Professor of the dark academic arts. It’s a job. Yes, really. No, you never see this position advertised. But it exists. And not just in J K Rowling’s world. In real life. Professors of academic dark arts magick away other people’s work and get away with it. They cast spells which do in their competition.

We have all heard about the dark arts of stealthy plagiarism, unethical appropriation of other people’s research agendas, fudging research results.

While there is emerging systematic evidence of extent of academic dark arts practice (see for example Retraction Watch, and herehere and here, and an interesting editorial here), there are loads and loads of stories. Stories about manipulation of experiments and cleansing of data. Stories about senior academics taking off with ideas generated by doctoral and early career researchers or their peers. Stories about early stage researchers being dismissed when…