{"id":600,"date":"2008-02-21T13:16:39","date_gmt":"2008-02-21T13:16:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scientopia.org\/blogs\/goodmath\/2008\/02\/21\/ethics-questions-dealing-with-senior-researchers\/"},"modified":"2008-02-21T13:16:39","modified_gmt":"2008-02-21T13:16:39","slug":"ethics-questions-dealing-with-senior-researchers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/2008\/02\/21\/ethics-questions-dealing-with-senior-researchers\/","title":{"rendered":"Ethics Questions, dealing with senior researchers"},"content":{"rendered":"

Over at Adventures in Ethics and Science<\/a>, Janet
\nStemwedel, our resident ethicist, has been writing about academic
\ndishonesty and how professional researchers should respond to it.<\/p>\n

I’ve been on the receiving end of dishonesty on three occasions –
\nranging from a trivial case (arguably not dishonest at all) to the profound.
\nI’ll describe my three experiences, along with how I did respond to them, and how I could have<\/em> responded to them. Unfortunately, my experience isn’t very
\nencouraging, and most of my advice comes down to: always, always<\/em> keep a paper trail: it can’t hurt, but don’t count on it being useful.<\/p>\n

I don’t want to be too discouraging here. I don’t think that there
\nare many dishonest researchers out there. The overwhelming majority of professional
\nresearchers are scrupulously honest people who give credit where it’s due, and who would never do anything to
\ntake credit for anyone else’s work, who would never steal an idea, and who would
\nnever do anything even remotely questionable when it comes to
\nintellectual honesty. The problem is, it doesn’t take much to poison
\nthe well – one person out of a hundred is easily enough to create a
\nhuge problem. And the nature of power and politics in research makes it
\npossible for that dishonest one to get themselves into a position where
\npeople are scared to come forward about it.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

My first and least serious experience involved a conference
\npaper. In computer science, most peer reviewed publications are
\nactually in conferences, not in journals. Work is published first in
\nconferences, and conference papers are actually more prestigious than
\njournal papers. (Acceptance rates for journal papers are quite high,
\nwell above 50%. Acceptance rates for good conferences are typically
\nbetween 15 and 20 percent.) In general, you don’t write a journal
\npaper until you have multiple conference papers that you can cite in
\nit. The conferences are really where it’s at.<\/p>\n

So I submitted a paper to a top conference – acceptance rates in
\nthe 15% range. The reviews were the best I’ve ever gotten. The reviews
\nsummarized their opinions for different categories using a 1 to 10
\nscale. My paper averaged between 8 and 9. Two of the three reviewers
\nrecommended it for the “best paper in conference” award. But it got
\nrejected. The program chair was offended at the way that I described
\nthe program chairs system in my related work. (I wasn’t critical of it; he
\njust thought that I didn’t discuss it in enough depth.) So he spiked it.<\/p>\n

In my opinion, there’s something wrong with the PC overriding the
\nopinions of the reviewers in that way, because of what he percieved as
\na personal slight. But technically, he was within his rights to do it
\n– it was allowed by the reviewing rules of the conference. So I was
\nupset, but I moved on. There really wasn’t anything I could do about
\nit. Looking back at it now, I still don’t see anything that I could
\nhave done. It was a case where all that I could do was accept it, and
\nsubmit the paper elsewhere. I ended up publishing it in a much less prestigious conference. But that’s the way the cookie crumbles.<\/p>\n

My second experience was much more serious, and much more
\nupsetting. I was at one of the major programming language conferences,
\npresenting a poster. One of my friends introduced me to a student from
\nUIUC, who was doing work that was related to mine. We spent a couple
\nof hours at the conference banquet talking about our work. About 9
\nmonths later, he published a paper proposing a change to his system
\nthat was clearly based on some of the ideas I discussed with him. I
\nwrote him a polite note saying, roughly, “I’m not sure if you
\nremember, but back at XXX conference, we talked about our work, and I
\ntold you that I was trying YYY idea. In your new paper, you use YYY,
\nbut you didn’t cite me. If it’s not too much trouble, I’d really
\nappreciate it if you could add a citation to any other papers where
\nyou discuss that.”<\/p>\n

His response was shocking. He basically said “You didn’t publish it, so
\nyou’ve got no proof that I got the idea from you, and who’s going to believe a student from a dinky little school like UD over a student a UIUC?”<\/p>\n

Looking back, what could I have done differently? Nothing
\ngood<\/em>. What I learned from that, and subsequent experiences is
\ndon’t talk about unpublished work in progress to people you don’t
\nknow<\/em>. I hate the idea of telling people to do that. But I’ve seen
\nfar too many examples of things like that happening – people hearing
\nabout unpublished work-in-progress, and scooping it. I do still talk
\nto people about my work, but I keep it very vague, and don’t talk
\nabout new ideas unless I know and trust the person that I’m talking
\nto. Nothing get discussed until it’s published in some form, so that
\nI have evidence that I did it first.<\/p>\n

The third experience was the most serious by far, the most upsetting,
\nand the most intractable. After getting out of school and getting a job, I was discussing work with a coworker. The coworker took the ideas, and published them
\nunder his own name.<\/p>\n

In this case, I had the paper trail. I had the documents that had
\nbeen presented to the management at my lab more than a year before the
\nscum had heard about them. I took advantage of what was known as the
\n“open door” policy – we were allowed to go to any manager or executive
\nwhen something like that happened to raise a complaint. I went to one
\nof the upper-level managers who I had presented the work to, and
\ndescribed what had happened, along with dates of meetings where I had
\npresented to him, to other people, and when I had described the work
\nto the scum. I expected some kind of serious action to be taken – here
\nwas proof, hard evidence of outright intellectual theft. What
\nhappened? Nothing<\/em>. The scum was apparently well-known for
\ndoing that (but no one had told me), and because he had excellent
\npolitical connections, no one dared to do anything to reprimand him. So the
\nwhole matter was dropped.<\/p>\n

I don’t know what I could have done differently. I think I did the
\nright thing. It would have been wrong to refuse to discuss work in
\nprogress with a coworker. I had a strong paper trail showing what I
\nhad done when – I couldn’t have kept more or better evidence that it was
\nmy work. I raised the issue in the right way, with the right person. I
\nwas calm, professional, and thorough. But I ultimately relied on the idea
\nthat honesty could trump politics. That wasn’t true. No amount of evidence
\ncould have made a difference. The thief got away with it – as he had done on
\nnumerous occasions in the past, and as I assume he continues to do today.<\/p>\n

To provide one (sort of) encouraging case: I know people who used to work at another, now defunct, research lab. One of their lab directors had, for years, been
\nusing the labs “publication permission” system to deny permission to publish to
\nhis underlings, taking their papers, putting his name on them, and submitting them. He even won a fellowship an a major professional organization on the basis of his stolen work. He was, eventually, caught with the help of a corporate ombudsman, fired, and stripped of his fellowship. Alas, he’d done this for close to 20 years, and the lab only survived for about six months after he was fired.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Over at Adventures in Ethics and Science, Janet Stemwedel, our resident ethicist, has been writing about academic dishonesty and how professional researchers should respond to it. I’ve been on the receiving end of dishonesty on three occasions – ranging from a trivial case (arguably not dishonest at all) to the profound. I’ll describe my three […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[39],"tags":[308],"class_list":["post-600","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-meta","tag-meta"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4lzZS-9G","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/600","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=600"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/600\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=600"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=600"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=600"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}