Science Fictions: How Fraud, Bias, Negligence, and Hype Undermine the Search for Truth

by Stuart Ritchie

Robert Sternberg also engaged in a kind of hybrid of salami-slicing and self-citation: self-plagiarism. In new papers, he re-used chunks of text that he’d previously published elsewhere. You may wonder how one can self-plagiarise: isn’t the whole point of plagiarism that you steal ideas and phrasing from other people? Recycling text might be lazy, but at least it’s not increasing the number of bad or wrong ideas in the world. However, self-plagiarism breaks the author’s contract – sometimes a literal one in the case of copyright forms, but more importantly the metaphorical one with the reader – stipulating that the work is original. It can make you look more productive when in fact you’re just regurgitating the same ideas; and like salami-slicing, it produces an uneven playing field for comparing researchers’ CVs. In recent years many scientists have been caught red-handed republishing sizeable paragraphs of text, sometimes even entire papers, in multiple journals without any indication that they were doing so. In one of Sternberg’s cases, he took an article he’d published in the Journal of Cognitive Education and Psychology, combined it with some text from an older book chapter, changed ‘Cognitive Education’ in the paper’s title to ‘School Psychology’, and got it published in School Psychology International.44 The latter journal’s editor eventually had the paper retracted ‘for reasons of redundant publication’.45 One relatively small-scale analysis of papers from a sample...