The British Journal of Sports Medicine retracted an editorial late last week by Paul McCrory, a former editor of the journal.
The publisher has joined the never-ending plagiarism euphemism parade. The retraction notice, which the journal embargoed until today despite having watermarked the editorial’s PDF “retracted” sometime Thursday or Friday, reads:
“This article has been retracted due to unlawful and indefensible breach of copyright. There was significant overlap with a previous publication, Physics, technology and the Olympics by Dr Steve Haake.”
McCrory, now of the Florey Institute of Neuroscience and Mental Health in Australia, has worked with the Australian Football League and has developed a “reputation for publicly ridiculing research that found a link between repetitive head injury and neurodegenerative disease,” according to The Age. He did not respond to a request for comment from Retraction Watch.
However, Haake did, and we’re publishing his response as a guest post.
By Steve Haake
If you are allowed only six words, then I suppose the euphemism “unlawful and indefensible breach of copyright” captures what happened here. On the other hand, obituaries rarely just say “person dies” as it misses out a hell of a lot of detail.
In 2000, I wrote an article for Physics World on “Physics, technology and the Olympics” on the link between technology and performance. It was a tough commission as I was only five years into my career as a sports engineer and was still working out my thoughts and ideas. This article took a long time with sentences written and re-written numerous times to get the narrative just right.
I later found Paul McCrory’s 2005 editorial warm up piece, “The time lords – measurement and performance in sprinting.” It was immediately obvious that the opening lines were my own. I was astonished to find that just over half of the words in the article were mine (50.7% to be exact): that’s 560 words copied and pasted. Even the carefully crafted final sentence was stolen: “A century on from Baron de Coubertin’s original vision of the Olympics, the motto swifter, higher, stronger ultimately still depends on the skill of the athlete.”
Bewilderingly, I found that Paul was the Editor-in-Chief of the BJSM at the time, and that he’d written another warm up piece in the BJSM two years before on Fraud and misconduct in publication. It’s not as though Paul didn’t know right from wrong or what the word plagiarism means (from the Greek for ‘kidnapping’).
The last most galling aspect of this episode is that his retracted paper still exists on his ResearchGate page and has 3 citations. One of the citations was in a 2011 publication by my own research lab, by people who had been my PhD students and were now full time researchers. Instead of my own Physics World article, they had quoted Paul’s. This is frankly insulting.
I alerted Physics World about this over a decade ago but they didn’t do anything. I put it in the ‘too hard’ pile but the McCrory reference irritatingly kept appearing in searches.
Then, in June 2021, I had to deal with an issue of self-plagiarism in a set of conference proceedings I had edited back in 2006 through Springer.
This showed me that something could actually be done about plagiarism and two days later I wrote to the BJSM. They got onto their investigation immediately but, while the Springer issue I had to resolve took three months from the initial email to the retraction, my own took eight months.
It was only in December 2021 that the BMJ first told me they thought there was “significant overlap” with my work (a similar phrase used in the Springer retraction), and would issue a retraction in January 2022. They agreed when asked that I could see the wording before it was published. Instead, the first I heard about the retraction – and its wording – was a few days before today, when Retraction Watch contacted me for comment.
Am I satisfied? No.
I’ve wondered if there is anything that would be recompense. In the first instance, I would like there to be some punishment for such blatant plagiarism, as there is for students. As academics, we use words to explain our ideas – this is the only intellectual property we have. If anyone can steal our words at any time and get away with it, what’s the point?
Assistant Professor Paul McCrory, MBBS, PhD, FRACP, FACSP, FFSEM, FASMF, FACSM, FRSM, GradDipEpidBioStats (yes – 55 letters!) – with his 530 journal papers, journal editorships (he is still associate editor of Clinical Journal of Sport Medicine) and with all the positions he is clearly proud of – should be a leader of integrity. I tell my PhD students from day one that they are ambassadors for themselves, their colleagues, their university and their country.
I know this won’t happen, but I would like to meet Paul in the presence of his peers, his partner, his mum and others dear to him. I’d like him to look us in the eye, explain to us how and why he did what he did, and apologize. I’d like him then to promise to everyone that, in his numerous positions of power, this was an isolated incident.
He should then decide which of these positions are now untenable.
Steve Haake, OBE, is professor of sports engineering and the director of engagement at the Advanced Wellbeing Research Centre at Sheffield Hallam University.
Like Retraction Watch? You can make a one-time tax-deductible contribution by PayPal or by Square, or a monthly tax-deductible donation by Paypal to support our work, follow us on Twitter, like us on Facebook, add us to your RSS reader, or subscribe to our daily digest. If you find a retraction that’s not in our database, you can let us know here. For comments or feedback, email us at [email protected].
Steve, you may very well get an apology in the manner you describe. But, a promise that such blatant plagiarism was an isolated incident by someone who has published 530 journal papers? My bet is that we will see future RW posts on this ‘text offender’.
Watch this space ;-))
Dear Dr. Haake,
If we were allowed only seven words, then the euphemism “why is there no legal recourse” encapsulates what happened to you.
You received a diluted, delayed and ultimately worthless solution from the publisher.
Should you be satisfied. No. But what to do about it?
Perhaps an on-line clearing house where miscreants can be ‘outed’?
The plagiarism sniffing software we have is so good it once caught me plagiarizing myself !
Surely such software can scan all publications and tag the offending papers. Journals might be asked to join and support such an effort.
No doubt a century on, many of Dr. Haake’s words will still circulate, depending on the skill of the plagiarist(s).
Regards, Theodore
Quelle surprise – it’s the British Journal of Sports Medicine.
Ta-da! http://retractionwatch.com/2022/03/02/was-leading-sports-medicine-researchers-plagiarism-an-isolated-and-unfortunate-incident/
My goodness … THAT was fast!!
And thank YOU, Nick!!!
My research days are back at the Dawn of Time; after BSc, PhD, postdoc and a few years bottom of the academic pile I went into industry. And there is a contrast there, where this behaviour would lead to dismissal; I watched someone who’d lied about their qualifications as they were escorted off the premises, and a couple of years later, after I’d left, someone who’d lied about their lab results met the same fate. But with Professor of Alphabet Soup Paul McCrory, and many others, nothing happens! Maybe a quiet retraction followed by “move along folks, nothing to see here”!
There’s a lot of confusion here about the distinction between plagiarism and infringement of intellectual property. In published work, these often happen simultaneously, but are defined differently. Intellectual property infringement is against the law, and can be remedied through legal mechanisms. There are no laws against plagiarism, which is academic wrongdoing; academic standards of conduct can only be defined and enforced by academic bodies.
The confusion is then amplified by the statement that “ideas – this is the only intellectual property we have”. The legal definition of “intellectual property” here is the wrong way round: “ideas” don’t constitute intellectual property, but rather the “expression of ideas” in published work is intellectual property. For example, excessive verbatim reuse would be infringement of intellectual property, but reusing the same ideas in a completely different manner wouldn’t be infringement.
Intellectual property includes both copyright and moral rights. Copyright is purely an economic matter, and is of little concern for authors whose royalties are negligible, but moral rights provide a legal basis for due acknowledgement when the expression of ideas is reused in later work that is sold or distributed commercially. Moral rights mean that authors have a sense of “ownership” of their words that can be legally enforced.
The journal’s explanation of “unlawful and indefensible breach of copyright” is therefore not a euphemism for plagiarism, but reveals the real reason for retraction. There’s little commercial reason for the journal to retract on the basis of plagiarism, since it’s not against the law. Stronger commercial reasons to retract are: to avoid committing a criminal offence for sale and distribution of infringing material; to avoid any threat of being sued by the original publisher for infringement of copyright; to avoid any threat of being sued by the original author for infringement of moral rights.
David, thanks for the clarification! Maybe my sentence should read “As academics, we use words to explain our ideas – this is all we have” (I can’t think of words to replace ‘intellectual property’ that says what it is i.e. both ideas and mine)
If I have this right, then, it would be for Paul McCrory’s University to deal with the plagiarism and for the courts to deal with the infringement of my moral rights?
In principle, courts and law enforcement agencies deal with any legal wrongdoing such as infringement of your moral rights. In the UK, where BJSM is based, local Trading Standards Authorities have the power to investigate any criminal offence that may have occurred through infringement of intellectual property. The publisher of Physics World, IOP Publishing, should have asked BJSM to stop infringing on its copyright, but perhaps felt it was not worth the time (and hence monetary cost) in pursuing.
In practice, the amounts of money authors receive from academic publishing (generally zero for articles) means that it’s usually in nobody’s benefit to go through legal processes, but they can always be threatened. I have no idea how seriously Trading Standards would deal with a complaint. A reputable publisher ought to come to agreement with authors when there’s been clear infringement, but it’s too often the case that publishers don’t care and nobody else bothers to fix matters.
Paul McCrory’s current employer ought to investigate any plagiarism and should have the power to order him to take remedial action to avoid future damage to the employer’s reputation. Given that the plagiarism occurred before his employment there, I guess that the employer might be limited in the scope of any punishment, but this depends on the terms of employment.
In addition, the publishers are supposed to enforce rules on plagiarism. Any reputable publisher should have some policy on plagiarism, but there’s no universal definition. For a university press, the definition of plagiarism and standards of enforcement are likely to be the same as for the rest of the university, but commercial publishers may be more flexible in their definition and enforcement. If journal editors are employed elsewhere, e.g. by universities, collusion in plagiarism in the course of their external editorial duties could potentially be regarded as academic misconduct by their own employers. Any relevant funding agencies may also have policies regarding plagiarism.
David – thanks for the clear explanation!
Hi Steve. I read your post with interest, and would like to bring attention to one small factual error within the text.
The post incorrectly states that Professor McCrory is ‘still associate editor of the Clinical Journal of Sport Medicine.’
In fact, Professor McCrory has not been an Associate Editor of the Clinical Journal of Sport Medicine (CJSM) for almost the past 8 years, and he is not on the current Journal Editorial Board.
Thanks, and best wishes,
Dr Christopher Hughes (Editor-in-Chief, CJSM).
Dear Christopher,
I sincerely apologise for this error. I took the information from his personal page at the Florey Department of Neuroscience and Mental Health where he has an honorary position from the University of Melbourne. You can access it here:
https://neurologynetwork.com.au/our-neurologists/assoc-prof-paul-mc-crory/
It says the following (my bullets to make the listing clear):
• He has served on expert panels for the NHMRC (e.g. Boxing Injuries and Head and Neck Injuries in Football)…
• He is a Member of the Concussion/Mild TBI Subgroup for the US National Institutes of Health, National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke.
• He is past president of the Australasian College of Sports Physicians and serves on both the Council of the British Association of Sports & Exercise Medicine (the UK equivalent for specialist sports physicians)
• as well as a member of the Board of the Institute of Sports & Exercise Medicine (UK).
• He is the former editor in chief of the British Journal of Sports Medicine (BMJ Publishing Group) from 2001-2008
• as well as an associate editor of Clinical Journal of Sport Medicine (2008-)
• and serves on 5 other journal editorial boards.
The second to last bullet clearly implies that he is still an associate editor of the Clinical Journal of Sport Medicine. Of course, I now know that the statement is not true and will ask the editor of Retraction Watch to make a clear correction to the blog. You might also like to ask Assistant Professor McCrory to correct his webpage.
Again, my apologies,
Steve Haake
It is tempting to dismiss the continued listing of this editorship as just a simple oversight on McCrory’s part. But, the fact that, as Nick Brown has shown, McCrory’s plagiarism extends for several years, it would not surprise me if other fabrications and/or exaggerations of his credentials come to light, a feature he would have in common with at least one other ‘serial plagiarist’ (see, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/09/health/academy-medicine-plagiarism.html).
Thanks Steve – much appreciated. No worries! Will follow-up re: your suggestion. All the best, Chris.