Thread by @rdpalacio

Here's the story of how some senior academics plagiarized my work, led by my former advisor Stuart Pimm.

I reported research misconduct to @DukeU a while ago.

Earlier this year, they had to acknowledge their wrongdoing, though they did so very subtly.

This is what happened👇

I started my Ph.D. under Prof. Stuart Pimm, a leading academic in conservation.

I was just thrilled to be his student. I never checked for red flags.

We published my first chapter together, but things changed when he offered me a topic for the second chapter of my Ph.D.

Stuart asked me to use a GIS workflow he had used for refining bird ranges.

This would help his NGO @SavingNature1 and @ABCbirds do conservation work in Ecuador.

The catch? We were going to report progress to ABC (basically our clients).

Not ideal for Ph.D. research.

I wasn’t happy with this proposal.

At the time, Stuart had been refining bird ranges for about 10 years with the very same workflow.

It was getting old.

The workflow had also drawn criticism from a scientific and conservation standpoint.

Stuart used to "refine" the expert-drawn BirdLife ranges (in red) by elevation.

The result is a smaller species range (in blue).

This assumes the BirdLife ranges are accurate, yet many are not.

They tend to miss a lot of points (yellow) where species have been recorded.

Consequently, this workflow can generate flawed estimates of species extinction risk under the @IUCNRedList

In a paper with Stuart led by @birdmapper, the IUCN committee said their work...

"represents a fundamental misunderstanding of the Red List categories and criteria."

So I knew we could do better.

I have worked on mapping species ranges for a long time.

The GIS workflow could be improved by starting with the species occurrence data...

and adding some adjustments along the way.

I suggested producing the range maps by drawing the Extent of Occurrence (EOO) around the points, taken from publicly available records.

I showed many examples of how this could work, and why it was better.

But Stuart was settled that this could not be done.

At the time, Stuart believed the BirdLife range maps were mostly fine.

But I finally was able to convince him otherwise- and to proceed with my proposed workflow.

He wrote in an email: "Above all, it's clear you've shown considerable problems with the BirdLife ranges."

But developing the workflow took time, and we were behind schedule for @ABCbirds

To try to expedite my work, Stuart resorted to bullying and harassment.

He even threatened to kick me out of Duke at his own will.

It was a very difficult time, and I decided to change labs.

Afterward, we agreed I will continue developing the geospatial workflow that I had started.

I teamed up with great collaborators, @Pablo_Negret, @jivelasquezt, and A. Jacobson.

I am indebted for their help.

We posted a preprint on April 28, 2020.

Our paper got published in @consbiog in October 2021.

Importantly, we acknowledged Stuart and Ryan’s earlier suggestions (Ryan is the first author of that paper).

This was the right thing to do.

I was surprised when they published their own workflow in @PLOSONE

I thought they had moved on with something else.

The workflow is remarkably similar to mine, and I was not cited. It's plagiarism.

They even used the same hummingbird species I used to illustrate the workflow!

In the conclusions, they say they are a very important group of people that should be taken seriously.

Science 101: The research should hold on its own, not by anyone's name.

Their publication was sloppy and rushed (I guess trying to publish first).

In the supporting information, there is a header for @ScienceAdvances

It seems they got rejected, and when submitting it to @PLOSONE, they overlooked updating it.

Ouch!

This is a Twitter exchange I had with one of the coauthors of that paper.

They admitted that they were aware of my research, and acknowledged that what had been done was clearly a wrongdoing.

"I'm not proud of this, of the way that 'we' kicked you out and took your idea".

During @ICCB2023 this week, they proudly presented how this research has advanced conservation science.

The photo shows @IUCNscience, former Ph.D. student of Stuart. Seems they have a new working document not citing my paper.

The photo was sent to me as I wasn't there.

And so back to where I started.

After my complaint to @DukeU, they had to acknowledge their work was similar to mine, but it's not enough.

I ask @PLOSONE to retract the paper.

Finally, some of these authors are people I have long admired but just didn't seem to care.

Thus, I felt compelled to write this thread.

And I feel at ease I've done my part - exposing light to murky actions - regardless of the potential consequences for me.

R.