Sunday, March 10, 2013

Plagiarism in NSF Grant Applications


The National Science Foundation (NSF) is investigating nearly 100 cases of suspected plagiarism drawn from a single year's worth of proposals funded by the agency. [2011 is the 'single year' in this sentence]

... In 2005, the NSF IG conducted a pilot study of nearly 1000 pending proposals and found that roughly 2.5% contained "significant amounts of unattributed text," NSF code words for plagiarism. Subsequent smaller studies have largely replicated those findings, Kroll says.

Testifying before the House of Representatives science committee during a 28 February hearing on management challenges facing NSF and other science agencies under the committee's jurisdiction, Lerner said that "extrapolating across the 45,000 proposals NSF receives annually suggests 1300 proposals could contain plagiarism and 450 to 900 could contain problematic data."

More at Science Insider.

0 Comments: