http://www.newsfactor.com/perl/story/22423.html
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Scientific
Researchers Routinely Fudge Citations
"The probability of repeating
someone else's misprint accidentally is 1 in 10,000. There should be almost
no repeat misprints by coincidence." Yet, repeat misprints appear in
nearly 80 percent of the papers UCLA professors Mikhail Simkin and Vwani
Roychowdhury studied. |
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Using a cunning
schoolchild's most common ploy -- copying someone else's work -- scientists
fill their bibliographies with titles from papers they never read, claim UCLA
electrical engineering professors Mikhail Simkin and Vwani Roychowdhury. Reading, Citing
and 'Rithmetic "We discovered
that the majority of scientific citations are copied from the lists of
references used in other papers," Simkin and Roychowdhury write in a
paper whose title admonishes, "Read Before You Cite!" An ingenious study
of the statistics of scientific misprints led the two researchers to conclude
that major innovations may, in part, be the products of lazy fudge factoring.
"We discovered
a method of estimating what percentage of people who cited a paper had
actually read it," said Simkin, a specialist in semiconductor research. At the end of a
paper, for instance, one scientist cites "Read Before You Site!"
misspelling "cite." Another scientist then copies the citation --
as written -- for his own paper, without reading the original. "Read Before
You Site!" ends up cited, erroneously and unread, in paper after paper,
as one scientist after another simply cuts and pastes the misspelled citation
without reading the original paper (with its properly spelled title). "The
probability of repeating someone else's misprint accidentally is 1 in
10,000," Roychowdhury and Simkin claim. "There should be almost no
repeat misprints by coincidence." Yet, repeat
misprints appear in nearly 80 percent of the papers the two authors studied,
leading them to conclude that "only about 20 percent of citers read the
original. Repeat misprints are due to copying some one else's reference,
without reading the paper in question." Great or Fate? Scientists measure
the "greatness" of papers by the number of citations each paper
receives -- a measure that may be determined more by fate and less by renown
if citations are routinely -- and blindly -- copied. SPIRES, the high-energy "'Renowned
papers' are those with 500 or more citations," he added. Out of 24,000
papers published between 1975 and 1994 in the prestigious journal
"Physical Review D," forty-four papers achieved "renowned"
status with 500 or more citations. Asking the
question, "What is the mathematical probability that 44 of 24,000 papers
would be cited 500 or more times in 19 years?" Roychowdhury and Simkin
found the answer to be 1 in 10^500, or effectively, zero. In other words, it
is a mathematical impossibility that 44 of 24,000 papers would achieve
"greatness" by these measures, unless another mechanism -- copying,
for instance -- were at work. If so, the
so-called "Matthew Effect" would take over after a few copied
citations, the authors say. "This way, a
paper that already was cited is likely to be cited again, and after it is
cited again, it is even more likely to be cited in the future," claims
Roychowdhury, a specialist in the research of high-performance and parallel
computing systems. "In other words, 'unto every one that hath shall be
given, and he shall have abundance,'" he quoted from the Gospel of
Matthew. A Comedy of
Copying In a world rocked
by recent ethical lapses -- WorldCom, Enron and Adelphia, for instance --
scientists cheating on their homework might be another scandal waiting to
break. Not so,
Roychowdhury told NewsFactor. "Our work provides evidence of human
dynamics in the publication process," he said. "I really do not
view this as a scandal." Simkin agreed.
"I would not label this a 'stealth scandal,' but 'a comedy of
misprints,'" he told NewsFactor. |
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