Maybe we should be looking at it this way… we have an initial (or master study) — the bookends. Then we slip a new slim volume between the bookends, amongst the other volumes and call it a whole new library.

The claims were made regarding Wegman’s paraphrasing of some verbally obtuse descriptions of the principles behind the use of tree rings in paloeclimatology from a book by Raymond Bradley. Anybody with a brain larger than that of a chipmunk could recognize that it had zero impact on the statistical analysis, however, the proprietor of the DC blog who is weak on science and strong on sophistry seemed to think otherwise. Whether or not a reference was given for the material is completely irrelevant (although the source was in fact referred to in another part of Wegman’s report).

It is a classic example of distraction from the meat of the report to an inconsequential side issue and indicates just how short on decent arguments people such as DeepClimate are. I am surprised that anybody else would have paid attention to it.

One possibility is that the team was necessary so they could data recycle amongst themselves, appearing to be independent, and not be caught individually for self-plagiarism.

The Team’s history is one of them being allowed to peer-review each other and claiming independent review, so they were data recycling and then circle-jerking the world with their circle-reviewing. Round and round they go.

Does it ever stop? It is the gift that keeps giving.

My first statistics prof said essentially the same thing. He turned red and spit while he explained that you should decide your statistical analysis tactics first — while you decided what data should be collected and what you wanted to prove. He made it clear that “wanting to prove” and “proving” were independent issues — which is why you had to state your tests up front — so you could decide “success or failure” by reviewing the results — not by deciding which results to present to prove your views. He was a really nice fellow and a good prof — but he had no respect for people who tried to “rescue” projects with statistics — nor did you get approval for “data torture”. He was a good prof, a good researcher, a good designer and — a very nice person. Funny how it all goes together…

I haven’t seen any allegations, but it sounds silly to me. The purpose of Wegman’s report was to show that Mann was or was not using proper statistical analysis. The easiest way to do this is to cite proper (and know improper) methods. The way you do this is to present material from textbooks and journal papers. If Wegman didn’t actually provide the textbook or paper used that’s sloppy, but it would take away from what he was trying to do, so I rather doubt he did so. It may be that some versions didn’t include the bibliography provided, but that would need to be shown.

As for this Mashey report I’ve never heard of it. A citation, if available would be useful.

I really prefer the more Colourful “Salami Slicing” term — kinda makes you want to sit down and have a lunch and a beer with your “fellow colleagues”. It is much better than the “Least Publishable Unit”…

“Salami publication,” or “salami slicing,” is a variant of the smallest-publishable-unit strategy. In salami slicing, data gathered by one research project are separately reported (wholly or in part) in multiple end publications. Salami slicing, apparently named by analogy with the thin slices made from larger pieces of salami meat, is generally considered questionable when not explicitly labeled, as it may lead to the same data being counted multiple times as apparently independent results in aggregate studies

But probably the LPU is the closest… though Google has a fair bit on the Salami…

To each their own.

Steve: This is stupid nonsense. You can find some discussion of it over at Lucia’s – you can discuss it there if you want.

This is a database search engine that I first saw referred to in a Science awhile ago. It was an article discussing self-plagiarism. I only used it to it to look up friends and associates at the time

eTBLAST 3.0:
a similarity-based search engine
http://etest.vbi.vt.edu/etblast3/