Reflections on academic plagiarism

I’m not stepping into the politically-charged fracas surrounding the resignation of the president of Harvard University--Claudine Gay. I understand that politics will inevitably rear its ugly head in the USA nowadays no matter what the situation. I’m only interested in one aspect of the case--the alleged plagiarism charges against her. If it’s true that she plagiarized some parts of her doctoral thesis already way back in 1997, then that’s the only thing that interests me. That’s because I spent over forty years in an academic research career and wrote nearly one hundred scientific articles, all of which were peer-reviewed and checked by specific software for plagiarism from around 2005 or so. This type of software appeared around the year 2000 and most scientific journals had incorporated it into use by 2005. If you were intentionally unethical and extensively plagiarized others’ articles, you would eventually get caught and your article would be refused. The ‘punishment’ was not more severe than that, except that ultimately, if you don’t publish in academia, you perish, hence the old adage—‘publish or perish’. The punishment of no published articles leads to no funding, because scientists will not get funding for their research if they haven’t published. Essentially it’s tantamount to shooting yourself in the foot. But in my long experience, most of the scientists I ran across or collaborated with were decent and ethical people. I include myself in that group. I can’t tell you how many times I lay awake during the night, wondering about the phrasing of this or that sentence or paragraph, wanting to get it just right, and hoping that I had without parroting others’ ideas. The problem of course is that each published article builds on the work that came before; in other words, there are very few novel ideas. The novel ideas belong to the few visionaries who move science along in a way that the rest of us do not.

If you have to write about the ideas and findings of others, as we had to do as scientists, then you must reference their previously-published articles. You cannot knowingly take credit for ideas and findings that rightfully belong to others. Most scientists are ethical and follow this unwritten rule; no one would like to end up being labeled a plagiarist. Of course mistakes are made and usually those cases are sorted out by the author and the journal, or by the author and his or her co-authors. But if you knowingly plagiarize and are caught doing so, the consequences can be unpleasant for your career.

I was an anonymous article reviewer for a number of journals for well over twenty years. Article reviewing is voluntary; we scientists do not get paid for helping the journals in this way. I have come across blatant plagiarism (of words or ideas) only several times in that period of time. In one case, the authors copied and pasted whole abstracts and paragraphs in the Introduction from one of their previously-published articles to a manuscript they were writing and wished to submit for review. They did this in order to pass off their new article as original. We’re talking about the exact same abstract and introductory paragraph(s) showing up in two different papers, with only a drug concentration or amount changed to indicate that the new article was different from the previous one. They did not bother to cite their previous article (had they done so, it would have been less problematic). In other words, the authors plagiarized themselves (self-plagiarism), which you might think is not plagiarism, except that it is. This type of behavior has positive consequences for the authors if their behavior is not discovered. We academics know why this is done—to increase the number of publications on one’s publication list. In this case, the authors had tested the effects of five different chemicals on cancer cells, and published the effects of each one individually (five separate papers instead of one paper detailing the effects of all five chemicals). Since the methodology involved in each paper was the same, as were the aims of the studies, the authors were too lazy to write new abstracts and introductions for each article. It happens more often than you might think and is not discovered so often, mostly because many reviewers won’t google previous publications by the authors in question due to lack of time or interest (another kind of laziness). How did I find out that the authors had done this? Interested as I was in the subject matter, I googled some of their previous articles. After I saw what the authors had done, I recommended to the editor that the manuscript be refused and the authors chastised for this practice. What I know for sure is that the article was published as it was (without any changes) in another journal (low impact-factor), because those journals are desperate for articles to publish. They need them for their existence.

Another case involved a high-profile group who published a rather banal article in the late 1990s in one of the best journals in the science field. Their article documented the use of a technology that could be used to assess DNA content in cancer cells. It was presented as though this was a novel finding, which it most certainly was not. I happen to personally know the researchers who invented this technique and published many articles about it twenty years before the publication in the elite journal; nowhere in that article were the original researchers referenced. I and many others wrote letters to the editor pointing this out, expecting the journal to retract the article or at least write a short commentary about the situation. Nothing happened. The journal did not want to upset the research group involved, so nothing happened. No consequences. When you’re the elite, when you sit at the top, you can get away with a lot. I learned that already in my late thirties/early forties, with nearly thirty years to go in the academic research arena.

So back to Claudine Gay, who as president of Harvard was making close to a million dollars a year. I’ve read some of the articles about what she did; the most descriptive one so far (in terms of comparisons of Gay’s writing versus the original articles she is accused of plagiarizing) was written by Sophia Nguyen and published in The Washington Post: Timeline: Plagiarism allegations against Claudine Gay - The Washington Post . It is possible to read the article for free if you register your email address with them. After reading the article, I say, Gay should have known better. Harvard University should have known better and reacted differently and much earlier. But many elite universities would probably have done the same--swept the affair under the rug as a tempest in a teapot. But they’re wrong, it is an important matter, because the entire affair allows for a way of thinking that is already prevalent in our society. That laziness is ok, mediocrity is good enough, taking credit for others’ work is ok as long as you don’t get caught, but if you get caught, talk your way out of it. One must strive for ethical behavior at all levels of academia. It’s hard work (the antithesis of laziness) and sometimes you’re fighting against the crowd, but in the end, you have to live with yourself and answer to yourself.