After one and a half years of dingdonging, the Melendez research misconduct investigations finally get an NUS report. Twenty one papers were associated with plagiarism, fabrication and falsification. Strangely, the NUS refuses to say which papers. But the NUS apparently exonerated all the co-authors. Whoohoo......! Nobody else were responsible!
Incredible news, I must say. The lead authors of the papers not responsible? I am sure Melendez was not the lead author for all 21 papers. How can this be?
In the NUS, I am told, there is a scheme of apportioning glory and credit for scientific publications. This is for the purpose of chalking up points for promotions and other 'rewards'. The lead and the corresponding authors get 50% of the credit each. All the other co-authors stuck in between get 10% each. On this model, one published paper with a mass grave of 10 co-authors can chalk up a total of 180% credit.
Contrast this with research misconduct, where suddenly everyone in the mass grave is invisible and not involved, and only one person takes the blame for everything.
You go figure the logic!
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Six Years
12 years ago
5 comments:
Certainly unbelievable that all of the PhD students, RAs etc in his lab who would have been the co-authors came out totally unscathed...so is NUS saying that only he alone doctored all the results, including those from experiments carried out by his students and staff over the 10 years or so he was in NUS???
He certainly wasn't acting alone. How many RAs and grad students were involved, we will now never know. The senior staff who were in on all those publications and who have had received promotions/tenures, grants and various research awards based on all these fraudulent publications should at least be taken to task, and not so easily exonerated.
Certainly hope the higher ups than NUS goerning research integrity would investigate further and not allow any fraudulent stuffs and the persons involved be swept under the carpet/exonerated by simply finding one scapegoate for all the wrongdoings that were carried out in that lab for such a long time and incurred so much taxpayers $$$
you said there would be perks for publications - main authors and co-authors will receive monitory reward? If the paper is retracted, will those authors have to return those perks? And also the awards and promotions on a high profile publications? does any one know about this?
Not direct monetary rewards.... but these 'credits' go towards computing research 'performance', which is used for apportioning bonuses and possibly for the justification of research awards, promotions etc.
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