From Plagiarism Today:
Last week, a major plagiarism scandal has rocked the field of medical research.
The story, which had actually been brewing for approximately two years, has grown to involve many of the fields biggest names including Dartmouth College, The New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM), the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) and researcher H. Gilbert Welch.
On the surface, it’s a simple case. A researcher claims that he and a colleague were not given proper credit for their contributions on an important paper. Those allegations were investigated by the college, found to be true and the researcher responsible resigned.
However, the story is much more complicated than that. The author involved staunchly denies any wrongdoing and the journal where the paper was published is standing behind him. This has created some deep battle lines in the medical research community and fears about the long term implications for this case.
. . . .
The story begins in October 2016 when Welch, along with three other listed co-authors, published a paper in the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine entitled “Breast-Cancer Tumor Size, Overdiagnosis, and Mammography Screening Effectiveness.”
The paper made the claim that the large push for earlier detection of breast cancer was leading to significant overdiagnosis and treatment of breast cancer and that the majority of the tumors detected would never have led to clinical symptoms.
The paper was considered an important one in the field. It resulted in many news articles about it and, according to Google Scholar, has been cited 162 times in under 2 years.
However, shortly after the paper was published, Dartmouth associate professor Samir Soneji came forward and alleged that Welch failed to properly attribute both him and Hiram Beltrán-Sánchez, a researcher at UCLA, for their contributions.
According to Soneji, Welch emailed him in May 2015 asking for a slide from a presentation he had presented and during a seminar that Welch attended. Soneji offered the slide but said that, “If this result/figure ultimately becomes part of a paper, I’d like the opportunity to be a coauthor (sorry if this comes across as a bit odd — I’ve had a few negative experiences this year when sharing results).”
Welch, however, assured him that it wasn’t going to appear in a paper and that the slide was for use in a class. Soneji went on to submit a paper containing those findings to the NEJM but was rejected. Welch submitted his paper the following year and had it accepted. This resulted in Soneji’s paper being rejected from another journal for being too similar to Welch’s work.
After Soneji came forward, Dartmouth began a twenty-month investigation and eventually sided with Soneji and Beltrán-Sánchez. Welch protested this, saying in an interview with Retraction Watch that his work (and the work of his co-authors) was a “natural progression of his work” and that, “the underlying data are publicly available – all the analyses, all the figures and all the writing in the article are my co-authors’ and mine.”
At the time, Dartmouth had taken no action against Welch but, a month later, the school demanded that Welch both stop teaching at the school and add Soneji as a co-author of the disputed paper. Welch refused and resigned.
The NEJM, however, has declined to retract the article. Saying in a letter that they see this as an “authorship dispute” and not “sufficient grounds for retraction of the article.” They cite the standards of the Office of Research Integrity when announcing their decision.
This puts the NEJM at odds with COPE, an organization that offers best practice and advice in the area of publication ethics. In their ruling, COPE said that, “a retraction should be considered,” given the nature of the alleged plagiarism.
. . . .
With research, battles over authorship are extremely common. COPE alone has dealt with over 130 such cases, which represent only a small fraction of such disputes.
What makes this case unique is that it involves both a prominent paper, a prominent researcher and a prominent journal. In short, it’s unique because it’s news.
The fact that there are so many authorship disputes shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone. First coined in 1932, “Publish or perish” has become something of a cliche to describe the never-ending pressure on academics to publish new research.
Basically, academics, whether to maintain their current positions or advance, have to prove that they are doing meaningful work in the field. One of the few ways to do that is to continuously publish papers in journals.
This has led to a set of perverse incentives that rewards quantity of publication over quality. This has led to predatory journals, which publish nearly any paper for a small fee, shoddy research and many disputes over authorship.
That, in turn, is where this case leaves us. Soneji and Welch are both operating under the same pressures. However, from Soneji’s perspective, he was denied not only authorship credit on Welch’s paper but the chance to publish his research because it was “too similar” to Welch’s.
However, from Welch’s perspective, Soneji’s contribution didn’t rise to the level of authorship and, as such, it was appropriate to leave him off.
Link to the rest at Plagiarism Today
It was the practice in my former field, physics, to add anyone as a co-author who had helped in a significant way with the published research(loaned expensive equipment/graduate students/funding). Or simply owned the experimental setup used. Which sometime led to author lists that looked like phone books, in the case of high energy physics papers where three or more major institutions took part…
That said, publishing someone else’s figure (and thus data) with no attribution at all, never mind coauthorship, is a Big No-No. That’s a major transgression and there is no valid excuse for it.
Sounds like The Double Helix, too.
And the practice leads to people being very wary of sharing their research data, which is bad for science.
It hurts careful researchers and rewards predatory ‘publishers.’