Professional Development Blog

Self-plagiarism

2/25/2015

Self-plagiarism

This is the second of three blog posts from one class in Professional and Ethical Development issues in which we talked about ethical issues in publishing and peer review. We discussed self-plagiarism, which in some ways has less clear boundaries than plagiarizing others’ work. However, I think there are some clear cut cases where most people would say the act was wrong:

Publishing an identical paper in two or more places
Writing the same paper from two courses without telling the instructor

Then there are times that most people would agree that it’s okay to self-plagiarize, such as:

Turning a thesis into a manuscript
Using text from a prior grant proposal in a new grant proposal
Repeating similar or even identical wording from part of a methods section that uses the same dataset, e.g., in explaining the sample, the procedures, or specific methods or measures (especially if we’re talking about a sentence here or there, not the full methods section).

We discussed some other issues, though, that are fuzzier.

Recycling parts of an introduction from a published paper in another paper.
Reusing text from a published paper in a new paper, where the authors aren’t identical (e.g., there was an author on the earlier paper who is not on the current one)
Using ideas from another paper that are not original because they’re published, but they are your own ideas.

And finally, we talked about a couple of things that students especially should try to avoid. One thing that can happen is that the influence of your mentor and her ideas can be really strong. You’ve talked about topics for years, and so you really internalize her perspective. And that’s great – I’m sure she’s happy you did. But then if you write about it, make sure that you accurately attribute it. Otherwise, you are implying that the ideas originated from you, when in fact, they are your advisor’s ideas that you agree with, but did not create yourself.

“The post Self-plagiarism first appeared on Eva Lefkowitz’s blog on February 25, 2015.”

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Plagiarism

2/21/2015

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It was a chicken-egg question in syllabus design. Talk about publishing and peer review first, or talk about ethical issues in publishing and peer review first? I’ll know in a couple of weeks if the decision to start with ethics was the right one.

To discuss plagiarism, I had each student find their own web article about a plagiarism case, so that we had multiple examples to discuss. My general default assumption is that people are not intentionally plagiarizing (side note: an example a student brought in of someone who clearly intentionally plagiarized led to my exclamation: I don’t understand that! How could someone think they would get away with that? Followed by my admission that I am likely not cut out for a life of crime). But there are a number of instances of unintentional plagiarism, and some things we as authors can do to best avoid it. I think the three issues we discussed that traditionally receive less time in online plagiarism modules or workshops on plagiarism are:

1. Consecutive citations in text. It’s not uncommon that when I run a paper through an online plagiarism tool, there will be instances where there are 3 or more citations at the end of a sentence that match another publication, even though the sentence itself does not. In most cases, it appears that the student read someone else’s lit review, and from a particular sentence/point that the authors made, used the author’s summary of past work on X, putting it in her own words, but citing the original sources from the author, rather than citing the paper the student actually read. Instead, authors should go back to the original sources themselves and only cite things they read themselves, and hopefully find their own new references on that topic rather than only pulling from someone else’s summary.

2. Failure to document original source in notes. Academics take notes all the time. We take notes when we listen to lectures/talks, when we read articles, when we read textbooks assigned to our students, and when we write our own lectures. The challenge is that if we don’t document for ourselves our original sources, we can forget where things came from, or even that our notes are not our own words/ideas, but instead are someone else’s. Students studying for comps, for instance, might cut and paste from an article into notes, but fail to document that the points are word-for-word from the original source. Instructors working on lecture notes may cut and paste text from an article into their notes without documenting it. The student returning to notes to write comps may then cut and paste into the comps document without realizing it wasn’t her own words. The instructor may, years later, write a textbook based on notes from a course and forget that the notes were not original material.

Several years ago I started obsessively documenting my notes. When I’m putting presenter notes into my PowerPoint slides, I now try to have the source of any material I have. If I cut and paste from an article because I plan to paraphrase it in class, I make sure to paste it into my notes in quotes so I know I didn’t put it in my own words. These steps help 3-years-from-now Eva know which are not my original ideas, and whose ideas/words they really are.

3. Copying images. I think many academics are guilty of this issue. We teach students that they can’t take other people’s words, but then we grab photos or other images from web sites and plop them into our slides without attributing them. If you put an image into a presentation, make sure it’s not protected by copyright, and make sure to provide an attribution of the source. I generally paste in the web address that the image came from to be clear of the source. Note that with google image searches, you can choose to filter by specific usage rights, so that you only use images that are labeled for reuse.

“The post Plagiarism first appeared on Eva Lefkowitz’s blog on February 21, 2015.”

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This week in Adolescent Development: Ethnic/racial, sexual, & gender identity 2

2/18/2015

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Some papers and topics we discussed this week:

We talked about measurement of ethnic/racial identity and related constructs, including Phinney’s Multiethnic group Identity Measure, The MIBI-Teen, and measures of implicit racism/bias, such as the IAT.

We discussed some great data from Calzo and colleagues on milestones of same-sex sexual experiences and coming out. One thing I appreciated about these data is that they included adults of a wide age range, not only LGBTQ youth. Thus, the average ages are substantially higher, but when you look specifically at the average ages of these milestones among the youngest in the sample, they look very similar to the data we regularly see with youth.

A student gave a great presentation on being a sexual minority adolescent in 2015. He had some excellent graphics and figures from Pew Research Center, including this map of acceptance of homosexuality worldwide:

Calzo, Antonucci, Mays & Cochran, 2011

A student gave a great presentation on being a sexual minority adolescent in 2015. He had some great graphics and figures from Pew Research Center, including this map of acceptance of homosexuality worldwide:

Pew Research Center (2013)

And data on changes in US acceptance of same-sex marriage:

Pew Research Center (2014)

And data from the National School Climate Survey (Kosciw et al., 2012) that indicates some decrease in harassment over time.

Kosciw, Greytak, Bartkiewicz, Boesen, & Palmer, 2012

Some great engaging discussions this week.

“The post This week in Adolescent Development: Ethnic/racial, sexual, & gender Identity 2 first appeared on Eva Lefkowitz’s blog on February 18, 2015.”

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Mentoring, authorship, and collaboration

2/15/2015

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I’m now weeks behind, so recently in Professional and Ethical Development issues we talked about issues of mentoring, authorship, and collaboration. We reviewed this authorship checklist which assigns points for different activities in order to determine who should/should not be an author, order of authors.

I gave several case studies for discussion, all of which were experiences I had as either a graduate student or a mentor. The ones that led to the most discussion were ones that involved student dissertations, and the issue of whether the advisor should be a co-author. This question really varies by discipline, lab, and specific situation. Questions we considered included whether the mentor should ever be the first author (e.g., if the student graduates and doesn’t ever write it up for publication)? What if the student collected his own data? What if the student collected her own data, but the advisor funded the data collection? What about future papers the student writes from those data, such as papers that come from the dissertation data collection, but were not written up in the dissertation?

We also talked about when to “give up the fight.”

We also talked about:

Differing standards across disciplines in the meaning of the last author.

Whether advisors should put timelines on time to submission or publication, either after completing a thesis/dissertation, or after claiming a research question.

Should faculty expect the same level of contribution from a student co-author as they do from a colleague/peer?

What recourse does a student have if there are issues in the mentoring relationship?

And we went over some best practices in authorship determination and involvement (some of these ideas come from the APA):

Start the conversation early, before too much work has occurred.

Revisit the discussion about authorship as often as needed, for instance, when one person is doing more/less than anticipated.

We discussed the idea of written authorship agreements. I’ve never used one, but now wonder if I should.

All authors must see and sign off on drafts before submitted. This point may seem obvious, but I have one publication that I didn’t know existed until someone emailed me and asked for a copy.

See my syllabus for additional readings on these topics.

“The post Mentoring, authorship, and collaboration first appeared on Eva Lefkowitz’s blog on February 15, 2015.”

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Responsible reporting

2/12/2015

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Last week in Professional Development we talked about ethical data management. This week we moved to issues with reporting, including data analysis and interpretation. We discussed an interesting paper by John, Loewenstein, and Prelec (2012) in which they surveyed academic psychologists about their engagement in 10 different “questionable research practices” (some of which overlapped with our discussion last week). They told some of the participants that they would be using Bayesian Truth Serum (BTS) – that is, they would use a scoring algorithm to assess the pattern of their scores and determine the honesty of their responses, and then would make a donation to the charity of the participant’s choice based on how truthful their responses were. They did find some differences (based on the algorithm) between the two groups, with the BTS group reporting higher levels of questionable practices than the control group. Our discussion, however, focused more on the percentages of participants who admitted to specific behaviors. It was interesting to see which behaviors students thought were surprisingly high, or were surprised to see on a list of questionable behaviors. It led to a good discussion of whether certain practices, such as not reporting all dependent measures, were questionable/unethical. One student was also very surprised at the rate (43% in BTS group; 38% in control group) of admitting to rounding p-values, and also, in the ratings of how defensible it was to round p-values.

We talked about defamation, and the extent to which it is okay for journalists or researchers to attack researchers in the public domain. And whether there’s a point where it’s okay for the researcher to sue for defamation. We used the Michael Mann case as an example.

We talked about reporting of fMRI data. I confess it is out of my comfort zone to talk about methods for researching fMRI. But we read a paper by Vul, Harris, Winkielman, and Pashler (2009) to spur the discussion. Fortunately, one of my students works with fMRI data, and it was great to have her perspective.

And we discussed some issues to consider in responsible reporting. Such as:

Correcting for number of tests/Type I error.

Statistical significance vs. practical importance/meaningfulness. Studies with enormous sample sizes can demonstrate significant results that, when thought of in effect sizes, are essentially meaningless. On the flip-side, there are sometimes meaningful differences that may not reach the magical .05.

p-hacking/fishing. Gelman has discussed this issue repeatedly on his blog, as have many others. Gelman has also talked about what he refers to as researcher degrees of freedom (decisions made that don’t involve statistical fishing but may still be questionable). I think that fishing is a very common issue in research, particularly with secondary data analysis. It is really useful for students to think about it early on, and to learn how to formulate hypotheses and research questions before running analyses.

Comparing two analyses without statistical comparisons. I have railed about this issue for many years. Gelman and Stern (2006) wrote a great paper called “The Difference Between “Significant” and “Not Significant” is not Itself Statistically Significant” (Yes, I always tell my students not to use article titles in their writing; I make an exception here). The issue is that researchers often say that two things were correlated, and two other things were not correlated, and therefore they are meaningfully different. Or, two things were correlated for one group, but not the other. For instance, maybe parent-child conflict correlated with substance use at .25, p < .05, whereas parent-child closeness correlated with substance use at .22, p > .05. And the researcher/author might then conclude that conflict matters for substance use, but closeness does not. Not okay! In a paper of mine, I once ran regressions predicting sexual behavior from a set of gendered attitudes, and was interested to see if the gendered attitudes mattered more for men’s or women’s sexual behavior. So I included interactions between each gendered attitude and biological sex. A reviewer then said that I needed to instead run the regressions separately for men and women to see what was significant. That was at least 5 years ago, and I clearly still haven’t gotten over it.

Causal conclusions when not warranted.

I learned the term HARKING.

Preregistration: We discussed arguments for and against pre-registration of hypotheses. And, taking pre-registration a step further, the idea of pre-registering hypotheses AND using simulated data to test hypotheses before actually running analyses in the actual data.

Students also generated the additional issues to consider:

Treating p < .05 as a magical/meaningful cutoff

How/when to report marginal significance/trend level findings.

“The post Responsible reporting first appeared on Eva Lefkowitz’s blog on February 12, 2015.”

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This week in adolescent development: Identity 2

2/3/2015

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Some papers and topics we discussed this week:

Meeus (2011). We discussed longitudinal trends in identity statuses. The paper has an interesting figure that summarizes moves between the different statuses, demonstrating that transition in one particular direction is more common than in another, and that for some (e.g., early closure) stability is much more common than for others (e.g., searching moratorium).

We talked a fair bit about measurement. There’s a good website that brings together several identity measures. It includes, for instance, Marcia identity status interviews. We also talked about the Extended Objective Measure of Ego Identity Status – Revised and about narrative measures of identity, such as McLean and Pratt’s (2006) use of turning point narratives to code meaning making and see how it maps onto identity status.

And like last year, we spent a lot of time debating the theory of emerging adulthood.

“The post This week in Adolescent Development: Identity first appeared on Eva Lefkowitz’s blog on February 3, 2015.”

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Self-plagiarism

Plagiarism

This week in Adolescent Development: Ethnic/racial, sexual, & gender identity 2

Mentoring, authorship, and collaboration

Responsible reporting

This week in adolescent development: Identity 2

Eva S. Lefkowitz

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