This essay was subsequently published as: Dillon, R.T., Jr. (2019d) Plagiarism, Paul Johnson, and The American Fisheries Society. Pp 243 - 249 in The Freshwater Gastropods of North America Volume 4, Essays on Ecology and Biogeography. FWGNA Press, Charleston.
My first impression of Dr. Paul D. Johnson was that of a
“hard-charger.” It was November of 1998,
and I had been invited to Chattanooga to join a committee primarily composed of
natural resource managers, fresh from organizing two successful meetings on
unionid mussel conservation in the Midwest, interested in expanding their
portfolio to include freshwater gastropods and going national. That weekend we drafted a constitution for
The Freshwater Mollusk Conservation Society and made plans for a first general
meeting, to be hosted by Dr. Johnson in Chattanooga four months later. I was pleased to accept the chairmanship of
the FMCS Gastropod Committee that Saturday afternoon in November. And I was honored to nominate Dr. Johnson to
the office of President-elect of the entire society in March, from which he
ascended to the presidency in 2000.
Even as early as 1998, Dr. Johnson was advocating a
“national strategy” for the conservation of freshwater gastropods, to be
modeled after a mussel strategy then nearing completion by the group. This project would involve the development of
a list of North American freshwater gastropods prioritized for conservation
purposes. And of course, Dr. Johnson
envisioned that such a list would arise from a collaborative effort, presumably
coordinated by the FMCS Gastropod Committee.
Although I was not opposed to the idea (15 years ago), it
was my strong opinion that our committee’s first order of business ought to be
a comprehensive survey of the continental freshwater gastropod fauna, only
after which conservation priorities might be assigned. I have also developed moral scruples
regarding the admixture of science, politics, and public policy, which have
deepened in recent years, but no point in going down that road here [1].
In any case, I declined to become involved with Dr.
Johnson’s “national strategy,” passing the chairmanship of the FMCS Gastropod
Committee to him in 2002. The effort
seems to have subsequently shifted home, from the FMCS to the American
Fisheries Society Endangered Species Committee, which has in recent years become
a center for such work on the aquatic biota in general. I have remained on the sidelines, hoping for
the best while fearing the worst. And in
June, alas, my worst fears were realized.
In June Dr. Johnson and 13 of our friends and colleagues published
a feature article in Fisheries, the peer-reviewed journal of the American
Fisheries Society. It is entitled,
“Conservation status of freshwater gastropods of Canada and the United States”
[2].
Although the paper extends
to 36 journal pages, details regarding the development of the data upon which
the Johnson/AFS recommendations of “conservation status” were based are
extremely vague. Here is the single
relevant sentence from the methods section, quoted in its entirety: “Species occurrences within provincial and
state boundaries were generated using primary literature, including provincial
and state checklists where available, as well as personal communications with
professional who are knowledgeable about certain groups or regions.”
Now I have some very, very bad news to report. If you open a new window in your browser
today (9Sept13), go to the USGS website hosting the Johnson/AFS database, and execute a map query for Delaware, you will find almost exactly the same
list of 8 species you received from your identical query of the NatureServe
Explorer database last month.
This is a peculiar list.
Missing from it are the four most common gastropod species actually
inhabiting the freshwaters of Delaware: Physa acuta (aka P. heterostropha),
Menetus dilatatus, Ferrissia fragilis, and Lymnaea (Pseudosuccinea) columella. All four of these species are
very nearly cosmopolitan in their distribution throughout eastern North America,
and simple reference to the collections of either the DMNH or the ANSP would
have returned numerous Delaware records for most of them.
The Johnson/AFS report also includes one species that our
extensive field surveys of Delaware and attendant reviews of systematic
collections have failed to uncover, Physa gyrina. Populations of Physa gyrina do inhabit Ridley
Creek in Delaware County, southeastern Pennsylvania, so on first reading it
certainly seems possible that the Johnson/AFS record might be bona fide. Or might this record represent a
misidentification of Physa acuta? The
DMNH collection does hold a single undated lot of P. acuta (locality just
“Wilmington”) misidentified as P. gyrina.
On 3Aug13 I sent an email inquiry to Dr. Johnson, asking if
he could provide a reference to the primary literature or any other source available
to him supporting his report of P. gyrina in Delaware, with 12 of his coauthors
on the CC line. Dr. Johnson has not
favored me with the courtesy of a reply [3].
The match between the Johnson/AFS database and the
NatureServe database is simply too close to be coincidental. But at
no point in his paper does Dr. Johnson acknowledge NatureServe as the origin of
his primary data – not in methods, results, or acknowledgments. The NatureServe organization is mentioned
only on pages 250, 252 and 263 with regard to its system of conservation
ranking, and cited only with respect to conservation ranking in the reference
section. The Johnson paper does not
include a citation to the NatureServe Explorer as explicitly required by
NatureServe for the fair use of its data.
The match is not perfect.
The exotic Bellamya (“Cipangopaludina”) chinensis was deleted from the
Johnson/AFS Delaware list, and Helisoma (Planorbella) trivolvis added, indeed
#11 on the confirmed list soon to appear on the FWGNA website. The generic nomina of Physa gyrina and
Fossaria obrussa have been emended to Physella and Galba.
But the evidence of
plagiarism is pervasive. My thirty
years of experience grading the genetics lab reports of lazy college sophomores
have (alas!) given me way too much practice identifying the phenomenon [4]. I have footnoted analyses of the situations
in West Virginia [5] and New Jersey [6] below.
If these examples do not constitute sufficient evidence to convince my readership
that the extensive data table reproduced in the appendix of the paper by
Johnson and his colleagues did not originate from the NatureServe Explorer, tell
me how many more such examples are necessary, and I will supply them.
Dr. Paul D. Johnson and his 13 colleagues stole a crappy,
spurious dataset off the internet, tweaked it to the point they thought nobody
would catch them, put their names on it, and transferred it into the
peer-reviewed literature without attribution.
Shame on everybody involved: Arthur E. Bogan, Kenneth M. Brown, Noel M.
Burkhead, James R. Cordeiro, Jeffrey T. Garner, Paul D. Hartfield, Dwayne A. W.
Lepitzki, Gerry L. Mackie, Eva Pip, Thomas A. Tarpley, Jeremy S. Tiemann,
Nathan V. Whelan and Ellen E. Strong.
Your mothers taught you all better.
And both the American Fisheries Society and the USGS
Southeast Ecological Science Center are now accessories to egregious
plagiarism. The Johnson paper must be retracted, with apologies to NatureServe
and to the scientific community at large.
Because the damage extends beyond that done to the
professional reputations of Paul Johnson and his 13 collaborators. The greatest damage is that done to
science. For what was merely the
conventional ignorance of the worldwide web has now been transformed, by its
publication in what appears to be a reputable journal, into ignorance of a high
and aggravated nature, disgorged by 14 professionals whose credentials would
lead one to expect some minimum level of scientific rigor, wrongly. And perhaps a bit of integrity, for a change.
Postscript – On the date this essay was posted I mailed
a formal letter to Dr. John Boreman, the President of the AFS, accusing Dr.
Johnson and his 13 coauthors of plagiarism.
Dr. Boreman then tasked Mr. Jeff Schaeffer, the chief science editor of
Fisheries, to conduct an individual review.
And 11 days later, I received a letter from Mr. Schaeffer finding that my
“letter of complaint and supporting information from the blog do not meet” the
standard of plagiarism. I do not know what
testimony the 14 authors of the Johnson paper might have offered on their own
behalf. I myself was not interviewed.
Notes
[1] The language,
culture, and values of science are not incompatible with those of law, politics
and public policy, but they are not compatible either. And over the years it has become clearer to
me that much damage is done by workers with either worldview when we try to
force a fit with the other, directly analogous to the damage done when a false
compatibility is forced between public policy and religion, or science and
religion, for that matter. See any of my
essays labeled “Worldview Collision” at right for more.
[2] Johnson, P. D., A. E. Bogan, K. M. Brown, N. M.
Burkhead, J. R. Cordeiro, J. T. Garner, P. D. Hartfield, D. A. W. Lepitzki, G.
L. Mackie, E. Pip, T. A. Tarpley, J. S. Tiemann, N. V. Whelan & E. E.
Strong (2013) Conservation status of
freshwater gastropods of Canada and the United States. Fisheries 38: 247 – 282.
[3] The complete correspondence record is as follows. On 2July13 I sent an email to Dr. Johnson
inquiring if he might be willing to share his database of occurrences with me,
and asking for additional detail on the method by which these data were
converted to conservation status recommendations. Twelve (of his 13) coauthors were on the CC
line. (I have been unable to find an email
address for Tarpley.) I received no
reply from any of the 13 recipients. On
3Aug13 I sent a second email to Dr. Johnson, again with 12 coauthors on the CC
line, simply requesting information regarding the occurrence of Physa gyrina in
Delaware. I received one fragmentary
reply from Mr. Jay Cordeiro, who abruptly broke off our correspondence when I
asked for clarification. And I have
heard nothing since.
[4] The sad science of plagiarism detection focuses on the
“shared bonehead error,” or SBE. If
student #2 copies the errorless lab report of student #1, he will not be
caught. If student #2 copies a lab
report, finds errors and fixes them, he will not be caught. In fact, if student #2 copies a lab report
containing reasonable errors, for example “three squared equals six,” he will
not be caught. The key to detecting
plagiarism is the situation where student #2 copies a bonehead error, for
example “three squared equals seven.” Such
“shared bonehead errors” are like fingerprints.
[5] NatureServe’s West Virginia list includes 28
species. To this list Johnson/AFS added
nine nomina – five valid species and four junior synonyms. But there are two SBE omissions on both lists:
Lyogyrus granum and Physa (“Physella”) gyrina.
This despite the fact that reference to the ANSP collection online would
return 1 West Virginia lot of the former and 6 lots of the latter.
[6] NatureServe’s New Jersey list includes 22 species, three
of which are exotic or introduced, reducing the list to just 19. To these 19 Johnson/AFS added ten nomina –
nine of which are specifically valid.
But again there is one SBE omission [7] on both lists: Helisoma
(Planorbella) campanulatum, of which the ANSP collection online holds 15 New
Jersey lots.
[7] There is also at least one glaring “shared reasonable
error” on the two New Jersey lists.
Neither includes Ferrissia fragilis, which is #8 most common of the 30 species
(no not 22, no not 28) soon to be documented on our Freshwater Gastropods of
the Mid-Atlantic website. This omission does
not qualify as a “shared bonehead error,” however, because no national
collection (to my knowledge) actually holds a single New Jersey record of F.
fragilis. The ANSP does hold 8 lots of
F. fragilis from New Jersey, but five are curated as “Ferrissia sp.” in their
online database, and three are misidentified as Ferrissia rivularis. Thus the absence of F. fragilis from the New
Jersey tabulation of Johnson/AFS does not constitute evidence of
plagiarism. It is a glaring example of that
simple, conventional ignorance which we all ought to be working to fix,
together.
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