."
• The Times of India writes that a professor from the Postgraduate Institute of Medical Education & Research in Chandigarh has been found to have plagiarized from two US American sources. Rakesh Sehgal retracted a paper from the journal Tropical Parasitology, published by Wolters Kluwer Medknow. The retraction notice states only that the paper has been retracted, not why. In a previous article, the Times of India noted that according to Indian law, a jail sentence between 6 months and 3 years can be levied, and public servants can lose their jobs if found to have plagiarized. 
• Richard de Boer published an atricle in the Dutch newspaper de Volkskrant on July 4, 2015 called "Welkom in de wereld van nepwetenschap" (welcome to the world of junk science), but the article is unfortunately behind a paywall and in Dutch. I was able to obtain it and use Google translate. The article deals with mock conferences like WASET and junk journals like those published with the OMICS group, which was removed from the PubMed list in 2013. There are a number of interviews with people attending the conferences, positive and negative, and also with a former colleague of the WASET organizer. The article discusses both Jeffery Beall's publisher black list and the Directory of Open Access Journals white list, noting problems with each. What a shame such an in-depth article is unavailable to a wider audience.
• Hatoon Kadi writes in her blog at Arab News the Memoirs of a Saudi Ph.D. student: The menace of plagiarism. She mis-believes, as many do, that "[t]here are certain programs that take a few seconds in determining the originality of any research material." No, software can only detect potential text overlap, it cannot determine plagiarism or originality, because all systems suffer from false positives (quotation not seen) and false negatives (source not stored in the database). She discusses the question of hiring a ghostwriter with friends and found to her dismay that many had no qualms about using work from others. She calls for strict laws to punish plagiarists. I don't think punishment works -- we need to educate people as to why referencing and quotation is important.

Now, back to grading exams.

Christmas Links

I seem to be getting more and more links I can't adequately deal with, but which I don't want to withhold from readers. So here is some Christmas reading:

• The "Neurosceptic" blog of Discover Magazine has a piece about The Strange Case of “Publication Integrity and Ethics” which details a number of integrity and ethics questions around the supposed new journal.
• The Times Higher Education has a piece on post-publication peer-review that describes more of the chilling consequences that occur when lawyers meddle with scientific inquiry. Physics professor Philip Moriarty is quoted with: “If you are publicly funded and you put your research into the public domain but no one can criticise you for it without facing legal proceedings, that seems to me to be a very badly damaged system.” Exactly.
• Retraction Watch obtained a $400.000 grant to set up a retractions database! This is great news, I hope that the database can be used to calculate a Retraction Index, that is, how many retractions per article published a journal has, and perhaps how long did it take for the retractions to take place after the initial information of the journal.
• Bernd Kramer recently published a book in German about obtaining a doctorate in Germany without doing the work ("Der schnellste Weg zum Doktortitel. Warum selbst recherchieren, warum selbst schreiben, wenn's auch anders geht?"). The cover is a horrible stock photo, but the book makes quite interesting reading. Kramer gave an interview in Deutschlandradio in November 2014 about it.
• Reports of fake peer reviews are increasing. Vox has an article about 110 papers retracted in the past two years on account of faking peer reviews. Retraction Watch reported on SAGE publishers retracting 60 papers from just one journal for this reason. The Minister of Education in Taiwan, Wei-ling Chiang, had been added to some of these papers as a co-author (he says without his knowledge). He stepped down because of the scandal in July 2014, according to IEEE Spectrum. 
• Taipeh Times reported in August of 2013 that Andrew Yang, the former Taiwanese Minister of National Defense was forced to resign in a plagiarism scandal a few days after taking office. He had published a book in 2007 that friends had ghostwritten for him. They had, however, plagiarized large parts of the book.
• The University of Nevada in Las Vegas fired an English professor for "serial plagiarism." The student newspaper, The Rebel Yell, also reports on the case.
• End of November 2014 the Vice Chancellor of Delhi University in India was jailed and released on account of plagiarism.
• There is a nasty case of plagiarism reported from early 2014 at the Chicago State University. The dissertation of the Senior Vice President and Provost of the university was being investigated, and the university confirmed to press that they were doing so. She sued the university for violating privacy laws, stating that she did not plagiarize [1]. There exist documentations of plagiarism in her dissertation in a blog ([2] - [3] - [4] - [5] - [6]). Despite the documentation, the University of Illinois, Chicago has ruled that her dissertation is not a plagiarism ([7]). The Chicago Tribune had three plagiarism experts (Tricia Bertram Gallant, Teddi Fishman, and Daniel Wueste look at the thesis ([8]). All three find the thesis problematic. The question is, are the students to be held to a different standard than the person who is enforcing that academic standard? A thorny question.

Berkley vs. Berkeley - Tales of a Diploma Mill

Everyone knows that Berkley is an excellent university in the United States. Or was that Berkeley? Whatever, if someone is sporting a degree that looks impressive, it must be from that place.

Except when it is not.

It has come to light, as the Swiss daily paper Tages-Anzeiger noted on 9 August 2013, that the IT-boss at the University Hospital in Zürich has stepped down because of a missing 'e'. The University of California, Berkeley, is indeed one of the top universities in the US. But it did not grant a doctoral degree to Jürgen Müller. Müller had been working on his doctorate at the University of Passau in Germany when his financing ran out.

Müller then heard about the University of Berkley, and for only $ 3000 in fees he was soon the proud owner of a sheepskin declaring him to be a "Doctor of Science", according to the Tages-Anzeiger.

I am not linking to the site of this degree mill, but it is simple to find with Google. The web page is an eyesore that should light up a million warning lights that this is not a serious institution. Some sins?

• I can't decide if the amateur picture of the smiling, international graduates or the red, blinking button "Honorary degrees" is worst. 
• Soon after the page loads it is clear that the self-starting video of the avatar "Kacy" who wants to sell me a degree is by far the most evil element of the page. Good luck finding the stop button quickly.
• A picture of Albert Einstein on a bicycle next to a quotation is balanced on the other side of the page by a "quotation" stating that one can earn 2 million more dollars in a lifetime with a college degree. 
• The price list is on the first page. Only $ 3505, what a deal!
• There is a button for information about ordering a class ring (!) that leads to a page with generic class rings pictured and a non-working link to a company that will gladly sell you any ring you want.
• The motto appears to be "Earn a World Class, formal University Degree from one of the most recognized and approved institutions in existence... all in possibly as few as 6-8 weeks based upon what you already know!"
• There is no street address or even state given, just a telephone number and a web-based contact form. 
• The domain is registered to one Dr. Dennis J. Globosky in Chicago, Illinois. The Los Angeles Times noted in 2005 that he is a former New Mexico state trouper who only has a high-school degree. The address listed is across the street from the DePaul University Loop Campus, there is no university listed at this address - and from the outside, nothing is visible.  
• Down on the bottom of every page is a yellow band stating "The owners/operators of this site may not conduct business with residents of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, USA". The owner is a resident of Erie, PA, and he had settled out of court in a case brought by the state Attorney General's office, but did not keep up on paying his fines, so the Attorney General has assessed him penalties for contempt of court. But it looks like he is still in business. 

Why would anyone in their right mind think that this is a serious institution of higher learning? 

The Tages-Anzeiger article ends with an interesting note. It seems that in March of 2013 a whistleblower tried to contact Müller's boss about his purchased degree. Müller, as IT boss, apparently had this person on a blacklist, so that emails from him did not bounce, but were just silently destroyed.

I suppose the University Hospital in Zürich is glad that he has resigned. The question is, where will he pop up again where people don't know the difference one letter can make?

The Case of Faheed Zakaria

The news from the States is full of stories about India-born Fareed Zakaria, an American journalist with Time and CNN who has been suspended in a plagiarism scandal. He has admitted to plagiarizing a number of paragraphs from a New Yorker article on gun control. His article, "The Case for Gun Control", is still online, as is of course the article by Harvard University history professor Jill Lepore, "Battleground America". CNN appears to have suspended him for similar plagiarism in a blog that has been taken offline.

I feel that this is a problem, to take stuff offline. I want to be able to examine the evidence for myself. My news feeder (Shameless plug for Highbeam) from the States led me to the Seattle Times' article "CNN's Zakaria sorry for plagiarism". There an example of the "plagiarism" is given, and I looked up, puzzled. This was statement of fact. The only text similarity was the name of the person quoted and the book quoted from.

I dug around for the articles and threw them at the comparison tool, SIM_TEXT, that we use on the VroniPlag Wiki.

Fareed Zakaria

Jill Lepore

Hmm. Wow. We have cases of plagiarism in Germany that have massively more copy and pasted that were found by their universities (BTU Cottbus and University of Heidelberg) to be only "technical weaknesses": Dd with 44 % of the pages affected: 28 -  35 - 48 - 103; Nk with 75 % of the pages affected (many from her doctoral advisor): 17 - 66 - 81 - 90.

I am, of course, of the opinion that both universities listed above are in error and that these theses are grave plagiarisms, the doctoral titles should be rescinded.Fareed's sin is the selection of facts and quotes, that were lifted from the New Yorker. It is right to suspend him, give him some time to think about what he did here. I don't know about other texts that might contain similar material. But this is far, far less than the Jayson Blair case. But should he be fired? What do my readers think?

Update 2012-08-19: The Chicago Tribune reported on Aug. 16. that Zakaria has been reinstated both at Time and at CNN. I'm quite glad, as it would have been very difficult to explain large-scale copy and paste in Germany being okay, and a paraphrasing error in the US costing one their job.

Massive Data Fraud in Chemistry

I have been sent a link on the Bengü Sezen case at Columbia University. Sezen is a chemist who was accused of massive data fraud, her case was under investigation by the Office of Research Integrity, a national organization dealing with scientific misconduct in the USA. At least 6 papers in which she was involved have had to be retracted, and Columbia University is moving to revoke her Ph.D. Interestingly, Chemical & Engineering News reports:

After leaving Columbia, Sezen went on to receive another Ph.D. in molecular biology at Germany’s Heidelberg University.

I have, however, been unable to locate any reference in the German National Library of a dissertation accepted at Heidelberg by someone of this name, and all doctorates granted in Germany must be listed here. The blog linked to above has collected many interesting links on the topic.

Update: A correspondent writes:

According to this list
http://www.zmbh.uni-heidelberg.de/schiebel/alumni-alt.html
Sezen graduated on 18 August 2009, which also corresponds to this calendar
entry for her doctoral exam.
http://www.zmbh.uni-heidelberg.de/WebCalendar/view_entry.php?id=1938

Psychiatrist accuses colleagues of plagiarism

A reader sends along this link: Penn Psychiatrist Accuses Five Colleagues of Plagiarism
by Jocelyn Kaiser on 13 July 2011

It seems to be a case of ghostwriters and "honorary" authors. Quite troubling in the pharmaceutical research community, I feel. 

Doctoral Plagiarism Elsewhere

Plagiarized doctoral theses are not only to be found in Germany. Janet Stemwedel reports on Adventures in Ethics and Science on the case of chemist Bengü Sezen. She links to Chemical & Engineering News with a report on the dissertation and three other papers. She quotes:

The documents—an investigative report from Columbia and HHS’s subsequent oversight findings—show a massive and sustained effort by Sezen over the course of more than a decade to dope experiments, manipulate and falsify NMR and elemental analysis research data, and create fictitious people and organizations to vouch for the reproducibility of her results. ...
A notice in the Nov. 29, 2010, Federal Register states that Sezen falsified, fabricated, and plagiarized research data in three papers and in her doctoral thesis. Some six papers that Sezen had coauthored with Columbia chemistry professor Dalibor Sames have been withdrawn by Sames because Sezen’s results could not be replicated. ...
By the time Sezen received a Ph.D. degree in chemistry in 2005, under the supervision of Sames, her fraudulent activity had reached a crescendo, according to the reports. Specifically, the reports detail how Sezen logged into NMR spectrometry equipment under the name of at least one former Sames group member, then merged NMR data and used correction fluid to create fake spectra showing her desired reaction products.

Correction fluid? I thought that state-of-the-art fakes used Photoshop these days.

Bush, the Plagiarist

The Huffington Post reports on George Bush's memoirs "Decision Point" - it appears that whoever ghostwrote it prepared a crazy quilt of plagiarisms, including "eyewitness" reports about circumstances that Bush provably did not attend, such as the inauguration of Afghan president Karzai.

Bush "recollects" - in a more literal sense of the term - quotes by pulling his and others verbatim from other books, calling into question what he genuinely remembers from the time and casting doubt on any conclusions he draws about what his mindset was at the time.

Even if we are not awarding Bush a degree for his words, one begins to despair of ever educating people of the difference between writing and copying.

Michael Leddy posted this note about a bit of a stir that is on at Jacksonville State University in Alabama, USA. The president of the university, William Meehan, was granted his doctorate from the University of Alabama. There has been determined that there is an enormous amount of, shall we say, correspondence, between that dissertation and the dissertation of Carl Boening, who was granted a doctorate a few years earlier from the same institution. Meehan's thesis does admit that it is duplicating a research method with a different population. But just duplicating the method does not warrent word-for-word copying from the text.

Interestingly, there are three professors who were on both dissertation commitees. Apparently, Meehan's committee approved the duplication of the method. It does seem strange that they did not pick up on over a third of the thesis being a copy.

The case was published in USA Today in April 2009. They report that the investigation was started because Meehan had seized a large plant sample collection from another professor and his lawyer is accusing Meehan of having a history of stealing academic work.

This same president was also caught with some plagiarized material in his regular column in the local newspaper in 2007. But he wasn't to blame, that was his ghostwriter doing the plagiarizing:

The Committee has found no discernable evidence that President Meehan knew or had reason to know that articles written and released over his name and office contained plagiarized material.

At least that cost him a job at a fancy Georgia Football College, Valdosta. The University of Alabama reviewed the similar dissertations, USA Today reports, and is not taking action because one professor from the committee is at another institution and one has passed away. Case closed. Ignore. Water over the mill.

The Tuscaloosa News reports, however, that the dissertation adviser was not involved in any sort of University of Alabama "review".

It does somehow smell of something getting swept under the carpet.

A Plagiarist for the White House?

I was dismayed this morning to see that Obama had chickened out and chosen Joe Biden as his running mate. My first associations were: old, Senator, something-nasty-but-what? A quick check with Google defined the nastiness: plagiarism.

In the 1988 presidential race, the senator from Delaware, Joe Biden, wanted to be president. In 1987 he gave a speech in Iowa as he was jockeying for the Democratic nomination with Michael Dukakis, amongst others. What he didn't realize was, that it was being filmed.

Dukakis' campaign recognized that this was a speech from the far-left British politician Neil Kinnock. They put together an ad with a few sound bites from Biden, then the same thing from Kinnock, and leaked it to the press. Biden had to withdraw his bid, as more and more reporters found the sources for other bits of his rhetoric, as reported on FamousPlagiarists. It was also found that he had been guilty of plagiarism in law school.

Barack Obama has also be nabbed for mimicking Deval Patrick, as shown on YouTube (1, 2, 3). Apparantly, the politicians (or their speechwriters) think that a good turn of phrase can be used by anyone.

I hope someone finds a copy of the Biden talk and has it digitized for YouTube soon. Video and searching rather changes the environment for plagiarists - maybe they need to learn how to attribute things better in the future.