Group clears museum staff of plagiarism

Failure to cite graduate students' writings deemed 'oversight'

Sue Vorenberg | The New Mexican

5/24/2008 - 5/24/08

Rioarribasuchus has made some flashy headlines lately, which you might consider odd for a 200 million-year-old extinct reptile.

But the alligatorlike animal's fame has nothing to do with a Jurassic Park-like resurrection. Instead, it has to do with scientific squabbling over who discovered and named the animal first.

For the past several months, staff members of the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science have been fighting off accusations they plagiarized the work of two graduate students, then rushed a paper to publication to secure naming rights to the animal.

Even after they were cleared by the New Mexico Department of Cultural Affairs, the battle went on, with accusations the department's investigation was biased because two professional associates of Spencer Lucas, the museum's interim director and one of the accused scientists, were on the panel that looked into the problem.

But now, a completely independent body has cleared the scientists of plagiarism.

The Society of Vertebrate Paleontology's Ethics Education Committee announced Friday that Lucas, Adrian Hunt, Andy Heckert and Justin Spielmann, who wrote the paper naming the dinosaur in the museum's bulletin, did not plagiarize the work of the graduate students.

The scientists did, however, fail to cite Jeffrey Martz, who wrote about the animal in his master's thesis at Texas Tech in 2002, for his ideas that the animal was distinctly different from other creatures, the society said, adding the problem was more of an "oversight" on the part of the scientists rather than an intentional act.

"The Ethics Education Committee concluded that this omission did not rise to the level of plagiarism," the findings said.

And the society was unable to come to a conclusion about accusations from another former graduate student from Northern Arizona University, William Parker, who accused the scientists of rushing to publish the name Rioarribasuchus in the museum bulletin two weeks before he published a paper in the Journal of Systematic Paleontology naming the creature Heliocanthus.

Parker said he had permission from the staff members of the museum, who collected the dinosaur fossil in 1998, to study the animal and write a paper about it, which is somewhat of a standard practice in paleontology.

Lucas and the other scientists, however, say they didn't give that permission.

And Parker said he made it known through abstracts, talks and other papers he planned to name the animal, but Lucas and the other scientists said he never spoke to them about it.

"Faced with conflicting testimonies, the Ethics Education Committee was not able to resolve these allegations in favor of either side," the findings said.

The committee added the editorial practices of the museum bulletin left the authors "vulnerable to the appearance of impropriety," since authors of papers in the bulletin can review their own manuscripts or have other scientists in the same institution review their manuscripts, which is not as rigorous as the standards for publication in scientific journals.

The committee also criticized the accusers for blogging about the problem on the Internet. "The public posting of opinion and correspondence about these allegations on the Internet has not been helpful to resolving these matters, both in regard to the SVP Ethics Education Committee fairly resolving the matters, but also in that it has potentially polarized and biased the vertebrate paleontology community in a way that jeopardizes fair consideration of these matters as a community," the findings said.

Lucas said he's satisfied with the statement. "I think the whole thing has been really unfortunate," Lucas said. "It cost a lot of time to deal with these accusations. We didn't do anything wrong, and it's taken months and months to deal with this."

In hindsight, Lucas said, all the parties "could have communicated better."

And if he had been aware of Parker's paper, he would have bowed out and let him name the animal, Lucas added. "If we had known he had an article in print, we would have never written our paper," he said.

Parker said he was also satisfied with the society's findings because they pointed out problems with the museum bulletin's publishing standards, which allow papers to be published more quickly than the procedures used by scientific journals. "It's not proper to do your own review," Parker said.

Still, he'd like to see a more detailed investigation into his accusations from the Department of Cultural Affairs, Parker added. "We felt there was wrongdoing," he said.

Stuart Ashman, secretary of the Cultural Affairs Department, said there won't be a follow-up investigation.

He also said he thought his department's investigation was unbiased, but acknowledged the participation of two of Lucas' colleagues "could appear as if we were trying to set something up."

The society's findings were welcome news, though, and backed up what Cultural Affairs had found in its investigation, he added.

"It feels very good to have the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology validate that," Ashman said. "There was never any doubt in my mind personally about Spencer Lucas' professionalism or his ethics. It's great to have an outside body confirm that."

Contact Sue Vorenberg at 986-3072 or svorenberg@sfnewmexican.com.