BIOETHICS

The Bioethics Imperative XIV

Ethics and the Literature: Citations II

“Mokita”: The truth we all know and agree not to talk about.

Scenario: Justa Learnin, a student writing her first manuscript, goes online to write about the diet of the red-horned worm. She downloads the data, plunks it into her computer, reads all the abstracts, and writes her manuscript, which states that “the red-horned worm does not eat acacia.” She and her mentor, Dr. Heresay, submit it to the prestigious Journal of Worms & Bugs. A month later, reviews arrive with scathing comments from the reviewers, who ask why there are no citations from before 1995, especially since evidence that the red-horned worm does eat acacia was described back in 1938. Justa and Dr. Heresay re-do their manuscript more carefully after discovering that the database Justa used covers articles only from 1995 forward. This time, using printed indexes, they discover a large body of information on the diet of the red-horned worm.

In the last column, we dealt with an incomplete electronic literature search. Here, we are really dealing not only with the generation gap in technology but with three other issues as well: (1) understanding the coverage of a database, (2) correctly preparing references in the article(s) that one writes, and (3) reading entire articles rather than just blindly citing references that someone else has used. I have had many an undergraduate student exclaim, “What, they keep references in the library, the physical books?! You mean I have to walk up there, find it, and copy it?! How do I find a paper in that big building?!”

The Dewey Decimal System may well be foreign to this generation, just as reading a bibliography and verifying the older references through the paper trail is not intuitive. Younger students have grown up in the electronic age, and learning these skills may not have been part of their schooling. Here’s an analogy: My parents did not grow up with computers, and my generation did not grow up with the web. In this information age, that makes a difference in how you think and problem-solve—in fact, in how you face the world. Mentors have two ethical responsibilities here: (1) to teach the youngsters these tricks of the trade and (2) to learn what their students can teach them about the new electronic world.

“How do you do a search for things that are just printed on paper?” is usually the next question. Students of the information age are used to searching electronically with keywords for just the nugget they need and usually don’t read much more than the abstract and bits of the introduction or discussion in the articles they cite. Sometimes the data they assumed to exist are not there once they really set out to find them. In my lab, we recently found that this game of citing non-existent data had created a dogma: Toxic compound “Y” is shuttled directly into the vacuole in plants. We did the actual experiment and found no Y in the vacuole but in other locations. When we traced all the leads back into the literature there was only supposition; the dogma was based on thin air and bad citation practices.

Beware, too, of simply citing references found in articles without actually obtaining the cited article and reading it to make certain it is appropriate and correct. At the very least, many such citations are incorrect, and you perpetuate the errors by citing them blindly.
It takes time and work to verify what you cite, to read what you cite, and to think critically about the data you cite in all your written work. Recently, D. Malakoff discussed the scientific misconduct of a principal investigator who misrepresented his own data in a grant application (Science, April 4, 2003, 300(5616): 40). The ethical consequences of not accurately citing the literature are manifold and all negative. The responsibility is clearly on our shoulders.

Next: Ethics and the Literature: Citations III

Dina Mandoli
University of Washington, Seattle
mandoli@u.washington.edu

A New Section on the ASPB Web Site

In this new section, we will post stories from others that relate to a particular Bioethics Imperative column or topic in the hopes of engendering a dialogue among members and as a resource for mentors and students alike. Please e-mail me with your tales! Dina Mandoli at mandoli@ u.washington.edu.

The Bioethics Imperative XIV: Ethics and the Literature: Citations II

“Once in the mid-1990s, when I was editing a medical journal, I was suspicious of a reference a doctor had used because it was from 1814. I doubted whether he had read it and wondered if it was a correct citation anyway. It was not. I used Science Citation Index to track it and found dozens of articles that cited the 1814 article, each with a slight variation on the article’s title and all with different pages listed for the beginning and end of the article. The journal was British and was not held by the National Library of Medicine. Eventually, with the help of Sarah N. Dippity, I discovered a set of the journal in question in the private office of a doctor on the East Coast. His widow answered the phone and told me she was 93 years old but just loved to go into her husband’s old office and help the researchers who were carrying on his work. She brought the volume in question to the phone and painstakingly read me the title of the article (different from every other instance of it that I had come across), the volume and issue numbers, and the inclusive page number. She also volunteered to read the article to me, since it was only one page long. Guess what? The article had absolutely nothing to do with the topic of the article that had been submitted to me for our journal. The author had seen the reference in a paper he’d read and cited it blindly.”

Submitted by Tamara Turner, librarian and editor, Seattle, September 2003