Tactics of scholarly abuses

A chapter in Guy J. Curtis (ed.), Academic Integrity in the Social Sciences: Perspectives on Pedagogy and Practice (Cham, Switzerland: Springer, 2023), pp. 185-200

pdf of chapter

Brian Martin

Abstract

Scholarly abuse takes many forms, including fraud, plagiarism, exploitation, exaggeration of credentials, and blocking others’ submissions and appointments. To better understand how such abuses continue, it is useful to look at tactics used by perpetrators to hide or legitimise their behaviours.

For actions that are widely stigmatised, such as plagiarism, the most common tactic is cover-up. To challenge these forms of abuse, the tactic of exposure is often effective, and most effective when done by those with higher status.

A different dynamic occurs with problematic behaviours that have become institutionalised, such as gift authorship and exaggerated claims in grant applications. Several additional techniques are commonly involved. One is positive framing, so that the actions are seen as normal and complaining about them deviant. Another is to set up official channels that give only an appearance of ensuring proper behaviour.

A tactics analysis offers insight into how abuses are carried out and defended, points to ways to challenge them, and shows how certain questionable behaviours can become so normalised that they are seldom even called abuses.

1 Introduction

Discussions of academic integrity most often focus on behaviour by students, especially plagiarism in assignments and cheating on exams. Student honesty is an important topic, but problematical behaviours by scholars are neglected by comparison.

Even for scholars, most attention is on plagiarism and fraud. Again, these are important but do not exhaust the number of questionable behaviours, including cronyism, padding of curriculum vitae, and exploitation of students. Some of these dubious behaviours receive little attention, and some are treated as normal and not stigmatised.

To better understand abuses by scholars, including why some are highlighted and others tolerated, it is useful to examine tactics. Specifically, tactics here refer to actions by scholars to either reduce or increase concern about problematic behaviours. In the next section, a framework for analysing tactics will be outlined using examples involving censorship. Following this, tactics commonly used in relation to two widely stigmatised abuses, plagiarism and fraud, will be described. Then comes a section on what can be called institutionalised abuses, which typically involve different sorts of tactics.

One implication of this analysis is that in dealing with academic integrity issues, more attention needs to be given to abuses by scholars. A second implication is that some commonly ignored or tolerated behaviours need to be questioned. In social scientific terms, there needs to be more attention to the social construction of scholarly deviance.

2 Tactics of Outrage Management

The purpose of censorship is to restrict awareness of something: a text, a picture, a film or any form of communication. It may seem obvious that prohibiting or penalising publication will achieve this purpose, but sometimes it does the opposite. A famous case involved the celebrity Barbra Streisand. The California Coastal Records Project posted hundreds of photos of the California coastline online. One of them showed Streisand’s mansion. She didn’t want it publicly available and in 2003 sued the photographer and publisher for $50 million. This was a bad move. When news of the suit became public, people flocked to the website to see the photo. Before the attempted censorship, it had been viewed just six times; afterwards, it was viewed hundreds of thousands of times (Adelman, 2007).

This case gave rise to a name: the Streisand effect, when online censorship leads to greater attention to the thing censored. There are many other instances of this effect (Wikipedia, n.d.) but this is not the end of the story because censorship, online or offline, is often quite effective. To understand the process, it is revealing to look at the tactics used by the censors and their opponents (Jansen and Martin, 2015).

In many circles, censorship has a bad reputation. Therefore, powerful censors use a variety of tactics to reduce the possibility of public outrage from their actions. One of the most effective tactics is cover-up: the censorship is hidden, so few people know about it. An example is Google’s manipulation of searches, which is never announced (e.g. Meyers, 2019). By keeping quiet about its actions, Google reduces the likelihood of outrage.

Another example is government surveillance of communications, which is normally hidden. In 2013, Edward Snowden released documents from the National Security Administration (NSA) revealing extensive government surveillance (Greenwald, 2014; Harding, 2014; Snowden, 2019). In this case, cover-up failed, so other methods were used to reduce outrage (Martin, 2015).

A key technique is devaluation of challengers, in this case Snowden, who was called a traitor; his expertise was devalued by calling him “only a contractor.” When someone is labelled negatively, and discredited, they become less credible as a messenger and their message also loses credibility. (For perspectives on devaluation, see Brennan (1995), Keen (1986) and Wolfensberger (1998).)

Another important technique is reinterpretation. Claims were made that NSA data collection was legal, and that it was in the public interest or the national interest. This reframed the surveillance as legal activity, obscuring the question of why it had been kept secret, and reframed it as protection rather than surveillance. The attack on Snowden was also a form of reframing, diverting attention from his revelations, namely the secret surveillance, instead fostering a debate over whether Snowden’s actions were justified.

Another claim was that Snowden should have reported his concerns to his superiors or used internal appeal processes. Snowden says he did raise concerns but, more importantly, he decided to release NSA documents because he had seen what happened to other intelligence-community whistleblowers (Snowden, 2019, pp. 294–295). The history of national-security whistleblowers shows that the expectation to report matters through official channels serves to reduce public outrage (Edmonds, 2012).

Finally, a key technique to reduce outrage over censorship is intimidation: threats and adverse actions taken against anyone who challenges censorship. Intimidation serves to limit the number of revelations, especially via the example of what happened to prominent whistleblowers such as Snowden and Chelsea Manning.

In summary, outrage over censorship can be reduced using a variety of techniques:

• cover-up, namely censorship of the censorship

• devaluation of challengers

• reinterpretation, including reframing of the meaning of events

• use of official channels, so people believe problems are being dealt with

• intimidation of people involved.

These same five types of techniques are used by powerful perpetrators in all sorts of areas, for example sexual harassment, police beatings, massacres and bombings (Martin, 2007; McDonald, Graham and Martin, 2010; Riddick, 2012). It is plausible, therefore, that the same techniques might be observed in struggles over academic abuses.

Perpetrators can be resisted, including in relation to outrage management. The five types of techniques to reduce outrage over censorship point to a set of corresponding counter-techniques:

• exposure of the censorship

• validation of challengers

• interpretation of actions as unfair

• avoidance or discrediting of official channels; instead, mobilisation of support

• resistance to intimidation.

Each of these can be observed in the Streisand affair. Streisand’s legal threat was widely publicised; the photographer and publisher were praised for their work; the legal action was condemned as constituting censorship; ever more people were alerted to the events and encouraged to see Streisand’s suit as wrong; the photographer and publisher did not acquiesce. As a result of the effective use of these counter-techniques, Streisand’s attempt at censorship backfired spectacularly (Jansen and Martin, 2015).

The same counter-techniques can be observed in the struggle over Snowden’s leaking of NSA documents: the leak was itself a dramatic exposure of surveillance; Snowden’s supporters lauded him as a hero serving the public interest; the pursuit of Snowden was portrayed as a reprisal for whistleblowing; Snowden did not trust his fate to courts but instead sought asylum, while journalists reported on the NSA documents; Snowden and journalists in receipt of NSA documents resisted threats by the US government.

In the case of Snowden, there are two distinct injustices, closely linked. First is the massive NSA covert surveillance of electronic communications; second is the attempt to arrest and stigmatise Snowden. The tactics of outrage management relate to one or both injustices.

To refer to an action as unjust or unfair is to make a judgement about it, so in all cases it is more appropriate to refer to perceived injustice or unfairness. A view about whether something is unjust is often at the core of these sorts of struggles. This is certainly relevant when it comes to talking about “scholarly abuses,” because to call something an abuse is to make a judgement about it. When discussing scholarly abuses, then, I am referring to actions that might be thought inappropriate or harmful. Perpetrators of such actions have an interest in painting them as normal and acceptable whereas critics try to make them seem wrong.

In the next section, I apply this framework of tactics for outrage management to highly stigmatised academic actions: fraud and plagiarism. To say they are highly stigmatised is to recognise that there is little question that many people see them as wrong, so we may expect to see many of the tactics and counter-tactics of outrage management.

3 Plagiarism and Fraud

Plagiarism is using the words or ideas of another without appropriate acknowledgement. It is a cardinal sin in academia. Most of the focus is on student plagiarism. Periodically there are scandals due to publicity about episodes of or claims about student plagiarism, or about purchasing of essays, which is a type of plagiarism.

A typical student plagiarist has little power compared to their teacher. To avoid penalty, the student’s most common tactic is cover-up, namely hiding or disguising the copying, for example by using an obscure source (one not on databases), changing some words or finding someone to do their work. If discovered, the plagiarising student can use the tactic of reinterpretation, saying they made a mistake in referencing, did not copy intentionally or did not know it was wrong. (The complication here is that much student plagiarism is not an attempt to cheat but rather due to a lack of understanding of acknowledgement practice (Sutherland-Smith, 2008).) A student plagiariser, due to their weak position in relation to teachers, is seldom able to use tactics of devaluation, official channels or intimidation.

Confronted with evidence of a student’s plagiarism, a teacher’s tactics are straightforward: exposure and interpretation of the behaviour as wrong. This pattern is familiar to most teachers and is only outlined here to show how the tactics model can be applied.

When a plagiarist is in a position of power and status, a somewhat different pattern emerges. In some such cases, a prominent figure is discovered to have plagiarised earlier in their career. Martin Luther King, Jr., the leader of the US civil rights movement, was one of the most prominent political figures in the twentieth century. After he rose to fame, his PhD dissertation came under scrutiny: plagiarism was discovered. Although some tried to publicise this discovery, others sought to keep it quiet or explain it away. King had such high status that his supporters were able to reinterpret the plagiarism as not important because King’s accomplishments were political rather than scholarly (Thelen, 1991).

David Robinson was a British academic who became a high-profile administrator at Australian universities, first as Vice-Chancellor of the University of South Australia and then in 1997 as Vice-Chancellor of Monash University in Melbourne, at the time Australia’s largest university. In 2002, a crisis unfolded, as evidence was revealed that Robinson, in publications in the 1970s and 1980s early in his career, had plagiarised various sources. Consider each of the categories of tactics and counter-tactics (Martin, 2008).

• Cover-up and exposure. One instance of Robinson’s plagiarism had been discovered years earlier. In applying for the VC jobs in Australia, this was known to only a few senior university figures, not more widely: this was the tactic of cover-up. Robinson’s critics used the tactic of exposure, making a succession of disclosures.

• Devaluation and validation. Robinson’s critics presented themselves as defenders of academic standards.

• Interpretation tactics. Robinson blamed his copying on being sloppy and hasty in a rush to publish, whereas his opponents painted the plagiarism as a grievous scholarly sin. Robinson and his supporters focused on his administrative achievements, whereas his critics focused on his scholarly transgressions.

• Official channels. Robinson’s supporters included the members of Monash University’s governing body, who passed a resolution in his defence. Robinson’s critics did not rely on formal complaints but instead found publicity to be their most potent tool.

• Intimidation and resistance. Because Robinson was the VC and had the support of university officials, some of his critics felt afraid to go public: they were not overtly threatened but worried that speaking out might lead to reprisals. Some critics, though, were willing to take the risk: they resisted.

The Robinson case contains more facets than can be addressed here, and this account relies mainly on published information (Martin, 2008). In nearly every such dispute, there are many complications. Here I have extracted a few points to illustrate tactics and counter-tactics. In this case, cover-up was for years the most important method for reducing outrage over plagiarism. When cover-up no longer was effective, other methods were brought into play. As it turned out, Robinson’s actions as VC had created many enemies among academics, and they were able to use information about his plagiarism to discredit him. He resigned.

The cases noted here illustrate the tactics and counter-tactics that can be used in struggles over plagiarism. However, tactics alone are not enough to determine outcomes, which are also influenced by resources available to players in the struggle, the context and various contingent factors. It was not possible to predict in advance the outcome of allegations of plagiarism made against Martin Luther King, Jr. or David Robinson. Nevertheless, the analysis of tactics enables an understanding of struggles and gives some guidance on how to engage in the struggle more effectively.

4 Institutionalised Abuses

Plagiarism and fraud are widely stigmatised but other questionable academic behaviours receive little attention. They have become sufficiently normalised that few people raise concerns about them. They are part of the way the academic system operates; in other words, they are institutionalised. After a brief description of some of these abuses, I will look at the role of tactics in maintaining and challenging them. The questionable practices are listed here in alphabetical order, though this is doubly arbitrary in that there are alternative names for several of the items.

Assessment bias Teachers make assessments of their students in order to assign grades. This process is vulnerable to bias based on a student’s gender, age, religion, ethnicity, appearance, personality, social class and attitude. A teacher can also be influenced by their beliefs about a student’s intelligence. Teacher assessments, in some cases, have major impacts on student careers, for example affecting their admission to university, admission to graduate programmes or their graduation. Some teachers make efforts to ensure their assessments are as unbiased as possible, for example by having work marked by colleagues who do not know the names of the students, but in many cases teacher assessments are affected, often unconsciously, by non-scholarly criteria (see, generally, Banaji and Greenwald, 2013; Eberhardt, 2019). Student ratings of teachers can also be affected by factors unrelated to teaching quality (Greenwald and Gillmore, 1997).

Bullying/mobbing Individuals can be the target of nasty behaviour, such as yelling, denigration and ostracism, coming from a single perpetrator (bullying) or a group (mobbing). Sometimes bullying and mobbing are extraneous to research but sometimes they are directly connected, for example to hinder or drive away a competitor for funds, jobs or status (Westhues, 2004).

Citation bias In writing articles, scholars are expected to cite sources that are most important and relevant to the topic, and ones that influenced the author, but studies show substantial deviations from the ideal (MacRoberts and MacRoberts, 1989). Various forms of bias in citation practices occur, including excessive self-citation, omitting citations to authors who are enemies or otherwise out of favour, and giving unwarranted citations to allies, sources recommended by editors or reviewers, and articles published in the same journal. Another common problem is what might be called plagiarism of citations: copying citations from other publications without reading or checking the articles cited.

Conflict In many universities, there are bitter conflicts involving academics and research students. There is nothing inherently wrong with conflict, but abuses can occur in the manner by which the conflict is waged. Unscrupulous methods include lying and harassment; a particularly nasty method is using students as proxy targets for attacks on colleagues (Peña et al., 2014).

Conflicts of interest (COIs) When a researcher receives funding from a source that has an interest in the issue investigated, this often has an impact on the findings. In short, COIs are often a source of research bias (Krimsky, 2019). Related to this, funders may demand that researchers sign contracts controlling what they can publish (Kypri, 2015)

CV padding A scholar’s calling card is the curriculum vita (or vitae), a list of degrees, job history, publications and other facets of experience and achievement. It is commonplace for scholars to hide or disguise shortcomings and exaggerate achievements (Phillips et al., 2019). This can be done by listing job experience that suggests more than what occurred, for example teaching a class when one contributed only a few guest lectures, or claiming a major contribution to a committee achievement. Most importantly, CVs almost never reveal failures, for example papers rejected by journals. Massaging CVs to give the most favourable impression is standard, analogous to selecting and improving photos on Instagram.

Favouritism When someone known or liked is an applicant for a job, promotion or research grant, it is common to give them extra support. This can be called favouritism, cronyism, discrimination or, if relatives are involved, nepotism. An example is a dean, sitting on a selection committee, giving preference to a collaborator or friend. In academic life, the ideal is to judge people’s performances on merit, but in practice it is difficult to avoid being influenced by non-scholarly factors including friendship (or enmity), familiarity, ethnicity, gender, age and political affiliation. Sexism and racism are two of the most long-standing forms of favouritism; also important are ageism and political affinity. Those who are good looking and who project confidence have advantages. Disciplinary affinity can be very important, with candidates lacking the most favoured degrees and backgrounds discriminated against.

Gift authorship In many contexts, supervisors add their names to publications even though they did little or none of the research. “Supervisor” here can refer to the supervisor of a research student or the senior member of a research team.

Research grant hyperbole It is common for research-grant proposals to make exaggerated claims about originality, achievements and outcomes. In biomedical research, this is manifested in claims about contributing to a cure for cancer. A similar sort of exaggeration occurs in nearly every field. It would be a rare applicant who acknowledged modest previous achievements while proposing an unoriginal project with little hope of advancing knowledge or contributing to social welfare.

Self-plagiarism Many researchers reproduce portions of their own previously published work, without attribution.

These are some of the areas where social scientists, indeed any scholars, can be involved in practices that involve abuse, bias or misrepresentation. The aim here is not to document the prevalence or impact of these problems but rather to examine tactics used to support or challenge them.

The important thing about all of these practices is that they are both commonplace and either tolerated or endorsed as standard practice. None is stigmatised like plagiarism or research fraud. To examine the role of tactics, it is most illuminating to consider cases in which there have been challenges to these practices, looking at the tactics used by challengers and those deployed by defenders of business as usual.

A preliminary general observation can be made. For many of these behaviours, most commonly nothing is said about them. This might be called cover-up, except that if no one is complaining, there is no need for special measures to hide actions. This might also be called reinterpretation: the behaviours are framed as normal and acceptable. Only when critics raise concerns — the tactics of exposure and interpretation as unfair — do the methods of cover-up and reinterpretation need to be deployed.

A closer look at several of these practices reveals some of the characteristic tactics used in defending them, as well as methods for challenging them.

4.1 Tactics of conflicts of interest

COIs are a serious blight on research in every field. The term COI itself is a potent derogatory label: few people like to be said to be in a COI. Critics of insider advantage, for example when committees award grants to allies of committee members, have become vocal in many contexts. A traditional response to allegations of COI bias is to claim that an expert’s judgement is driven by “the science” or “the facts” and not by other considerations. This response works better in the natural sciences where the belief in objectivity remains stronger. In the social sciences, the credibility of claims to objectivity has been under attack for decades (Porter, 1995).

A prime response to allegations about the influence of COIs is to require declarations of COIs. The idea is that when COIs are open, they cannot exert covert influence: people can take them into account. It has now become commonplace for authors of scholarly papers to be expected to list COIs.

As a tactic, listing COIs is an official channel. It gives the appearance of dealing with a problem but in practice often is inadequate. There are two sorts of problems. One is that authors are on their honour in listing COIs: there is no readily available method to check the accuracy of statements, so in many cases it is easy to omit significant COIs. Second, and more importantly, listing a COI does not make it go away: the COI can still cause bias and, perversely, declaring a COI can lead to greater bias due to “moral licensing,” in which a disclosure reduces guilt about making a biased decision (Cain, Loewenstein, and Moore, 2005). The solution to COIs is not to have them. For example, it should be considered unethical for researchers to accept funds from groups with vested interests in the results.

4.2 Tactics of gift authorship

The term “gift authorship” refers to the practice by which authorship or co-authorship is assigned to someone who did little or none of the work (LaFollette, 1992, pp. 91–107). This is sometimes called “honorary authorship.” A related term is “ghostwriting,” in which a writer, called a “ghostwriter” or “ghost,” does most or all of the writing but is inadequately acknowledged, or not at all (Shaw, 1991). In the case of students, this is called contract cheating (Newton, 2018).

In scholarly contexts, gift authorship is commonplace in some places, especially in the sciences and especially in large teams, but can be found in just about any field. Most commonly, supervisors of research students put their names on papers when the students did most or all of the work. Although widespread, there is relatively little documentation of the problem (Martin, 2013; Witton, 1973). Apparently no one has made a systematic study of the practice.

Gift authorship can be considered to be a form of plagiarism: it involves claiming authorship for work done by others. Yet the label “plagiarism” is almost never applied to this practice. This gives a clue to the tactics involved in this form of scholarly exploitation.

An important tactic is cover-up: although many researchers are victims, few ever complain publicly. Another tactic is reinterpretation: senior researchers say or assume they deserve to be co-authors of their students’ research papers because of their intellectual input, mentoring, provision of funding and resources, or other contributions. However, seldom are these researchers called to justify their authorship, so reinterpretation, as a tactic, may not need to be deployed often.

Another important tactic in gift authorship is intimidation: research students are afraid to clash with their supervisors over authorship because they fear reprisals, for example loss of financial support, bad references or even hindering of their studies. As well, students may not have sufficient experience of research to understand when a practice is exploitative.

To challenge gift authorship is not easy. A first step, and technique, is exposing it. This is seldom straightforward. A PhD student can say that their supervisor contributed nothing to their jointly-authored paper, but if the supervisor claims to be a valid co-author, then it is one person’s word against another, and the person with more authority and experience will usually have greater credibility, or at least managers will have more to lose by crossing a productive academic than an aspiring student. Exposure has a greater chance of being influential if it is a collective complaint, with many signatories. However, if the complaint is internal to the institution (a use of official channels), even if it is successful, it is unlikely to lead to wider awareness of the problem. Another avenue for exposure is commentary by senior scholars who are aware of the problem, know about many cases, and — most importantly — are willing to speak out about it. A few scholars have indeed raised concerns about gift authorship (Martin, 2013; Tarnow, n.d.; Witton, 1973), but so far without much wider impact. Because there has been little public exposure of the problem, those who defend or tolerate the usual exploitative practice have seldom needed to deploy other techniques to reduce outrage.

There is a vast amount of educational research, on all sorts of topics, and a plethora of journals. However, some topics are virtually taboo, and scholarly gift authorship seems one of them. Possibly an independent journalist would find it easier to undertake the research, for two reasons: there would be no need to receive approval from a research ethics committee, and not having an academic career would reduce the risk of reprisals.

4.3 Tactics of CV padding

Padding of CVs is so commonplace and accepted that raising awareness of the problem is extremely difficult. One can find advice, for example, on how to explain a gap in your resumé or how to choose the most appropriate people to be listed for giving references. Advice is not needed for some choices, such as never mentioning failures to be appointed or promoted, not listing students who were supervised but did not graduate, not mentioning classes for which teacher evaluations were disastrous, and not listing having been subject to disciplinary actions. The exclusion of negatives, when undertaken by nearly every academic, creates a false picture of performance, analogous to the problem of false appearances on social media, on which a realistic photo of a typical face will appear unattractive by comparison to curated images.

Because CV padding is standard practice, minor embellishments are seldom remarked except perhaps informally by close colleagues who know the truth. However, challenges to certain items on CVs can occur, especially when they are believed to be transgressions. An important example is fraudulent credentials. These can take different forms. Some individuals claim to have received degrees when actually they didn’t: there are numerous websites selling fake degree documents. This may remain unnoticed when someone is performing at the expected level and not otherwise prominent but can become an issue for someone with a public profile. All it takes is for a journalist or disgruntled colleague to contact the institution from which the degree was claimed, asking whether there is a record of a person of that name graduating in the year specified.

A slightly different situation is when someone lists a degree from an institution that lacks credibility, such as an unaccredited university in which payment of a fee and a brief essay is enough to become the possessor of a seemingly respectable degree. In such cases the CV may be accurate but there is an implied misrepresentation in that people expect listed degrees to be from legitimate institutions, namely that they represent having achieved a certain level of study or research. Exposing that someone’s credentials are from disreputable institutions is a common discrediting tactic.

Different again are degrees conferred from reputable institutions but obtained by illegitimate means. Undergraduate cheating is the most well-known scenario: a graduate can be exposed for having paid someone to take examinations for them. Then there is high-level plagiarism, which involves the usual stigma of plagiarism. Prominent European politicians have been exposed for plagiarising in their PhD theses or having them ghostwritten (Weber-Wulff, 2013). This is not padding one’s CV in the usual sense, but rather listing an achievement obtained fraudulently.

4.4 Tactics of self-plagiarism

“Self-plagiarism” refers to reusing one’s own previous ideas or text without appropriate attribution. Related terms, and practices, include text recycling, duplicate publication, textual reuses, redundant publication and self-copying (Bretag and Mahmud, 2009; Eaton and Crossman, 2018). For decades, what is called self-plagiarism was so little noticed that it did not even have a name; without a name, it was difficult to raise concerns about it. A few researchers have documented the extent of this sort of copying. For example, Bretag and Carapiet (2007) used the text-matching software Turnitin, supplemented by close scrutiny of publications, to investigate the extent of unacknowledged copying of authors’ own texts. The bulk of the texts of some multi-authored papers in fields such as psychology was copied, nearly word-for-word, from various previous papers by some of the same authors. For example, the methodology section might be copied from one previous paper and the literature review from another. Bretag and Carapiet (2007) excluded instances when this reuse of text was acknowledged.

Challengers to the practice of unacknowledged copying have used two main techniques. The first is exposure: they speak out about the problem, providing documentation. The second is devaluation: by applying the label “self-plagiarism,” they draw on the connotations of plagiarism, which is highly stigmatised. Andreescu (2013), who gives reasons why copying one’s own texts can be beneficial, deplores the label “self-plagiarism” as unfairly demeaning.

Despite the efforts of Bretag and Mahmud, and others, there has not been very much attention to self-plagiarism. Nevertheless, their efforts have done as much as anything to bring attention to this problematical behaviour.

4.5 Common tactics

Table 1 lists the institutionalised academic abuses addressed here — the sorts of abuses that are often perpetrated without penalty, being accepted as normal or being tolerated — and the typical tactics used to challenge them. Note that these are summary assessments that could be contested.

Table 1. Common challenger and defence tactics for selected academic abuses          

5 Conclusion

Social science, and scholarship more generally, is subject to a wide range of abuses that affect research, researchers, teaching and teachers. In the research domain, a few behaviours are highly stigmatised, notably plagiarism and research fraud. In cases involving violations of accepted behaviour, it is possible to observe a range of tactics, or methods, deployed by perpetrators and by challengers, and allies of each party. For perpetrators, the most common and usually the most effective method is covering up the action, for example hiding and remaining silent about plagiarism. However, after a transgression is exposed, a wider range of tactics can be deployed, including devaluation, reinterpretation, official channels and intimidation, and the counter-tactics of validation, interpretation, mobilisation of support, and resistance.

A different sort of pattern is observed for questionable behaviours that are widespread and either accepted or tolerated, including gift authorship, CV padding, conflicts of interest and bullying. Given that these behaviours are so often allowed to continue without sanction, to call them abuses is a value judgement. Because these behaviours are so entrenched and so readily defended from criticism, they can be called institutionalised. For these behaviours, a different set of tactics is more commonly observed, most notably the introduction of official channels, such as bullying policies and requirements to declare COIs, that give the appearance of addressing the problems but often achieve little in practice (Martin, 2020).

For institutionalised abuses, it is useful to examine tactics in order to learn what is and is not effective. Authorities most commonly introduce official channels that provide symbols of due diligence, often without much evidence of systemic change. For challengers, the tactics of exposure and labelling can have an impact, as in the case of studies of self-plagiarism that reveal deceptive patterns of copying without attribution and apply a discrediting label.

A wider observation is that the widespread condemnation of plagiarism and research fraud can serve to hide the continuation of behaviours, such as COIs and favouritism, that are more common and sometimes more damaging. Rather than spending so much effort decrying already stigmatised behaviours, it may be better to devote more effort to exposing and challenging entrenched problems, and promoting ways to encourage good practice.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Clark Chilson, Guy Curtis, Kelly Gates, Sue Jansen and Erin Twyford for useful comments.

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