The, apparently 'celebrity', psychiatrist Dr Raj Persaud has been suspended from practising as a shrink for three months due to plagiarism in articles he had published in the media (it seems he appears regularly on TV, though perhaps not this summer).
Three things come to mind: Why does plagiarism affect a person's ability to deal with people with mental illness, or, for that matter, to carry out surgery or whatever? The feeling seems to be that because he has been dishonest here, he'll be dishonest to his patients. I suppose he could then tell people that these drugs are better than the others, and collect a fee or a holiday from a drugs company. But he would be far from the only one now, wouldn't he? I would have thought that he might never be able to publish certainly a learned article, and maybe even any books he writes might be looked at more critically than normal, but the impact on patient care? It would be good to have a survey of people with mental health problems, eg his patients, to see what they think about this.
The other thought is that he 'gets done' for three months for plagiarism, how long should someone get who leaves a scalpel in a patient, cuts off the wrong leg, or interferes with a patient?
And finally, I wonder how much training people get in medical schools on writing essays and articles? Do they do any research as students, and are they told about plagiarism? A friend of mine had to retake some of his MA exam following an accusation of plagiarism - that's after two years of study, when he had failed to transfer references into the summary he had written of a paper. My own university (the Open University) is extremely hot on plagiarism, and certainly at Masters level, if not earlier, you learn very quickly a) to quote like crazy, and b) to label every reference, whether it is a direct quote or whether you say 'as Mr X argues'. It's a pain in the neck to do, but it does really cover the student against any accusation that they stole someone else's laurels. In this case I wonder if it was intentional (though much mention has been made of a whole sentence, by a different author, in which one word was changed; I mean, really!), or whether Dr Persaud was just slapdash.
Will he ever get anything scientific publish again? If you were a journal editor, would you take his work?
Three things come to mind: Why does plagiarism affect a person's ability to deal with people with mental illness, or, for that matter, to carry out surgery or whatever? The feeling seems to be that because he has been dishonest here, he'll be dishonest to his patients. I suppose he could then tell people that these drugs are better than the others, and collect a fee or a holiday from a drugs company. But he would be far from the only one now, wouldn't he? I would have thought that he might never be able to publish certainly a learned article, and maybe even any books he writes might be looked at more critically than normal, but the impact on patient care? It would be good to have a survey of people with mental health problems, eg his patients, to see what they think about this.
The other thought is that he 'gets done' for three months for plagiarism, how long should someone get who leaves a scalpel in a patient, cuts off the wrong leg, or interferes with a patient?
And finally, I wonder how much training people get in medical schools on writing essays and articles? Do they do any research as students, and are they told about plagiarism? A friend of mine had to retake some of his MA exam following an accusation of plagiarism - that's after two years of study, when he had failed to transfer references into the summary he had written of a paper. My own university (the Open University) is extremely hot on plagiarism, and certainly at Masters level, if not earlier, you learn very quickly a) to quote like crazy, and b) to label every reference, whether it is a direct quote or whether you say 'as Mr X argues'. It's a pain in the neck to do, but it does really cover the student against any accusation that they stole someone else's laurels. In this case I wonder if it was intentional (though much mention has been made of a whole sentence, by a different author, in which one word was changed; I mean, really!), or whether Dr Persaud was just slapdash.
Will he ever get anything scientific publish again? If you were a journal editor, would you take his work?
No comments:
Post a Comment