Academic integrity
jstemwedel | June 28, 2006I'm not going to do this to death, partly because others will and partly because Churchill isn't a scientist. But, given that I'm working the ethics beat at ScienceBlogs, I ought to give you the ethical crib-sheet:
Plagiarism is bad.
Self-plagiarism (that is, recycling stuff you've written and published before without indicating that you're recycling it) is bad.
Ghost-writing pieces for other "scholars" in what purports to be a scholarly anthology might be acceptable under some possible set of circumstances, but it's fishy enough that it's probably best presumed bad.
Citing pieces you've…
jstemwedel | June 12, 2006Occasionally I get email asking for advice in matters around responsible conduct of research. Some readers have related horror stories of research supervisors who grabbed their ideas, protocols, and plans for future experiments, either to give them to another student or postdoc in the lab, or to take for themselves -- with no acknowledgment whatever of the person who actually had the ideas, devised and refined the protocols, or developed the plans for future experiments.
Such behavior, dear reader, is not very ethical.
Sadly, however, much of this behavior seems to be happening in…
jstemwedel | May 18, 2006Some of you with lives tied to the academic calendar have been done for awhile. Others may still be heading for the finish line. In either case, I'm willing to bet some of you have seen some cheating.
The term is when we deal with practical matters of the prevention and punishment of cheating. The interstitial periods between terms might be better spent thinking about the big picture. Some gestures in that direction (from the vault) after the jump.
It must be a law of nature that when past and current graduate students dine together at the end of December the conversation turns, sooner or…
jstemwedel | January 26, 2006Today I had my first (non-virtual) class meetings of the spring semester. There's nothing like having every available seat filled and then having folks stream in to sit on the floor to make an academic feel popular. (Of course, in the past, a significant portion of those who have gotten add-codes have then disappeared until the midterm, after which most of those disappeared for good. But right now I'm popular!)
When it came time to give "the talk" about academic integrity, I was less dispassionate than I have been in years past. It's no secret that I think plagiarism is lame. But, in the…