Earlier this week, we wrote about a case of plagiarism in the British Journal of Sports Medicine (BJSM) involving a highly credentialed researcher and Australian Football League consultant who’d cribbed roughly half of an article from another scholar.
The researcher, Paul McCrory, has still not responded to our requests for comment. But in an email to Steve Haake, whose work McCrory lifted while editor of the BJSM, Paul McCrory said that the offense was:
an isolated and unfortunate incident …
That resulted from the uploading to the journals’ website of a “working draft” that “failed to appropriately cite your original and excellent work as the source of the manuscript.”
Unfortunate, yes. Isolated? That’s a bit less clear.
After reading our post, Nick Brown – a data sleuth whose work we’ve covered many times – decided to do his own digging into McCrory’s oeuvre. Quickly, Brown said, he discovered two more papers by McCrory in the BJSM that appeared to contain widespread plagiarism (a word the journal took pains to avoid in its initial retraction notice).
As Brown wrote to Jonathan Drezner, the journal’s editor-in-chief, in an email on which he copied us:
It took me very little time to identify two other pieces by the same author that also appear to be extensively plagiarised:
McCrory P “Definitions for the Purist”, Br J Sports Med 2005;39:786.
McCrory P “Take nothing but pictures, leave nothing but footprints…?”, Br J Sports Med 2006;40:565.
Between 80% and 90% of the text of these pieces has been copied essentially verbatim from other sources, without appropriate citation or attribution.
Brown attached PDFs making the comparisons, and goes on to note that McCrory’s name shows up on some 200 articles in the BJSM. And he adds, helpfully:
Perhaps it might be an interesting project for an editorial assistant to check the rest of them. A few minutes with Google per article looking for key phrases are generally all that is needed. (I have only spent about two hours in total on the entire exercise so far, including the annotations and writing this e-mail.)
Drezner thanked Brown for his message and said he would refer the complaint to the publisher’s ethics division for review.In the meantime, The Australian has picked up the story.
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I was about to say “Unbelievable”, but a more honest and accurate description would be “Totally expected”
In addition to “totally expected” one would like to say “totally unacceptable”.