But Wegman's report has now been undercut by the revelation that much of it was plagiarized from other sources like textbooks and Wikipedia, USA Today reports. The newspaper asked three experts to review the 91-page document, and they found several examples "of passages lifted word for word and what appear to be thinly disguised paraphrases."
"It kind of undermines the credibility of your work criticizing others' integrity when you don't conform to the basic rules of scholarship," Virginia Tech plagiarism expert Skip Garner told USA Today.
Though it's unclear what constitutes a "plagiarism expert," Garner has a Ph.D. in plasma-physics, and as a scientist, he's certainly capable of weighing in on the papers. But you certainly don't need to be a scientist, let alone a "plagiarism expert," to spot Wegman's egregious appropriations.
Raymond Bradley of the University of Massachusetts provided the newspaper with an example of text he believes Wegman cribbed from his textbook "Paleoclimatology: Reconstructing Climates of the Quaternary." The bold sentences are lines he thinks were paraphrased:
Read more at USA Today.• Bradley text: "A cross section of most temperate forest trees will show an alternation of lighter and darker bands, each of which is usually continuous around the tree circumference. These are seasonal growth increments produced by meristematic tissues in the tree's cambium. When viewed in detail (Fig. 10.1), it is clear that they are made up of sequences of large, thin-walled cells (earlywood) and more densely packed, thick-walled cells (latewood). Collectively, each couplet of earlywood and latewood comprises an annual growth increment, more commonly called a tree ring. The mean width of a ring in any one tree is a function of many variables, including the tree species, tree age, availability of stored food within the tree and of important nutrients in the soil, and a whole complex of climatic factors (sunshine, precipitation, temperature, wind speed, humidity, and their distribution throughout the year). The problem facing dendroclimatologists is to extract whatever climatic signal is available in the tree ring data and to distinguish from the background noise."
• Wegman report: "A cross section of a temperate forest tree shows variation of lighter and darker bands that are usually continuous around the circumference of the tree. These bands are the so-called tree rings and are due to seasonal effects. Each tree ring is composed of large thin-walled cells called early wood and smaller, more densely packed thick walled cells called late wood. The average width of a tree ring is a function of many variables including the tree species, tree age, stored carbohydrates in the tree, nutrients in the soil, and climatic factors including sunlight, precipitation, temperature, wind speed, humidity, and even carbon dioxide availability in the atmosphere. Obviously there are many confounding factors, so the problem is to extract the temperature signal and to distinguish the temperature signal from the noise caused by the many confounding factors."
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