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“Close to 10% of the papers we receive show some sign of academic misconduct”

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Re: “Close to 10% of the papers we receive show some sign of academic misconduct”

#21

Post by chubot »

javert wrote: post #17
chubot wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For Computer Science Ph.D.'s, I think you should get credit for writing code. Either production-quality open source code, or pedagogical code. I'm looking at the Stanford Pintos kernel and MIT xv6 kernel. While there were minor papers from those projects, I think they were more like a labor of love. When you consider the coding effort, those projects probably took 10x the effort than a typical paper. But yeah it woul…

Part of being a scientist is learning how to communicate your results. And anyway, writing is required for good thinking. As a PhD student implementor, yes, my theory colleagues get way more publications than I hypothetically could even if I were a better student than I am. That makes it hard to get an academic job, but otherwise doesn't matter too much.

Sure, I didn't say you shouldn't write. There are plenty of people who write great code and then write about it. The author of Redis author has a great blog, where he explains various design and implementation issues. That kind of work may not qualify for most academic journals. But it is a lot more valuable than a lot of academic research and should be a valid way to get a Ph.D.

Re: “Close to 10% of the papers we receive show some sign of academic misconduct”

#22

Post by chubot »

foobarbazqux wrote: post #15
chubot wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For Computer Science Ph.D.'s, I think you should get credit for writing code. Either production-quality open source code, or pedagogical code. I'm looking at the Stanford Pintos kernel and MIT xv6 kernel. While there were minor papers from those projects, I think they were more like a labor of love. When you consider the coding effort, those projects probably took 10x the effort than a typical paper. But yeah it woul…

I'm not sure you can really write production quality code in a Ph.D., because that requires a production environment, which just isn't available in academia, and also because writing such code conflicts with research goals.

Sure you can. Plenty of 16 year olds have written say windows managers that thousands of people use -- that's production quality code.

Your second argument is circular -- I'm saying a valid research goal should be to write solid and useful code, and then explain it.

For example, you could write an OS kernel or kernel subsystem to fill some particular part of the design space. A great but rare example is what the authors of Lua have done.

Re: “Close to 10% of the papers we receive show some sign of academic misconduct”

#23

Post by beloch »

Self-plagarism is a tricky thing. Some redundancy in publications is virtually unavoidable. If you are reporting new results from an experiment that has been previously published, you still need to provide a brief summary of how things work but, of course, you reference your previous work. This is as transparent and innocent as things get, and isn't self-plagiarism. However, what if you reproduce a figure published in another journal exactly? Then things can get ugly (Depending on a lot of legalese no researcher should have to worry about.)!

To make matters worse, the same experimental setup is frequently used to run experiments that result in several publications. When you have several papers authored by different overlapping groups of researchers in various stages of review simultaneously things can get very confusing. The first paper you submit is frequently the last one published. The last paper you submit will then wind up referencing arxiv pre-prints instead of published articles, and if you did plagiarize yourself by mistake, the publisher of the paper submitted last might have absolutely no chance of detecting it. On top of it all, there is frequently interference from editors and reviewers. A well-written and coherent paper on a theory an experiment testing that theory might be considered "too long" or "too confusing" by a referee, and the editor will jump on that comment and demand the paper be split into two, sometimes only one of which they feel like publishing in their journal. If the researcher had done this of his/her own initiative many would consider it CV-padding!

Yes, self-plagiarism can be a means to pump up your publication list, but it also happens innocently because publishing is such a confusing counter-intuitive mess! It's probably an idiotic idea, but some kind of pan-journal version control system, even just for figures, would be a tremendous headache reducer if done right!

Re: “Close to 10% of the papers we receive show some sign of academic misconduct”

#24

Post by Kliment »

spikels wrote: post #2

Important issue. It is good to see Elsevier, a publisher often thought to be more concerned with profits, highlighting the problem.

I don't see why that matters. This is in issue with absolutely every journal, and Elsevier should die regardless. Ask the editors of any open access journal what percentage of submissions show problems like this, you'll likely get the same response. This in no way excuses or mitigates the evil that Elsevier has done to the world.

Re: “Close to 10% of the papers we receive show some sign of academic misconduct”

#25

Post by Locke1689 »

foobarbazqux wrote: post #15
chubot wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For Computer Science Ph.D.'s, I think you should get credit for writing code. Either production-quality open source code, or pedagogical code. I'm looking at the Stanford Pintos kernel and MIT xv6 kernel. While there were minor papers from those projects, I think they were more like a labor of love. When you consider the coding effort, those projects probably took 10x the effort than a typical paper. But yeah it woul…

I'm not sure you can really write production quality code in a Ph.D., because that requires a production environment, which just isn't available in academia, and also because writing such code conflicts with research goals.

Nah. You can write great code inside Racket for a PhD using tooling that's light years ahead of almost any development platform on the planet.

Re: “Close to 10% of the papers we receive show some sign of academic misconduct”

#26

Post by Kliment »

unreal37 wrote: post #9

Half the plagiarism violations are "self-plagiarism", which I assume means copying from your own previously published works. Hardly seems like such an ethical problem to copy from yourself except of course if you're paid by the word.

A major issue is that you assign copyright to many publications, meaning that it's infringement to reuse an image in another publication. The rest of the problem is basically one of passing off already published results as new ones. Of course, because reviews take for fucking ever and can be hit by unexpected obstacles, you will not know the publication order of your articles in advance, so properly referencing parts of the work as already published while it's in pre-pub limbo is difficult. Arxiv helps a lot there, but there are still many traps.

Re: “Close to 10% of the papers we receive show some sign of academic misconduct”

#28

Post by pyoung »

javert wrote: post #16
unreal37 wrote: post #9

Half the plagiarism violations are "self-plagiarism", which I assume means copying from your own previously published works. Hardly seems like such an ethical problem to copy from yourself except of course if you're paid by the word.

I felt a little uneasy reading this in the article. I write CS conference papers that are all in the same area, so obviously, some of the background information (which is a pretty small part of the overall paper) is basically copied from paper to paper. And that part is the most polished. I don't feel uneasy because I'm doing anything remotely unethical---I'm not. I feel uneasy because it sounded a bit like the descr…

Is this an issue with conferences? My guess is that conferences would prefer to have interesting topics, and probably wouldn't care as much if the material was partially recycled. I have known people who presented early results of a study at one conference, and the final results at another. They were upfront about it, so it wasn't unethical, but I guess you could accuse them of resume padding. Personally, I would prefer a bunch of really interesting presentations at a conference with some recycled material, rather than a bunch of boring presentations that are all original (although if you attend a lot of conferences with the same people, you might prefer the latter I guess).

Re: “Close to 10% of the papers we receive show some sign of academic misconduct”

#29

Post by joe_the_user »

aidenn0 wrote: post #10
unreal37 wrote: post #9

Half the plagiarism violations are "self-plagiarism", which I assume means copying from your own previously published works. Hardly seems like such an ethical problem to copy from yourself except of course if you're paid by the word.

It increases the amount of crap out there, plus it pads the CV

Sure but crap as such isn't an ethical problem. In fact, theoretically it would be the job of publications, not authors, to prevent crap from being published.

Plus, if the competition wasn't so gruesome and that evaluation criteria weren't shallow, the pressure to pad one's CV wouldn't be so great.

"Holy ethical violation batman, the slaves are slipping out of their manacles and they certified on their honor they would not do that"

Re: “Close to 10% of the papers we receive show some sign of academic misconduct”

#30

Post by weland »

joe_the_user wrote: post #29
aidenn0 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It increases the amount of crap out there, plus it pads the CV

Sure but crap as such isn't an ethical problem. In fact, theoretically it would be the job of publications, not authors, to prevent crap from being published. Plus, if the competition wasn't so gruesome and that evaluation criteria weren't shallow, the pressure to pad one's CV wouldn't be so great. "Holy ethical violation batman, the slaves are slipping out of their manacles and they certified on their honor they wou…

Yes, it is. It's an ethical problem because making researchers sift through more crap just so that you can pad up your CV is slowing down further research into your field.

I know it's an oversimplification, but the essence of it is true: curing cancer is already hard enough. It shouldn't be made any harder by ambitiously exceeding your dead tree quota.

Sauce: abandoned an academic career :-)

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