Bibliographic negligence
Frank Norman
Thursday, 07 May 2009 08:45 UTC
In an editorial in The Scientist, Richard Gallagher reviews two recent cases of “bibliographic negligence”, where authors failed to cite relevant work, and suggests that “We need a code of practice for citation, which journals should adopt explicitly”.
He asks whether this kind of mispractice is on the increase but suggests it is not, rather that “the openness gifted us by the Internet is revealing the lax standards that have been in place all the time”.
-
Replies
Jump to resultsResults
-
This is the policy of the Nature journals
_Discussion of published work
When discussing the published work of others, authors must properly describe the contribution of the earlier work. Both intellectual contributions and technical developments must be acknowledged as such and appropriately cited._
Does that seem reasonable to you, Frank, or do you have any suggestions for improvement?
-
Surely the responsibility for this falls mainly onto referees? One of the first things I look at when reviewing funding applications or manuscripts is what has already been published on the same or similar topics.
-
I fear these are all symptoms of research competition “red in tooth and claw”. Referees are not necessarily complicit; they may be familiar with a field in general but not be specialised enough on the specific topic of a contribution to know all prior work. This is particularly the case if the prior work is from a not so famous source and published in a less well known journal.
However, the problem is serious and will continue to be present when appointment and promotion committees look for easily accessible metrics.
-
If authors have signed up to a policy such as the one we (Nature journals) have, and subsequently to their paper being published, someone points out that they were not cited but should have been (which often happens), the journal can investigate and publish a formal correction if appropriate. Most of these “complaints” turn out to be matters of opinion or wishful thinking on part of the complainant, but some are found (via objective investigation0 to be valid and in those cases a correction is published, inextricably linked to the original paper.
Brian, I think you’ve identified some of the problems but not others, for example journals tend to have limits to the number of references they allow authors to cite (for space reasons), and in an era where so many people publish so frenetically, there is a lot more “to” cite (which let alone the referees, is hard for the authors to be entirely on top of in the aspects that are less central to the main theme of the work). The internet etc also makes it much easier for people to (1) scan the literature and (2) express their feelings of being slighted.
There are several sides to the question. For my part I believe that a good editorial and peer-review process will achieve the right balance and end-result. The issue you highlight, Frank, is yet one more aspect of why it is time-consuming and resource-intensive to publish a “good” journal!
-
Darren: peer-reviewers do an invaluable service for journals and for funders in this way. I agree that good reviewers identify omissions – I am not familiar with the funder review process but journals provide advice to their reviewers to prompt them to look for specifics such as these.
However, I believe at the end of the day it is a question of “author ethics”. It is a pity if we suggest we need to rely on peer-reviewers to keep people honest. -
Maxine – Ethics is very important and I fear for the future. In universities we find it very hard to persuade students that it is wrong to plagiarise when they do assessed work or project reports. At undergraduate level it is usually trivial copying wholesale from Wikipedia etc. However, it breeds a culture of unattributed use of work of others. I think we may need to include ethics courses in our postgraduate programmes to bolster the anti-plagiarism work we currently do with the undergraduates.
-
I agree, Brian, it is a very worrying issue. You probably recall the relatively recent issues over some Turkish preprints at ArXiv. We had some comments from people pretty much defending the practice.
Many journals (including ours) and organisations are introducing plagiarism-comparison checks but these cannot be 100 per cent foolproof.
I think in a previous conversation at NN we discussed the role of education. I know that at my daughters’ school the students are taught about copying, searching etc, but I’m sure it isn’t a universal practice.
All very worrying I agree. Part of the reason why it is expensive to produce a good journal and why I get a bit irritated sometimes with people (nobody in this thread!) who seem to think that Nature casually publishes two-page, headline-grabbing notes that have not been peer-reviewed, or have been reviewed by cronies. The truth is very different – it seems to be taking longer and longer to publish a paper these days as poor authors, peer-reviewers and editors all struggle with these and other issues to try to produce a meaningful, intelligible “object” at the end of the day, trying to deal with all these issues such as plagiarism, citing, financial interests, patents, data availability, reagent sharing, detailed protocols, image integrity – you name it ;-) -
In my admittedly limited experience, it seems that authors (or funding applicants) will try to oversell the novelty of their work by conveniently ignoring the work of others. I have seen several examples – just in the last few months- where I found it almost impossible to believe that the authors could have inadvertently missed numerous recent references (in easily accessible journals) to work on exactly the same subject. In one particular case the work submitted was basically redundant, and in another the “novelty” or wow factor was significantly diminished, as I pointed out to the editors. It is a subject of regular discussion in our journal clubs here.
I suspect Brian is on the money suggesting it is an inevitable result of increased competition and possibly a slide in ethical/moral standards. I think the problem tends to be slightly more prevalent in manuscripts arising from U.S. labs, possibly reflecting a more general US-centric attitude? Regardless, with such powerful ability to search the literature, there really is no excuse for it.
-
Although much of the problem being described here may be caused by author negligence, simple ignorance of how science is supposed to work may also be a contributing factor.
For the last three years I have been giving a course to Brazilian biomedical students on scientific writing, publishing and the scientific method generally. The scope of the course developed from an analysis of why projects fail to get published.
One of the main reasons research projects go pear-shaped is because the student and their supervisor have failed to put the hours in at the beginning of the process formulating a really strong research question. Some times the basic problem is as simple as not having been used to use bibliographic resources such as PubMed or Scopus effectively. So the literature that is cited serves only as a background to the description of the new work, rather than a rigorous justification for the experiments being carried out.
These problems may be exacerbated when English is not your first language, but my hunch is, from discussions like this and comments from colleagues, that they are quite widespread, even amongst post-grads and faculty.
-
Spot on, David!
Results
-
