The following showed up in my email one day:

From:

Subject: Self-Plagarism in Current Opinion in Psychology

Date: March 9, 2018 at 4:06:25 PM EST

To: “gelman@stat.columbia.edu” Hello, You might be interested in the tremendous amount of overlap between two recent articles by Benjamin & Bushman (2016 & 2018) in Current Opinion in Psychology. The articles “The Weapons Effect” https://doi.org/10.1016/j.copsyc.2017.04.011 and “The Weapons Priming Effect” https://doi.org/10.1016/j.copsyc.2016.05.003 seem to simply be lightly-rewritten versions of the same piece. Should readers be made aware of the overlap?

I don’t know who this “aoju3n+8h52tq8nmy8ms” person is, but . . . this story is amazing!

To say there’s a “tremendous amount of overlap” between these two papers is an understatement.

To start with, here are the abstracts:

From 2016:

In many societies, weapons are plentiful and highly visible. This review examines recent trends in research on the weapons priming effect, which is the finding that the mere presence of weapons can prime people to behave aggressively. The General Aggression Model provides a theoretical framework to explain why the weapons priming effect occurs. This model postulates that exposure to weapons increases aggressive thoughts and hostile appraisals, thus explaining why weapons facilitate aggressive behavior. Data from meta-analytic reviews are consistent with the General Aggression Model. These findings have important practical as well as theoretical implications. They suggest that the link between weapons and aggression is very strong in semantic memory, and that merely seeing a weapon can make people more aggressive.

from 2018:

In some societies, weapons are plentiful and highly visible. This review examines recent trends in research on the weapons effect, which is the finding that the mere presence of weapons can prime people to behave aggressively. The General Aggression Model provides a theoretical framework to explain why the weapons effect occurs. This model postulates that exposure to weapons increases aggressive thoughts and hostile appraisals, thus explaining why weapons facilitate aggressive behavior. Data from meta-analytic reviews are consistent with the General Aggression Model. These findings have important practical as well as theoretical implications. They suggest that the link between weapons and aggression is very strong in semantic memory, and that merely seeing a weapon can make people more aggressive.

It keeps going from there.

Really, there are only three things missing from that second paper:

1. A left quotation mark (“, or, as we say in Latex, “)

2. A right quotation mark (“, or, as we say in Latex, ”)

3. The following phrase at the very beginning of the paper: “As Benjamin and Bushman (2016) wrote:”

At times I’ve felt some sympathy for authors who follow Arrow’s theorem and publish the same article multiple times: after all, it gives you a change to reach multiple audiences.

But in this case there’s really no excuse at all, as the two papers are published in the very same journal.

Here’s something funny:

Can you believe it? Dude was so clueless that he copied an entire article he’d written, then edited that article, never remembering that he he already published it two years ago.

Brad J. Bushman is Professor of Communication and Psychology, Margaret Hall and Robert Randal Rinehart Chair of Mass Communication at Ohio State University. He also appears to be affiliated with Vrije Universiteit in the Netherlands. Perhaps he holds the Diederik Stapel chair there?

A google search also revealed that Brad Bushman retracted a paper which caused one of his students to retroactively lose her Ph.D. from Ohio State. Bushman has published other papers that appear to have problems. In the meantime, though, he “received the Kurt Lewin Award from the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues for ‘outstanding contributions to the development and integration of psychological research and social action.'”

Bushman also reports:

I have published over 200 peer-reviewed journal articles.

Umm, better change that to “over 199,” as I don’t think “The weapons effect” and “The weapons priming effect” should count as two papers. If publishing two papers with the same content counts as two different articles, then I could easily up my publication count to 10,000 by just standing by the xerox machine.

P.S. I searched Ohio State University’s misconduct rules and found this, which is item 5 on a list of examples of academic misconduct:

Submitting substantially the same work to satisfy requirements for one course or academic requirement that has been submitted in satisfaction of requirements for another course or academic requirement without permission of the instructor of the course for which the work is being submitted or supervising authority for the academic requirement.

Apparently this is a problem if you’re a student, not so much if you’re the “Margaret Hall and Robert Randal Rinehart Chair of Mass Communication.”

Jeez. Bushman was editing the damn journal issue. If he and his collaborators really had nothing new to say, then fine, why not just reproduce the abstract from the earlier paper, with direct citation, and let some other people publish something in the journal? What’s the point of it all? Just to rack up your publication count from 199 to 200?

The whole thing is so pitiful, to go to the trouble of cheating and not even get anything for it. Really the worst of both worlds.

Say what you want about Lance Armstrong, at least he got to wear the yellow jersey for awhile. And Barry Bonds, he got the home run record. But Brad J. Bushman, all he got for his efforts was a duplicate paper in a journal that nobody reads. Was it really worth it, dude?

P.P.S. I just realized something. The guy’s job title is Chair of Mass Communication. Publishing the same article multiple times, that really is a form of “mass communication”!