Comment by devin | Hacker News Reader

Comment by devin | Hacker News Reader

What about the plagiarist's other contributions? Will there be any additional investigation into whether or not those papers were his own?

I found it a bit puzzling that the plagiarist's name was not mentioned, although it is easy to find from the links provided in the article. Why the professional courtesy in light of such an egregious violation of same?

Edit to add: The second link in the comment by jonchang answers my question. Though, I don't fully agree. It ought to serve as a warning to those would-be plagiarists that if they are caught, there will be real professional consequences.

In addition, the verbosity of the retraction is a bit annoying.

> As corresponding author I ask for retraction of our article Finelli et al. (2016[1]) with the consent of all co-authors, because of unauthorized reproduction of confidential content of another manuscript. The data in the retracted article actually are from a cohort of patients from the Boston, MA enrolled in a trial registered in ClinicalTrials.gov, NCT02454127. We deeply regret these circumstances and apologize to the scientific community.

"unauthorized reproduction of confidential content of another manuscript" and "The data in the retracted article actually are from a cohort of patients from..." ought to read: "This manuscript was plagiarized, and the data falsified."

The author was interviewed[0] about it and this was his reasoning:

"I'm not looking to 'tattle' on the perpetrator — doing so starts to look like revenge rather than achieving the more important objectives, and may even draw attention away from those objectives."

[0] https://www.statnews.com/2016/12/12/plagiarist-study-science...

> I'm not looking to 'tattle' on the perpetrator — doing so starts to look like revenge

I do not fully understand this reasoning myself. Is this a common sentiment? That calling out perpetrators by name is counterproductive? Is it specific to some culture? I've never heard it expressed directly.

If you publish their name, they can't come back from it. If you don't publish their name, they can rethink their actions, not do it again and make meaningful scientific contributions in the future. Its like giving the death sentence to someone who stole a car.

Please. Someone who made this choice should be banned from legitimate scientific research for ever and ever.

Let them restart their career in advertising, sales, marketing, or politics -- fields where lying is routine and accepted.

I certainly don't condone plagiarism, but I've come to appreciate that people fail and as an outsider it is doubtful you will ever make sense of everything that is going on in their life that led to their failure. A repeat offense is one thing, but a single offense should be allowed some consideration.

Sorry, not in this field. Science is having enough of a hard time lately as it is, it doesn't need anyone who has such disrespect for honesty and truth anywhere near it.

This one needs to be categorical. In fact I would support civil or even criminal prosecution, for misuse of public funding if there is any government money behind their fraudulent research.

In my mind, this is "white collar" crime, pure and simple. The repercussions should be life-changing.

You aren't aware of the common refrain in academia, "snitches get stitches"?

What's "justice"? Outing the plagiarizers does nothing to get them to do the right thing in the future, their ability to contribute is virtually eliminated. This hurts the community if this is a one-off event but they otherwise have made or can make useful contributions. If this is habitual, then outing them improves the community (as they're a net-negative to the community).

So reasons to out: habitual behavior that's a negative to the community; to make the injured party feel better (in some fashion). We've already addressed habitual behavior, outing is appropriate as they're a net-negative. So the second needs to be address, satisfaction for the injured party.

The publication is out there, what the true author wanted, and people can base new work on that (by way of citations and reading it). So the only thing for the injured party to gain is satisfaction at knowing the offenders are hurt and that they (true author) will get credit. But this is vanity, and other than the potential for that credit to provide the true other with greater resources (due to proper recognition in the future for their, potentially, valuable work), there is no benefit to the community. And if the true author's work is of value, and their work isn't frequently plagiarized, then their personal career is going to be fine.

Exceptions, of course, are important to note. I knew someone in grad school who had a professor plagiarize their work (and not their advisor, either). This greatly hurt the grad student, as this was one of their early publications (first significant one, maybe?). It also greatly hurt the plagiarizer who lost a lot of standing within the department (I don't recall what all became of either of them, I was on my way out at the time). We can always construct ever more exceptional cases that show that extreme (by some measure) responses are justifiable in the name of justice. But moderate responses are certainly also worthy of consideration, and probably ought to be considered more often.

This is western culture.

For starters if you fuck up, you might ruin an innocent persons life, and in turn, hopefully they will sue you into the ground and ruin yours.

Did the authors listed actually submit the paper. Are all the authors complicit? Were there different levels of complicity? Was the Journal involved? Were the reviewers involved?

By just stating the facts the case is made and humanity hopefully moves forward reducing errors and less lives ruined.

Add to this, do you think a person who is at their wits end deserves to be taken down.

They might be just about to lose their house and position at there university and this was their last desperate ditched attempt.

Their harm to the original author really was minimal, if anything at all. (Plus they got an extra citation out of it)

Would you as a human not feel guilty if they killed themselves after you went to the extra effort of outing them and you realized just how bad a shape they were to do what they did?

What if they we in a manic state at the time, and the internet now turns on them and makes them and their families life a further living hell?

Western culture is mostly about about moving things forward, not revenge for revenges sake. Most decent people in the west try and practice this.

I upvoted this comment for the content but there's nothing here specific to the western culture, it's just how a decent person behaves anywhere in the world.

It is not a cultural universal, unfortunately.

There are major differences in how transgressions are dealt with between "shame cultures"[0], "guilt cultures"[1], and "fear cultures"[2]. "Fear cultures" are not especially stable over the long term, so may be thought of as a perturbation that "shame" and "guilt" cultures can go through.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shame_society

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guilt_society

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture_of_fear

PubMed search shows 148 results for papers with an author named "Finelli C". They should all be checked to see if they were plagiarized.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?term=Finelli%20C%5BAuth...

While the first author took the blame, Finelli wasn't explicitly named as the reviewer. So it could be any of the coauthors.

Source: http://retractionwatch.com/2016/12/12/dear-peer-reviewer-sto... (retractionwatch.com)

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