More on the Disregard Syndrome

Editor's Note: All of these letters relate to the Opinion article, "The Disregard Syndrome: A Menace to Honest Science?" by Isaac Ginsburg, published in the Dec. 10, 2001 issue of The Scientist. See also, "Demand Citation Vigilance," a commentary by Eugene Garfield. Two common variants of the disregard syndrome deserve explicit identification. The "but see" variant typically involves a citation sequence such as "Much work supports this idea (Alpha 1991, Beta 1992, Gamma 1993—but see Delta 1994)." The "but see" citation to Delta's contrary findings is a fundamentally Machiavellian version of Isaac Ginsburg's "intentional disregard" category: Its user can claim that contrary evidence was acknowledged, yet not appraise readers as to the strength of that evidence. The "most recently cited" variant, on the other hand, reflects only laziness: One cites a very recent work in which the topic is mentioned, even if only in passing, as if it were a major paper, thus making a literature search moot. Although widespread recourse to this tactic of laziness would make for very short citation half-lives, my impression is that the practice is spreading: I expect soon to see work from The Origin of Species attributed to a contemporary researcher in the form "Natural selection is known to lead to the survival of the fittest (Smith 2002)." Both this practice and the "But see" one should be recognized and criticized for what they are: serious departures from ethical standards of science. Raymond J. O'Connor Professor of Wildlife Ecology University of Maine Orono, Maine I keep running into [the Disregard Syndrome] as I read the literature and review manuscripts. In my own research training (McGill University, Experimental Medicine), the first thing we were taught was to review the literature and critically evaluate the scientific evidence (pro and con) as an academic exercise. Then a hypothesis was formulated, etc. I have assumed that people are not receiving this kind of classical training because technology has overwhelmed the process. People have to be reminded that the technology is only a means to the end, not an end in itself. When the whole flap over forging data occurred in the United States back in the 1980s, the blue ribbon panel formed at Harvard University to address the problem concluded that this was due, in part, to the fact that people were not doing master's theses anymore. So there was no one trying to reproduce others' experiments systematically. The answer would be to put rigor back in to the training process. John S. Torday, MSc, PhD Professor, Department of Pediatrics and Obstetrics and Gynecology Director, The Henry L. Guenther Laboratory for Cell/Molecular Research Harbor-UCLA Medical Center Torrance, CA I offer yet another example of the disregard syndrome done in quite a different, but obviously quite intentional, way. Some 20 or 30 years ago, I was on the advisory committee of Clinical Toxicology. I had received an article for review on the animal responses to various chromatographic fractions of extracts of marijuana. As I was reviewing the manuscript I became increasingly aware that I had read the paper before, somewhere. By the time I had completed it, I was completely positive that it had been published before. Since there were two basic disciplines represented in the article, toxicology and botany, I started a dedicated search in the botanical area of my library. After a couple of hours, I connected with it. The identical article had been published in an obscure botanical journal (the authorship was reversed and the abstract changed), but the experimental detail was there, word for word. So here was another variety of your "dishonest science"—getting two citation entries in your bibliography from a single piece of research. The strategy was to pick two journals in different disciplines to increase the odds that no one person would read both of them. I had the first-time ever opportunity of returning the manuscript to the editor with the recommendation that it not be published under any conditions. And I gave him the reason. Alexander T. Shulgin, PhD 1483 Shulgin Road Lafayette, CA 94549 As a young scientist I greatly appreciate the article about accidental disregard of older citations. I rely heavily on the bibliographies of current articles to queue me in as to what older sources I should seek out. If other grad students use the same approach in their literature searches, articles neglected in one generation could be effectively lost forever. It's sort of like genetic drift: a random few citations get perpetuated, while others face oblivion. I have one proposal to help diminish accidental disregard. I recently purchased a portable scanner that I use in lieu of a copy machine when I need to get articles not available electronically. Scanning these articles as portable document format (pdf) files takes only slightly more time than using a copy machine, and it uses considerably less paper. I have built up a respectable library of pdf documents in the past year, many of which are articles that may be prone to accidental disregard. All of these citations are represented in my library, and many listings even have full abstracts (thanks to optical character recognition in Adobe Acrobat). I'm not saying that all pre-Medline articles could be easily scanned and made available, but if there are others out there using scanners instead of copy machines, we could easily upload our libraries to the Internet to make more older articles easily obtainable. Perhaps your thesis the disregard syndrome could even persuade a few more people to jump on the "scanwagon." Perhaps libraries could make scanners available as a less expensive alternative to photocopy machines. I'm sure there are a few legal issues I'm ignoring, but given the importance of and resources invested in many of our nonelectronic journal articles, there ought to be a way to preserve the older literature using the Internet. Eli Bridge University of Minnesota 100 Ecology Bldg. 1987 Upper Buford Circle St. Paul, MN 55108

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