Erick Jones, the dean of engineering at the University of Nevada in Reno, appears to have engaged in extensive plagiarism in the final report he submitted to the National Science Foundation for a grant, Retraction Watch has learned.
The $28,238 grant partially supported a three-day workshop that Jones and his wife, Felicia Jefferson, held for 21 students in Washington, DC, in April 2022 titled “Broadening Participation in Engineering through Improved Financial Literacy.” Jefferson received a separate award for $21,757.
Jones submitted his final report to the agency in May 2023. Retraction Watch obtained a copy of that report through a public records request to Jones’s previous employer, the University of Texas at Arlington, and identified three published sources of extended passages he used without citation or quotation marks.
Jones, who has been criticized for publishing “bizarre” and “incoherent” articles in the journal he founded, the International Supply Chain Technology Journal, did not respond to a request for comment. Earlier this month, a student at his university launched a petition to demand his resignation which has now garnered more than 200 signatures.
The report to NSF also mentioned the forthcoming publication of a book by Jones and two coauthors titled “Broadening Participation of Financial Literacy in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM),” which Retraction Watch was unable to locate.
Under the National Science Foundation’s grant policies, “fabrication, falsification, or plagiarism in proposing or performing research funded by NSF, reviewing research proposals submitted to NSF, or in reporting research results funded by NSF” is considered a form of research misconduct.
Olivia Mitchell, an economist at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, whose work was cut and pasted into Jones’s grant report called his borrowing “unbelievable” after she was made aware of it by Retraction Watch.
“He has directly copied my words written in a published article with my coauthor and he presented the paragraph verbatim, and without attribution, as his own work without my permission,” she wrote in an email to Retraction Watch. “I condemn this practice and consider it to be a breach of academic integrity.”
Below is a comparison between text in Jones’s 2023 grant report and three published articles.
Jones’s Grant Report:
The modern economy increasingly requires consumers to make many complex and sometimes bewildering financial choices. Almost daily, our students, colleagues, relatives, and even strangers on airplanes ask us difficulty questions including: How many credit cards should I have, and how do I select them? Should I borrow for college, and how much is too much pay? How much should I save in my 401 (K) plan, and where do I invest it? Should I lease or buy a car? Should I rent or buy a place, and how much do I need to put down and what can I afford to pay? When can I afford to retire?
The modern economy increasingly requires consumers to make many complex and sometimes bewildering financial choices. Almost daily, our students, colleagues, relatives, and even strangers on airplanes ask us difficult questions including: “How many credit cards should I have, and how do I select them? Should I borrow for college, and how much is too much to pay? How much should I save in my 401(k) plan, and where do I invest it? Should I lease or buy a car? Should I rent or buy a place, and how much do I need to put down and what can I afford to pay? When can I afford to retire?”
Jones’s Grant Report:
There are three important components of financial literacy that focus on understanding the following: 1) numeracy, or the capacity to calculate a simple compound interest rate; 2) understanding inflation; and 3) knowledge about stocks, stock mutual funds, and risk diversification.
A previous study suggests that there are three important components of financial literacy that focus on understanding [3]: (1) numeracy, or the capacity to calculate a simple compound interest rate; (2) understanding inflation; and (3) knowledge about stocks, stock mutual funds, and risk diversification.
Jones’s Grant Report:
In Japan, men and those with higher education and income tend to have higher financial literacy; moreover, financial literacy is positively correlated with participation in investment activities and retirement planes. For decades in Japan gender roles have restricted women’s participation education and occupation. With this, gender inequality in socioeconomic status may be significant in contribution to the male-female disparities in financial literacy, considering that socioeconomic factors, such as education and occupation, are important determinants of financial literacy.
Previous research has examined Japanese samples and investigated the association of financial literacy, individual characteristics, and financial behavioural choices [12–16]. These scholars report similar results to studies in other countries: namely, men and those with higher education and income tend to have higher financial literacy; moreover, financial literacy is positively correlated with participation in investment activities and retirement plans. In Japan, the conceptualisation of gender roles has restricted women’s participation in education and occupation for decades [17]. Although the situation has improved recently, disparities in higher education and occupation across gender still exist [18]. Therefore, gender inequality in socioeconomic status may be a significant contributing factor to male-female disparities in financial literacy, considering that socioeconomic factors, such as education and occupation, are important determinants of financial literacy [3].
Jones’s Grant Report:
Having a high level of financial literacy is considered as conditioning sensible financial decisions. People who are financially literate should be able to plan and control their personal financial matters, to avoid debt, and to provide for their old age by securing their personal financial prosperity.
A high level of financial literacy is considered as conditioning sensible financial decisions (e.g., Braunstein and Welch, 2002). If people are financially literate, they are supposed to be able to plan and control their personal financial matters, to avoid over-indebtedness, and to provide for their old age by securing their personal financial prosperity (e.g., Lusardi and Mitchell, 2014).
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I love how he not only stole those works but also removed their proper citations to other works too lol.
The only mystery is given the brutal competitiveness of grants, how did he even manage to get one???
These are small grants to fund meetings/colloquiums. They are not the most prestigious or competitive.
The workshop grants I submitted were quite competitive and denied. Maybe not as prestigious, but competitive still.
The bigger question is how many grants get fast tracked and approved to former project directors. There should be a rule that former NSF project directors should not be eligible for NSF awards for a certain number of years.
There might be some significant variation from PO to PO, directorate to directorate. We can both be right, is what I am trying to say.
These aren’t personal essays or a thesis or a signed written article for publishing. It’s just a grant report that cites the info.
It’s not wise to do, it’s lazy in fact, but it’s also not the same thing.
What remains a mystery to me is why bother to avoid citation, and even expend the effort to change a few words but clearly still plagiarize the content. I think it takes more work to do that than to just quote and cite these sections. In fact, I find it enhances the credibility to show how this work is built upon prior work rather than pretending that these thoughts were all original. These conscious choices are mysterious to me.
I agree. Because it’s just a grant report there’d be no problem with extractions that were cited.
I am most disappointed that he didn’t get his wife to do original illustrations for the report!
https://retractionwatch.com/2024/02/11/engineering-deans-journal-serves-as-a-supply-chain-for-bizarre-articles/#comment-2213028
I think some of the commenters are missing the point when they ask why did he plagiarize etc. Just follow the link and try to read the report. It is barely literate and displays no indication that the author can make any useful contributions in this area. For example, go to the paragraph in the report that begins, “The modern economy . . .” and read from there. It reads like a mediocre essay for a high school class. Lots of it makes no sense at all.
The quality of the language is striking, as you say, at least coming from a native speaker. But personally, I wouldn’t read a great deal into a final report, which is not assessed, as opposed to a grant proposal, which is. Taken in isolation this document raises some questions, but as far as I’m concerned, it does not answer them. Among other things, some people do odd things when writing “public-facing” language. Not exactly these things, but something similar. Disclaimer: I’m only looking at this because your comment intrigued me, and I’m certainly not looking at the case as a whole in any detail.
Glc:
I sincerely doubt that, in the entire history of NSF, there has been any other report authored by a native English speaker that was written so incoherently as this one–unless is was another report by this same person. Those paragraphs don’t look like something that someone wrote while in a hurry; they look like something written by someone who has no understanding of what he is writing, and I assume that it’s pretty rare for NSF to fund such people.
Then again, the fact that NSF has repeatedly funded this person suggests to me that NSF’s quality control is not what I’d thought, so maybe there are other reports in the archive that are similarly empty and incoherent.
I guess my point is that the plagiarism here isn’t much different from the non-plagiarized parts: he’s stringing together words with no apparent interest in constructing something that makes any sense.
“Note: Project Outcome Reports are not reviewed or approved by NSF”
(This is not the same as final reports, which are presumably looked over for compliance and not much more. But it seems worth bringing in as it is part of the NSF reporting instructions.)
What I know about quality control relates only to the assessment of proposals (in one particular area). It would certainly be interesting to see the proposal that corresponds to this report.
I didn’t find the public posting of the project outcomes statement for this grant, for some reason. Maybe I didn’t search properly. All I saw was an abstract of the proposal (as a funded grant).
The grant proposal is off the wall but not as wild as the research article reported on here prior–that one is complete nonsense and indecipherable. What’s going on here?
And he’s gone: https://nevadasagebrush.com/2024/04/15/unr-dean-of-engineering-replaced-associate-dean-taking-place/