Coming down hard on university students who plagiarize, but letting plagiarizing professors get away with it is a well-established national scandal… International, really, as in the recent case of New Zealand novelist and professor Witi Ihimaera.
When I say well-established, I mean not only multiple individual cases at our best schools, like Harvard Law; I mean the department-wide, accepted practice of plagiarism throughout many American medical schools, where a combination of courtesy authorship and ghostwriting thoroughly undermines research integrity.
By December 8, a group of our best med schools must answer a questionnaire sent to them by Senator Charles Grassley, who wants to know why some of their faculty publish
medical journal articles in which an outside writer — sometimes paid by a drug or medical devices company whose product is being studied — has done extensive work on the article without being named on the publication. Instead, one or more academic researchers may receive author credit.
Mr. Grassley said ghostwriting had hurt patients and raised costs for taxpayers because it used prestigious academic names to promote medical products and treatments that might be expensive or less effective than viable alternatives.
It’s just like the prestigious names at law schools, except that there the articles and books are written not by drug companies and their agents at ghostwriting firms, but by teams of students who essentially write the book for the professor, who then puts his or her name on it. This practice has its own name — it’s not called ghostwriting or courtesy authorship, but rather the atelier method.
Mr. Grassley asked the universities to describe their policies on both ghostwriting and plagiarism and to enumerate complaints and describe investigations into both practices since 2004.
… Mr. Grassley’s letter highlighted the disparate treatment of students and professors who claimed authorship of a paper that was not their own.
“Students are disciplined for not acknowledging that a paper they turned in was written by somebody else,” Mr. Grassley wrote. “But what happens when researchers at the same university publish medical studies without acknowledging that they were written by somebody else?”
November 18th, 2009 at 10:33AM
Obviously there are a big, big problems here — but I don’t think the various cases are at all parallel. When a professor of (say) English read some texts, makes something up about them, and writes it, the written expression is entirely integral to the research; but this is not true, in the same sense, for experimental or clinical research. Also, the English professor works alone (occasionally with a co-author), whereas much scientific and medical research is done in teams or even by aggregation of separately developed data.
Some of the practices you lump together are clearly outrageous; others require analysis much more subtle than, e.g., deciding how much credit Gordon Lish should get for Raymond Carver’s prose.
November 18th, 2009 at 10:39AM
Couldn’t agree more, Mr Punch. I don’t mean to elide these differences – I guess it’s the nature of the short blog post to look as though I’m doing that. I hope to write more about this, and I’ll try making just these distinctions…