No science in 'cut and paste'
A few months ago, I helped to organise a workshop on Academic
Ethics at the Institute
of Mathematical Sciences,
Chennai. It was a well-attended meeting, with many eminent participants from
the sciences and social sciences, including the heads of some of our leading
institutions. Over two days, several themes were emphasised relating to various
forms of academic misconduct. Now that one of our leading scientists has hit
the headlines over plagiarised text in some of his own publications, it seems
it is time to revisit these issues and discuss them more widely.
It was widely reported in mid-February that an apology had
appeared in the December 2011 issue of the journal Advanced Materials,
by the authors of a paper that had been published in that journal in June 2011,
for incorporating verbatim text from an earlier paper by a different set of
authors. The newsworthiness of this arose from the identity of the last author:
C.N.R. Rao, former director of the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, founder of the Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for
Advanced Scientific Research, Bangalore,
fellow of the Royal Society (U.K.), scientific adviser to the Prime Minister of
India, and one of the most celebrated living Indian scientists.
How it unfolded
The initial reaction of many scientists, including myself, was
that this was a non-story: the plagiarism was in the introductory section,
probably committed by a junior author inadequately schooled in the ethics of
writing, and unnoticed by the senior authors; it was a short passage that did
not affect the reported results in the paper; and, once alerted to this
transgression, the authors quickly issued an apology. And there the issue
should have ended.
Unfortunately, the senior authors (Rao, who was the last author,
and S.B. Krupanidhi of IISc, Bangalore)
did three other things. They both publicly blamed the first author, a graduate
student of Krupanidhi. They both denied that it was plagiarism. And Rao
declared that he had had little personal involvement with this paper. Suddenly,
many topics discussed at the ethics meeting appeared starkly relevant.
Some major issues that came up for discussion in that meeting
were plagiarism and data manipulation; authorship issues; and institutional
mechanisms for dealing with reported transgressions. (Numerous related matters
were discussed, including inadequate citation, victimisation of scientists,
gender issues, and perspectives from scientific journals and funding agencies.)
It was observed by many speakers that students have a limited
understanding of what plagiarism is; and the Indian educational system, which
encourages rote learning and verbatim reproduction of answers from memory, was
squarely blamed. Rao and Krupanidhi, by denying that plagiarism occurred, have
demonstrated that the understanding of senior scientists is not much better.
Plagiarism in the introduction is better than plagiarism of the results, but it
is plagiarism nonetheless. It is disheartening to see a scientist of Rao's
eminence claiming that a verbatim cut and paste is not plagiarism. But, on the
bright side, one speaker (T.A. Abinandanan of IISc, Bangalore)
noted that, since automatic plagiarism-detection software became widespread,
about four years ago, the number of retracted papers from India (as
reported by the PubMed database) has plummeted: most such cases are now caught
by journals at the pre-publication stage.
Grey area
But cut and paste plagiarism is only the simplest kind. What if a
researcher borrows the essential ideas from a previously published paper,
re-expresses them in new languages, and fails to cite the original? Here, in my
opinion, Rao's paper is in a grey zone. The paper that they plagiarised the
introduction from deals with a very similar material (graphene thin films; Rao et
al. also consider nanoribbons); measures similar physical properties
(photocurrent, electrical transport properties, time response) using similar
techiques (infrared laser); and even contains similar graphs. Rao and his
colleagues were undoubtedly aware of the previous paper, since they plagiarised
from it; yet they cite it only once, briefly and without discussion, in the
introduction. Not only do they fail to compare their results with a very
relevant prior publication: they nowhere even hint to the reader that such work
exists.
Issues of authorship
Rao's response to journalists, essentially passing the buck to
Krupanidhi and his student, also raises questions of appropriate authorship.
There is a widespread convention in the experimental sciences that the student
who does the hard work is the first author; the student's adviser, who plans
and conceives the experiment, is the last author; and anyone else who
contributes appears in the middle of the author list. In this case, by Rao's
own account, the work was primarily that of Krupanidhi and his student: yet Rao
is the last author (which is usually the case in Rao's papers). To claim
“senior authorship” and then disclaim the paper in this manner is rather
unsatisfactory. Though media attention has focused on just one paper (for which
an apology was published), an anonymous commenter on my blog has given four
other examples of papers authored by Rao that contain plagiarised text; none of
these have, I believe, been apologised for. One paper, published in Applied
Physics Express in 2010, is notable in that it does not include the
aforementioned student as an author; the three authors are Rao's own student,
Krupanidhi, and Rao. It lifts the first part of its abstract, much of its
introductory paragraph, and some text elsewhere, from a 2008 paper by Matheu et
al., published in Applied Physics Letters. Both papers deal with
scattering from gold nanoparticles in silicon photovoltaic devices (in
addition, Matheu et al. consider dielectric silica nanoparticles, while
the Rao paper considers metallic ReO nanoparticles); the figures in both papers
deal with I-V characteristics and photocurrent response. And, on this occasion,
Rao and co-authors make no reference at all to the paper they plagiarised from.
Ethics body
So the Advanced Materials paper cannot be dismissed as a
one-time incident, and it seems inappropriate to blame it entirely on one
student. This does not, of course, invalidate the work that Rao has earned
respect for over the decades. Rao is a prolific scientist — he has over 1,500
published papers, an unthinkable number for most scientists. Five questionable
papers may seem a small number in comparison, but they should not be ignored. A
scientist of Rao's stature needs to ask himself some hard questions, and then
share his answers with the scientific community.
There was widespread agreement among the participants at the
ethics meeting on the need for institutional (and perhaps governmental)
mechanisms to deal with cases of lapses in academic ethics in an impartial
manner, without fear of influence or conflict of interest. Rao himself has
previously urged the necessity of such a body. It is a pity that he is now
demonstrating, in word and deed, the need for such a mechanism.
In the article, Matheu was misspelled as Mathieu. The
author also issues the following clarification -
'Erratum. I should not have claimed that the authors of the
Applied Physics Letters paper do not cite the paper by Matheu et al. They do,
but (again) inadequately in my opinion. In the case of the paper plagiarised
from Istkos et al, published in J.Luminiscence and reported elsewhere in The
Hindu, they do entirely fail to cite that paper.' - Rahul Siddharthan
(Rahul Siddharthan is with the Institute of Mathematical
Sciences, Chennai.)
TH120309
No comments:
Post a Comment