But as the group’s impact grew, more of its members were supported by the sports leagues the group was supposed to advise. These relatio...
But as the group’s impact grew, more of its members were supported by the sports leagues the group was supposed to advise. These relationships have prompted critics to question whether the group can truly offer a rigorous and unbiased interpretation of brain injury research.
“There’s no reason to say it’s a consensus, it’s a consensus of people who have been given a lot of money to do this,” said David Michaels, former assistant labor secretary for the Occupational Safety and Health Administration and author of “The Triumph of Doubt: Dark Money and the Science of Deception.” That doesn’t mean they intentionally hide the truth. But we do know that self-interest blinds them to what exist.
Accusations of plagiarism have called McCrory’s credibility into question.
The first accusation of plagiarism against McCrory related to an op-ed he wrote in 2005 for the British Journal of Sports Medicine, which he edited at the time. But Steve Haake, a sports engineering professor in Sheffield, England, noticed that about half of the part had been removed from an article published by Haake five years earlier in Physics World.
This publication did not pursue the case. Last year, Haake raised the issue with the British Journal of Sports Medicine, which eight months later, on February 28, retracted McCrory’s piece due to “unlawful and indefensible copyright infringement”.
Haake was not satisfied.
“I wish there was a punishment for such blatant plagiarism, like there is for students,” haake wrote on the Retraction Watch website. “If someone can steal our words at any time and get away with it, what’s the point?”
McCrory did not respond to a request for comment, but he told Retraction Watch that the plagiarism case was “isolated”. By then, Nick Brown, a doctor who runs a popular blog documenting flaws in published research, had discovered two other papers McCrory published in the British Journal which had potentially been plagiarized. McCrory said in one, the draft article was uploaded prematurely and he asked the newspaper to remove the article. In the other, he said, the composition did not include the necessary quotation marks.
“In both cases, the errors were neither deliberate nor intentional, but nonetheless require redress because what was published is plagiarism,” McCrory told Retraction Watch. “Once again, I apologize for my mistake.”
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