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Re: (off-topic) self-plagiarism



Fred Herzfeld is partly right, in that he explains the trigger for breaches of ethics. Currently, academic success is based on filling quotas, which, as mature people know, always produces absurdities. (Consider the ratio of PhD production to job production.) But plagiarism occurs not because of stress, but because of what persons of bad character are willing to do when under stress. And that, boys and girls, is our psychology lesson for today ... - Lance Nizami
 
In a message dated 7/7/2009 3:45:14 P.M. Eastern Daylight Time, herzfeld@xxxxxxxxxxxx writes:
Dear List

I find it interesting that we discuss what a reviewer or editor should do how to behave. Not one
word of why this happens.  It happens (my personal opinion) that there are a number of reasons:

1.    For members of the academic community there is the well known PP. Many schools require at least
one, but hopefully more, publications per year to promote an academic to assistant professor or
higher. That is how Publish or Perish came along.

2.    For members of industrial research organizations (Bell Labs, the former David Sarnoff Research
Center, and many others) the number of publications reflects on your salary and internal and
external promotions.

3.    From 1 and 2 above we can conclude that the number of publications we can list on our CV
contributes in some proportion to the increases in our salaries (among other factors), and in the
eligibility for promotion to some higher research or management level.

4.    From 1,2,and 3 I am led to the conclusion that the problem lies not in ourselves buy in our
employers.

Fred
==========================================

Fred Herzfeld, MIT '54
78 Glynn Marsh Drive #59
Brunswick, Ga.31525
USA