Wegman Paper Retracted for Plagiarism

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The journal Computational Data and Statistics Analysis (CSDA) has withdrawn a paper by George Mason University Professor Edward Wegman and his student Jasmin Said for plagiarism, USA Today has reported.

The newspaper quotes CSDA editor Stanley Azen (who is denying responsibility for what appeared to be a rushed, one-man review of the Wegman/Said paper), saying the journalโ€™s legal team has decided to pull the study because of the evidence of plagiarism from Wikipedia andย textbooks.

The Wegman work is part of a flurry of โ€œanalysisโ€ (at least one expert derides this particular paper as โ€œan opinion pieceโ€), that Wegman and Said conducted on behalf of U.S. Congressman Joe Barton (R-Texas), who was using the material to attack the climate scientist Dr. Michael Mann.

Barton commissioned an earlier and similarly problematic report for a Congressional hearing in which he argued that Mannโ€™s iconic โ€œhockey stickโ€ climate reconstruction was statistically unsound. Wegman and Said went on to author the CSDA report, using what they called a โ€œnetwork analysisโ€ to argue that Mann and a small group of climate scientists were short-circuiting the publication process by getting friends to peer-review one anotherโ€™s studies. That puts Editor Azen in an awkward position. A friend of Wegmans, who was himself an editor of CSDA, Azen has no record of anyone other than himself reviewing the Wegman/Said paper, and Azen has no particular expertise in the relatively new field of networkย analysis.

Although โ€œbrokenโ€ in the mainstream news by Dan Vergano at USA Today, credit for this story must go to blogger DeepClimate, who was the first to document Wegman and Saidโ€™s plagiarism. Several others, notably John Mashey and the Simon Fraser University Professor Ted Kirkpatrick, also launched complaints to CSDA and George Mason University about Wegmanโ€™s shoddy work. GMU has yet toย respond.

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