Senator Paul Claims to Have Written Scientific Papers....

[xocet]

Of how many papers may Sen. Rand Paul claim authorship? I am unfamiliar with the journals in which he may have published and would not know which medical database(?) would yield an all-encompassing list of his publications (PubMed?).

It would be interesting to read his papers and see what sort of research he has done. Any help in finding the papers that he authored would be appreciated - he does not seem to include a bibliography of his writings on his Senate website.

So far, it seems that at least one review paper from 1988 may be credited to him:

Presumed autoimmune corneal endotheliopathy.
(PMID:3285693)

Paul RH
Department of Ophthalmology, Duke University Medical Center, Durham, NC 27710.
American Journal of Ophthalmology [1988, 105(5):519-522]
Type: Journal Article, Review

http://europepmc.org/abstract/MED/3285693/reload=0;jsessionid=bhFWioQtO1jf8eRearmB.50

Sen. Paul claims to have written scientific papers though:

Sen. Rand Paul Wishes He Could Challenge Plagiarism Critics to a ‘Duel’; Calls Them ‘Hacks and Haters’
By Imtiyaz Delawala
Nov 3, 2013 1:00pm

...

“When I wrote scientific papers, I sometimes had statements with eight footnotes for one sentence. Is that what you want me to do for my speeches? If it’s required, I’ll do it,” Paul added. “But I think I’m being unfairly targeted by a bunch of hacks and haters. And I’m just not going to put up with people casting aspersions on my character.”

...

http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2013/11/sen-rand-paul-wishes-he-could-challenge-plagiarism-critics-to-a-duel-calls-them-hacks-and-haters/

Has he actually written more than this one article?

[The Velveteen Ocelot]

1. And did he actually write even this one?

[randome]

2. Let's see those eight footnotes, too.

[hr][font color="blue"][center]Treat your body like a machine. Your mind like a castle.[/center][/font][hr]

[pinboy3niner]

7. ...for ONE sentence

Who's he writing his scientific papers for--wiki?

[randome]

9. He sounds rattled. Another clown falling out of the car.

[hr][font color="blue"][center]Treat your body like a machine. Your mind like a castle.[/center][/font][hr]

[xocet]

21. That is exactly what I thought.... n/t

[Coyotl]

35. If he really wrote science articles, he would know they are not "footnotes"

They are bibliographical references.

[progressoid]

3. I wouldn't let "Doctor" Paul anywhere near my eyes.

[Orrex]

4. He also claims to have written "The Diary of Anne Frank."

[appleannie1]

5. At the same time he wrote his doctor's diploma?

[randome]

6. He also wrote the stuxnet virus.

[hr][font color="blue"][center]Treat your body like a machine. Your mind like a castle.[/center][/font][hr]

[billh58]

8. I think that it's

an absolute travesty that someone has cast asparagus on the character that he's playing this session.

[randome]

11. And for someone whose hair looks like melted broccoli, too.

Such a shame.
[hr][font color="blue"][center]Treat your body like a machine. Your mind like a castle.[/center][/font][hr]

[malaise]

10. Bet he wrote one to get into his Association

the one he formed

[pinboy3niner]

13. Hey, don't mock! He's Bored Certified!

[hatrack]

40. He was in The Association? He sang "Never My Love"?

Wow!

[JHB]

12. Scientific papers don't allow wholesale plagiarism...

...and footnotes are no excuse. If that's his excuse, then maybe his old papers should be researched and compared to their reference sources.

[Hekate]

26. I think that is what is probably happening even as we write

He should have blamed the speechwriter and intern, and then moved on. What's he's done instead is wave a red flag at Dr. Maddow, Rhodes Scholar, D.Phil. University of Oxford.

Game on.

[Volaris]

31. THIS.

And i cant WAIT for the segmet later this week. Its why the right "...hateses the liberal media, donts we, Prescious?".... always out looking to PROVE what the president knew and HERES when he knew it.

[enlightenment]

28. I don't know the protocol for scientific papers,

but was a bit surprised to see three papers (two journal articles and a case report) with the exact same title as the one above - "Presumed autoimmune corneal endotheliopathy".

Paul wrote his in 1988 and the citation suggests he has 20-odd references.

An earlier article with the same title was published - same journal - in May of 1982 by different authors (co-written) and in between there was a case report, also in the same journal and by a different set of co-authors, in Nov 1982.

Is that a common thing in the hard sciences? In the social sciences, we try to have fairly unique titles for our papers.

[JHB]

36. I won't pretend I know the answer to that, especially not knowing the details.

There are a number of (legitimate) reasons why there may be multiple sources found for one title, but I don't know enough about publishing in that field to make any intelligent guesses.

Given that, it doesn't seem likely to me that he would have so blatantly plagiarized another paper back then, because it likely would have been more obvious (to readers within the field), and the stakes for him professionally would have been much higher back then, as a 25-yr-old med student and not as the center of his own political machine.

[SoCalDem]

41. He probably paid someone to write it for him, and THEY knew better than to plagiarize

People who write papers for others make a tidy sum, and they usually deliver a stellar product

[enlightenment]

42. I agree - I didn't think he cribbed an entire

paper, including title. Given the year he wrote his paper, he was in his last year of med school or newly graduated and in a residency.

Perhaps it's just a convention of the medical sciences; certainly it is clear what you're talking about if you just use the subject for a title. Boring and not a little confusing, though!

[MisterP]

14. well, so's David Duke!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glayde_Whitney#Political_controversies

[gopiscrap]

15. what an asswipe

[kydo]

16. Someone should tell Gattaca Man Rand that middle school papers don't count.

[HereSince1628]

17. The sci. jounrals I've published in don't use footnotes...

footnotes refer to notes at the bottom of a page.

Science journals usually have a reference id in the text that matches with full citations placed at the end of the paper.

Maybe Rand refers to citations that way because he learned the word footnote as a senior in high school and just never transitioned to 'references' and/or 'citations'.

[randome]

20. He's learning another meaning of the word 'footnote'.

As in his value as a Congressman.
[hr][font color="blue"][center]Treat your body like a machine. Your mind like a castle.[/center][/font][hr]

[xocet]

22. That is a good point.

Would you happen to know if PubMed is the best place to look for works that he might have published?

Additionally, would you be able to comment on how review articles are looked at in terms of their value as publications?

[HereSince1628]

25. PubMed should work as should Science Citation Index

I'm not sure what you mean by review article. In science, book reviews don't carry much esteem.

It's my experience that value on publications is a practice usually associated with things like tenure and promotion. That varies from institution to institution.

Large circulation journals with high rejection rates often have a "Wow!" factor. It's typical to see smaller journals (state academy of science for instance) as carrying less prestige.

But the smaller journals are a lot easier to get published in and they may serve exactly the audience who would be most interested...so if you are working on a treatise...say The Pentatomidae (Stinkbugs) of Illinois, and you want to only want to include documented/published records of occurrences you may produce dozens of little state journal publications along the way to working them all into the broader framework of a book that considers all that are known.

The scientific value of a publication is really how important it is to understanding, generally the more important a paper is, the more often people will cite it. Some of the top schools use that criterion rather than number of publications as an indication of faculty reseach quality.

Reviews of areas of study can be important and very helpful...especially to grad students catching up with the advancing front of the field. In my experience, good reviews often also make attempts at summarizing/theoretically framing of what's known. The hypotheses that are generated from such work can be tremendously valuable.

[xocet]

33. Here is an example of a review article with which I am familiar....

Rev. Mod. Phys. 51, 591–648 (1979)
The topological theory of defects in ordered media

N. D. Mermin
Laboratory of Atomic and Solid State Physics Cornell University, Ithaca, New York 14853

Aspects of the theory of homotopy groups are described in a mathematical style closer to that of condensed matter physics than that of topology. The aim is to make more readily accessible to physicists the recent applications of homotopy theory to the study of defects in ordered media. Although many physical examples are woven into the development of the subject, the focus is on mathematical pedagogy rather than on a systematic review of applications.

© 1979 American Physical Society

URL:http://link.aps.org/doi/10.1103/RevModPhys.51.591
DOI:10.1103/RevModPhys.51.591


http://rmp.aps.org/abstract/RMP/v51/i3/p591_1

As the abstract states, this paper takes the mathematics of homotopy groups and restates these ideas in a form that would be more easily understood by someone who is not thoroughly conversant with topology, but who would be familiar with an area of study (ordered media) to which topological methods could be applied. This type of presentation is done to allow one to see how these (mathematical) tools can be used without leading the reader through the construction of the tools themselves. At least, this is approximately what I believe is going on in this kind of a review paper.

This sort of an article is useful in physics, but it is unclear to me what sort of a review article would be useful in Paul's field of study. I would have thought that he might have reviewed and correlated other studies, but there is no mention of statistical analysis in the abstract of what I suppose is his paper. If he is simply stating that he read 20 case studies and is summarizing their findings, this does not strike me as a paper of much significance or utility - however, I could be wrong.

Thank you for your comments and suggestions.

[JHB]

37. Searching on PubMed for Paul RH[Author] has some that are probably his, but...

...there are 352 results some of which are very recent (October 2013), so obviously it's picking up one or more other authors with the same initials and last name. Sorting out his would take more time than I'm prepared to devote to it.

Here's the Pubmed listing for the paper in question:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/3285693

Only one other article is listed as citing it, which may be a sign of how useful (or not) other authors found it.

[johnd83]

18. It is weird he calls them "footnotes"

Normal people would call them "citations". I can't think of any journal that uses footnotes for citations instead of a "references cited" section. I suppose that if you had special permission to reproduce a section of an article or book that would be a footnote.

[JHB]

19. No, if you're quoting a section of another work, it's cited like every other reference in the paper

Unattributed wholesale lifting of other peoples' work doesn't wash.

[enlightenment]

30. A "citation"

can be a footnote or an endnote - or even a bibliographic reference. Every field has their own standard. Footnotes are usually more common in the social sciences and humanities - the hard sciences, etc, generally prefer endnotes. Footnotes are annotated with superscript notation (usually), while endnotes can use superscript or parenthetical notation.

I'm using "usually" and "generally" because there are so many different styles. In my field we use Chicago Style - the grandmother of footnotes, so I'm familiar with it more than others.

I've never liked the hard science referencing because it doesn't seem to take me to the exact place something is discussed - sometimes it just seems like it is sufficient to say "it's in this article or this monograph", even if the article or monograph is fantastically long and the cite might be a single sentence buried somewhere in it. It's annoying.

[nyquil_man]

23. The man's got a complex.

Either he thinks so little of himself that he needs to build himself up in the eyes of others or he thinks we're all morons.

[malaise]

24. Tell him Rachel Maddow wrote a fugging PhD thesis at

Oxfuggin'ford University as a Rhodes scholar, so he can go Cheney himself and continue to plagiarize Wikipedia.

[giftedgirl77]

27. This fucker is special as hell.

You would think eventually he would just stop spewing bullshit since it only takes a few clicks to find out it is yet another fallacy he speaks

[MattBaggins]

29. He should have kept his trap shut

Now even more people will be pouring over his old papers to find these reports.

[Denzil_DC]

32. I fed the search term

"R.H. Paul" ophthalmology

into Google scholar (I doubt he's written on gynecology, as someone I presume to be a different R.H. Paul has, but who knows?)

http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=%22r.h.+paul%22+ophthalmology&btnG=&hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5

It came up with about 72 results, if you've the time to look though them, with the article you cite as the first result. A term other than ophthalmology might also help if you can think of anything that would single him out (that isn't profane ...).

[xocet]

34. Thanks. I have been looking at some of those entries.

I think that I'll see about visiting a university library, so that I can have unrestricted access to the articles.

[Denzil_DC]

38. You're welcome.

I hope somebody with more resources than either of us is onto this anyway.

Who knows? Maybe somebody from his academic past will crop up with beans to spill as well. Given his social skills, he's probably made some enemies along the way ....

I hope you'll post about anything you find - though if you do turn up something interesting, if you know any journos, it would be as well to tip them off too.

[hatrack]

39. In one, he discussed how some peas are wrinkled, and others are smooth . . .

In another, he mentioned how many different organisms - pigeons, barnacles and finches - have different physical attributes, then posited an amazing idea - that natural variation over time produces the many species of plants and animals we know today.

Amazing!