Two articles appear in The Hindu today.
Rahul Siddharthan has an opinion piece about the CNR Rao and SB Krupanidhi plagiarism case and brings out the issues involved and the responsibility of senior scientists. Their responsibility in determining and establishing the atmosphere in which research is carried out is obvious. But what is more disturbing is a news article where Professor Krupanidhi is quoted extensively. He continues to trivialise the acts of plagiarism and refuses to take any responsibility for the papers published under his supervision.
More instances of plagiarism come to light
Krupanidhi still seems to have a very poor understanding about the wrongdoing. In fact he seems to doubt that anything seriously wrong was done at all. It is hardly surprising that research students indulge in “cut and paste” science when their advisers and supervisors – by their own behaviour – demonstrate how little consideration they give to plagiarism.
“We go through checks several times. However, the exact lines [that] appear in the introduction may not be detected by senior authors. Senior authors mainly focus on experimental results, analysis and interpretation of results,” Professor Krupanidhi replied through email to questions raised by The Hindu on how and why the senior researchers failed to identify the infraction.
He then fails to see his own responsibilities:
“Strictly speaking, responsibility lies with everybody. However, when sharing the work in preparing the paper, the student should do the first draft, as it is part of training,” noted Professor Krupanidhi.
Krupanidhi then tries to shrug the whole thing off as being a non-problem.
“Though it is regrettable, the lines appeared only in the introduction and does not relate to the actual work done by us,” Professor Krupanidhi said. According to him “the research ideas and results are totally original and [the paper was] published purely based on technical merit.” Professor Krupanidhi does not think that Chitara would have indulged in similar acts in all the papers written by him.“Not necessarily. Such things happen when the student is weak in writing scientific [literature in] English.” The IISc is “very sensitive and sufficient measures are already being taken” to educate students on the basics of research misconduct and how to avoid committing it, he said.
But The Indian Institue of Science needs to inculcate a sense of ethics from the top down and starting with some ethics training for Professor SB Krupanidhi. But more importantly the prevailing paradigm in India of senior scientists merely appending their names to research papers without contributing to the work and without taking responsibility for any wrongdoing has to change.
Merely relying on automated plagiarism detection software is the act of a “policeman” and can help in detecting the “crime” but only after it has been committed. It is the senior scientists who have to first adopt the underlying values which make plagiarism a “crime”. Whether in industry or in academia, compliance becomes a non-issue in the presence of ethical behaviour.
Tags: CNR Rao, cut and paste, cut and paste science, India, Indian Institute of Science, Krupanidhi, Plagiarism
The k2p blog 
March 9, 2012 at 5:58 am
While it is nice to call for ethics in India, the problem seems to be invasive in academia, particularly in the climate science field among those aligned with IPCC. Fudging research, conspiring to prevent peer review of those you disagree with, schlockey sticks, apocalyptic visions all are ethical breaches. When these people say it’s no big deal what this one or that one did, well maybe in effect some aren’t on the surface, but they at minimum teach others that ethics don’t matter. So lying in research doesn’t matter even when consequences are lethal as long as the scientist/student succeed. Science and religion have this in common: we cannot be teleological (meaning the ends can’t justify the means), we must be deontological ( the means used make the ends just or unjust, good or bad). If the means are polluted ethically, the ends will get messed up.