Gross plagiarism is easy to spot and most people agree it’s wrong, so it’s relatively easy to deal with. But while stealing somebody else’s paper and pretending it’s your own is obvious misconduct, it’s surprisingly hard to define exactly what plagiarism is, especially for more minor offences. It would be helpful if we could agree a definition of plagiarism (or a classification of different types) so that editors (and teachers) could decide how they should handle it/them. Editors now have access to powerful text-matching software (such as CrossCheck or even a simple Google™ search). It’s now easy to discover the percentage of text in one document that matches text in another (or several others). But it’s much more difficult to know what those numbers mean. In fact, one editor I know says that the numbers are meaningless (although she admits that the tools are helpful for flagging up possible problems and then looking for large matches). more…

Yesterday, I gave evidence to a UK parliamentary inquiry into peer review (as did Fiona Godlee). (The session can be viewed here)

Before the session I tried to think of an analogy for peer review that I could use to explain its usefulness, but also its variety and imperfections, to the MPs. Inspiration often comes from unlikely sources – in this case an episode of the 1980s TV sitcom “Minder” which is based around the dodgy dealings of secondhand car salesman Arthur Daley (about as unlikely a role model for a journal editor as you can find, but I hope Fiona and her fellow editors will forgive the comparison). more…

There’s a new species of journal lurking in the medical publishing jungle, but it doesn’t seem to have a name. As a zoologist turned writer (ie somebody obsessed by taxonomy and words) this bothers me so I hope somebody will christen them soon. To launch this campaign, I’ll begin by describing what the new type of journal isn’t and then try to describe what it is. more…

I love the fact that many words have multiple meanings. This multiplicity sometimes sets up strange resonances or odd mental images, especially if you pick the wrong meaning initially.
The other day I was running a publication workshop and talking about tables and figures, when I got horribly tangled up by the fact that figures can mean either numbers or illustrations. My subconscious was clearly still brooding over my confusion as I read a sonnet (later in bed, I hasten to add, not during the workshop) and wondered what Shakespeare meant by the lines “Return forgetful Muse, and straight redeem, In gentle numbers, time so idly spent.” Surely, I thought, Shakespeare wasn’t thinking about songs (as in “opening numbers”)? That sounded like a much later usage. And it didn’t make sense if he was talking about arithmetical figures. The dictionary came to my rescue, reminding me that numbers could also mean “metrical periods of feet, hence lines, verse” (with the first recorded use in 1588 which sounds as if it might have been Shakespeare himself). 

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In my last blog, I addressed calls for raw research data to be made available. Like most other discussions about publishing data I started from the assumption that individual information must be kept confidential at all costs. That’s a helpful stance when considering the classic doctor-patient relationship but I wonder if it is always necessary when it comes to clinical trials. more…

The latest chapter in the sad saga of the Wakefield et al paper on the MMR vaccine raises some difficult questions about access to individual patient data. It is possible that the apparent discrepancies between the patient records and the publication might have come to light a whole lot sooner, perhaps even before publication, if Wakefield et al’s* raw data had been available for public scrutiny. (*I persist in including the rather cumbersome et al, because it is important to remember that there were co-authors, and I will return to this point later.) more…

I’m in Sao Jose dos Campos, near Sao Paulo, Brazil, on the last leg of BRISPE 1 – the First Brazilian meeting on Research Integrity, Science & Publication Ethics, which started in Rio de Janeiro last week. Brazilian science is, apparently, booming. A recent article in Science described it as “riding a gusher.” An astrophysicist told me, quite seriously, that Brazil had considered offering funding to the UK arm of an international space consortium and offered his condolences on the parlous state of UK research funding. more…

There are days when I curse the existence of email. I curse it when I have been training all day yet feel obliged to sit up half the night to plough through the 50 messages that have popped uninvited into my in-box. I grind my teeth when people in meetings check their Blackberries every 5 minutes. I shout at my computer when I get an “out-of-office” message informing me that the recipient is on holiday and will only be checking emails once a day. “That’s not a holiday!” I want to tell them. “Relax, just ignore your email for a whole week, the world won’t come to an end.” more…

I’m just back from running a course in Kenya and, as usual, it was an eye-opening experience – but perhaps not in the way you might expect. I’ll admit that, until now, I have been a bit sceptical about qualitative research. more…

I’ve been wondering about the role of journals in punishing miscreant authors.

A senior publisher told me he was uneasy about COPE’s retraction guidelines because although they suggest that redundant publications should be retracted, they recommend that the first publication should remain. The publisher felt that this was condoning and rewarding multiple publication and that journals should punish the authors by retracting all the articles. He clearly views the purpose of retraction not just as cleaning up the literature but as a penalty for misbehaving authors. I disagree, as I wrote in the COPE retraction guidelines: “The main purpose of retractions is to correct the literature and ensure its integrity rather than to punish authors who misbehave”. One reason I don’t like the idea of retracting all versions of a paper which has been repeatedly published is that it deprives readers of potentially useful information. Surely, it makes sense to leave the primary version in print and to reprimand the authors by having the redundant subsequent versions retracted? more…