A new scandal hit the world of psychology last week when it emerged thatRobert J. Sternberg, an eminent experimental psychologist and former President of the American Psychological Association (APA), has been engaging in text recycling aka self-plagiarism.
It has emerged that Sternberg re-used large chunks of previously published text in several publications without any acknowledgement that this done. This discovery came after Sternberg was already under scrutiny for a very high rate of self-citation. In my view, this is a sad case. Sad because I can see no logical reason for Sternberg to do these things. It is not like he was a young researcher desperate to build a career - on the contrary, he was already very succesful. Sternberg's early research focussed on intelligence, IQ and rational thought. As early as 1988 - thirty years ago - he had published major, highly cited research on these topics. In the ...
