Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
Further suspicions about plagiarism were raised about the WR's discussion of social networks,
which appears
46
to have been lifted from two topics, one by Wasserman and Faust,
47
the other by de
other purpose than to introduce some difference—perhaps to make plagiarism more difficult to detect
some amusing results. For example, Wasserman and Faust refer to a particular type of social network
link as “movement between places or
statuses
(migration, social or physical mobility).” In the WR
this became “movement between places or
statues.
”
50
The summaries of “key papers” in the WR, too, turn out to have been mostly cut and pasted from
the abstracts of the original papers, yet with subtle but important changes that served to weaken the
apparent strength of the science.
51
In the end, John Mashey estimates that nearly a third of the WR was
giving on climate change, including slides he took, without attribution, from my very own public
lecture on climate change.
53
But plagiarism may be the least of the alleged issues that came to light;
the fundamental claims advanced by the report—both that the peer review process was broken in the
field of paleoclimate studies and that the hockey stick was an artifact—were demonstrably based on
distorted evidence and arguments.
Recall Wegman et al.'s use of social network analysis (described in
chapter 11
) to portray
paleoclimatologists as an inbred clique, unable to independently review each other's work. It was a
charge whose origins lay with Stephen McIntyre, but Wegman et al. sought to grant it the imprimatur
was published by Said et al. in the journal
Computational Statistics and Data Analysis
in July 2007,
a year after the WR report was published.
55
The Said et al. paper—essentially a
post hoc
attempt to
supposed “entrepreneurial” style of authorship
57
with Wegman's “mentor” style of authorship.
58
The
ostensible purpose was to indicate that Wegman's pattern of publication was somehow less
susceptible to peer review bias than that of paleoclimatologists such as me, with our supposed
“entrepreneurial” approach. According to the authors, “the mentor style of co-authorship … does
suggest that younger co-authors are generally not editors or associate editors…. they are not in a
position to become referees, so that the possibility of bias is much reduced.” The assertion could not
have dripped with more irony: Wegman was on the advisory board of the journal publishing this very
paper, and Said—his graduate student—had somehow been appointed an associate editor of the
journal prior to having earned a Ph.D!
To defend their conclusions, the authors made a quite misleading comparison between one
individual (me) who was at the time only a junior faculty member and who had graduated very few
students (thus forced by definition into the “entrepreneurial” classification), and a senior academic
(Wegman) who had graduated many students over the years (thus forced by definition into the
“mentor” classification). Even worse, Wegman and company had generated their clique diagrams
differently for me and for Wegman, leaving out in Wegman's case the diagonal elements of the matrix,
making it look, as one commenter put it, less “cliquey.”
59
Summarizing the problems with the WR social network analysis, Deep Climate noted: “[E]ven a
cursory examination of the social network material betrays a shocking lack of understanding of social
network analysis, accompanied by a complete failure to tie the background material to any meaningful
