“Journal of Economic Perspectives” rebukes Bruno Frey – plus: replies by Torgler and Frey

David Autor, the editor of the “Journal of Economic Perspectives” (JEP)  just told me that Bruno Frey, Benno Torgler and David Savage have been “formerly rebuked” by the JEP because of the “multiple overlapping” of their papers on the sinking of the Titanic. Autor wrote me that

“Frey has directly apologized to the journal and its readers on behalf of himself, his coauthor Benno Torgler, and Benno’s student, David Savage. This correspondence will be published in the forthcoming issue of JEP, which is a very stern and public rebuke to an academic. “

With regard to the paper “Social class and survival on the S.S. Titanic” , which was published in 1986 in “Social Science & Medicine” by Wayne Hall (University of Queensland, Brisbane) [note the weird coincidence that Benno Torgler and David Savage are affiliated with the Queensland University of Technology], Autor told me:

“The Hall paper that you cited (and which I downloaded and read yesterday) comes as unhappy news to my coeditors and me. We were not aware of that article or its overlap with Frey et al. My reading is that there is considerable overlap between Frey et al. and this 1986 paper. It would be extremely difficult to establish that Frey et al. knew of the Hall paper and had borrowed from it. Absent such proof, I would not make such an allegation. However, Frey et al. should have known about this article. It is their responsibility as scholars to fully research the literature in their field of study, and to acknowledge prior contributions accurately and fairly.

It is foolish in the extreme for an author to publish plagiarized work (self-plagiarized or other) in a major journal — as this incident underscores. Academics have long-lived reputations to maintain. And they also sign copyright forms testifying to the originality of their work. These institutions provide strong disincentives against plagiarism. Such behavior is quickly discovered after the work is published, and it does long-lasting damage to the authors. “

(Update: The 1986 paper by Wayne Hall now publicly available here!)

From my point of view, this is a very reasonable reaction by the JEP editors. The journal published by the “American Economic Association” therefore is the second economic journal that rebukes Frey, Torgler and Savage. According to a comment on the blog “Economic Logic”, the editor of the Journal of Economic Behaviour and Organization (JEBO) has told Frey and his coauthors that the JEBO will never again accept one of their articles.

In a different mail, Autor wrote me:

“I’m glad you are bringing this issue to light in the non-academic press. By publishing in JEP the correspondence with Frey et al., I mean to make a very public statement of exactly how such conduct should be treated in scientific publishing. This is intended as a teachable moment for Frey and coauthors and for other scholars considering the benefits and costs of padding one’s CV with self-plagiarized work.”

I’ve also just received an answer by Benno Torgler:

“There are various blogs that have discussed about it. In our view an interesting discussion is provided by Gelman. As far as we know the original discussion started with this blog and a follow up (search for: An unexpected benefit of Arrow’s other theorem).

We encourage you to take a look at it.

Thanks for referring us to other studies. We were not aware of them. We haven’t seen the Hall paper published in Social Science & Medicine beforehand, otherwise we would have cited it. We didn’t know him nor that he is working at the University of Queensland (other university in Brisbane). Yes, we have done a literature research on various issues related to our articles. As you can see, we have, e.g., cited a lot of articles in our JEBO paper. However, it seems that we have missed the ones you have mentioned which is a substantial shortcoming from our part (also taking into account, as you mentioned, that it would have not been difficult to find them). There is no reason why we shouldn’t have cited these previous studies if we would have been aware of them. It would have allowed us to work directly on the comparative approach between ship accidents that we found very important.

Let us answer your other questions jointly. We have failed to properly cross-reference our work. This was not done intentionally to publish more. The papers were published in a short period of time (2010/2011) and we tried to target different audiences (economics, science in general, sociology).

After writing the first working paper submitted to JEBO we thought that we needed a better understanding under what conditions people deviate from selfish behaviour. This can only be achieved with a comparative analysis. Thus, we searched for a ship accident that had similar initial conditions (similar composition of passengers, survival rate, and stable historical norms) and found one with the Lusitania. As a novelty, we analysed these two events in a comparative manner using individual data of the passengers and crew members. The study allowed to explore the interaction of natural survival instincts and internalized social norms due to substantial differences in the sinking time.

We showed that time pressure appears to be crucial when explaining behaviour under extreme conditions of life and death. Even though the two vessels and the composition of their passengers were quite similar, the behaviour of the individuals on board was dramatically different. This was in our opinion a substantial knowledge improvement compared to the first study reaching also a completely different audience (e.g., researchers in the area of biology, zoology etc. approached us after the publication).

If you read the paper (also compared to the JEP) you will notice that we tried to reach a different audience (e.g., link to the fight-or-flight behaviour literature). Science related journals such as PNAS or Science have clear guidelines about cited references. Only published or in-press papers and books may be cited in the reference list in PNAS). At that time the first paper was in the submission process (whether accepted nor published).

Comment by me: That might be true. However, JEBO, PNAS, JEP and Rationality and Society all have guidelines prohibiting concurrent publications. PNAS, for example, insists that “articles are accepted provided they have not been published previously or concurrently submitted for publication elsewhere. Related manuscripts that are in press or submitted elsewhere must be included with your PNAS submission.”

Torgler continues:

The initial version that we submitted to Rationality & Society, entitled at that time “Who Perished on the Titanic? Testing Antecedents of Power”, was directed to the issue of identifying the working of particular antecedents of POWER under conditions of life or death. We thought that this element was not well elaborated in our previous contributions. We also thought that the interdisciplinary readership of R&S (more readers in the area of sociology) would be interested in that aspect.

However, the referees didn’t like the approach asking us to focus on the power of norms. We followed the referees’ advice with the result that the paper became more similar to the other papers such as the JEBO paper, although the JEBO paper provide a more detailed theoretical discussion linking, e.g., our contribution to literature on helping behaviour and altruism. We thought that there are different and rather isolated markets; we assumed that there are few scholars reading Rationality and Society which would either read the Journal of Economic Perspectives or the Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization.

This does not seem to be totally wrong at least judging from the congratulatory remarks and mails we received from scholars of Rationality and Society who were not aware of the JEP publication, and readers of JEP who were not aware of Rationality and Society publication.

Comment by me: The submission guidelines of Rationality and Society state the following: “Authors submitting manuscripts to the journal should not simultaneously submit them to another journal, nor should manuscripts have been published elsewhere in substantially similar form or with substantially similar content. Authors in doubt about what constitutes prior publication should consult the Editor.”

One should note that the first paper that we wrote was already intensively discussed in the media in 2009 after the working paper came out (paper that was published later in JEBO). Similarly, the results of the PNAS study were discussed even more intensively in newspapers.

After receiving the invitation from JEP to write a piece on the Titanic we should have clarified with the editors what we have done so far. It seems that they were aware of the PNAS paper, but not the JEBO one.

We see the challenges one faces when trying to reach different audiences and different (social) sciences. It is important to note that one cannot steal from oneself. Moreover, we have received several congratulatory notes from colleagues (some of whom very well-known scholars) for the JEP publication. They seem to have seen only the JEP version which might suggest that a large readership of the two economics journals JEP and JEBO are quite separate.

I don’t want to be overly picky, but with regard to the JEP this reads like he’s at least partly blaming the editors. From my personal perspective, that’s rather cheeky.

Anyway, it’s interesting to hear that the JEP article was invited by the editors. Probably this means that it wasn’t regarded as an “original, frontier empirical contribution”. With regard to those kind of publications, the JEP submission guidelines demand that “the paper’s main topic and question must not already have found fertile soil in refereed journals”.

A few hours earlier, I also received  a frist reply by Bruno Frey. His secretary wrote me:

“Professor Frey is absent from the institute at the moment. He has been traveling extensively and will continue to do so until mid August. Since your mail seemed quite urgent, I called Professor Frey this morning and discussed the issue with him.

He emphasized that there is a categorical distinction between plagiarism which is stealing ideas and publications from other persons and self-plagiarism which is in a way the opposite, namely not referring to ones earlier work.

This is clearly stated in the paper “Tales from the Editors’ Crypt: Dealing with True, Uncertain, and False Accusations of Plagiarism” (December, 2010) devoted to the subject by J. Barkley Rosser, Jr., the outgoing editor of JEBO (until December 2010): “Legally and ethically speaking, what has come to be called “self-plagiarism” is not true plagiarism, which necessarily involves intellectual property theft of some sort. One cannot steal from oneself” (page 13).

Indeed, we cited a large number of papers related to the topic of our paper. Professor Frey wishes to state this because this important distinction is not always made.

Comment by me: Point taken. However, I did not equal plagiarism with self-plagiarism. Interestingly, on the other hand is that Bruno Frey once gave a talk at the University of Warwick entitled “Academic fraud and illegitimacy”.

On page 22 of his presentation, he asked “What is academic fraud?”. In a sub-section dealing with fraud on the publications stage and – among other things – Frey gives the following examples: “plagiarism ( other / self), duplication, co-submission”.

Back to the mail of Frey’s secretary:

“From your mail we understand that you wish to know how the publication in R&S could have happened. The initial version submitted to Rationality and Society entitled “Who Perished on the Titanic? Testing Antecedents of Power” was directed to the issue of identifying the working of particular antecedents of POWER under conditions of life or death.

This element was not well elaborated in the previous contributions and Professor Frey assumed that the interdisciplinary readership of R&S would be interested in that aspect. However, the referees didn’t like the approach. One, e.g., pointed out that the “framing is all about the antecedents of power: To sociologist this is really not such a compelling question”.

The referee also concluded: “In conclusion, I think that the paper is more about norms than power, and – in effect – is about the power of norms – under conditions that need to be specified”. The authors followed the referees’ advice with the result that the paper became more similar to the other papers.”

Update: The University of Queensland just made the 1986 paper by Wayne Hall (“Social class and survival on the S.S. Titanic”) , which deals with the exactly the same issue and uses very similar methods than the papers by Frey, Torgler and Savage, publicly available.

 

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