This article is about the work of Dr. Robert J Sternberg. He is the past president of the American Psychological Assocation (APA) and is working at the Cornell University. His CV is more than 100 pages long and he has more than 150.000 citations. In recent times, some people have been complaining that most of these citations are self-citations. It also seems that Sternberg makes use of his previous work. A graduate student of the University of Leicester contacted Nick Brown and told him that the texts in Sternberg’s articles and chapters sometimes were almost identical.

Exhibit 1

The graduate student found a 2010 article by Sternberg and noticed that this article was a mashup of his own article from the same year and a book chapter from 2002. There were only a few differences made to the text: some terms had been changed. For instance, “school psychology” was replaced with the term “cognitive education”. This probably had to do that the first was published in “School Psychology International” and the other article in “Journal of Cognitive Education and Psychology”.

Exhibit 2

By downloading Sternberg’s CV and selecting a couple of random articles Nick Brown looked for more examples of this kind of behavior. He found articles from 2003 and 2005 written by Sternberg and his collegeau Dr. Elena Grigorenko and found that these articles had huge overlap. About 60% of the text in the later article was recycled from the article in 2003. And neither of these articles cite each other.

Exhibit 3

Brown was interested in whether some of the texts in the articles mentioned in Exhibit 2 were also used in other publications. He found that chapter 6 of his book in 2012 was based on text of other chapters, such as chapter 11 from his 1990 book, a chapter from his book in 1998, the 2003 article mentioned in Exhibit 2 and chapter 10 of the 2010 book, which was written by Sternberg, Jarvin and Grigorenko.

He cited 59 of his own publications and 10 chapters of books that he has co-edited, but none of the citations were to the work he used from his self in the past. When book chapters are based on previous work, this should be noted. This is not always done by Sternberg.

Exhibit 4

It seems that Sternberg has copied almost entirely chapters from his previous work more than once. An example is that of a chapter which has almost totally been created out of his previous publications. About 80% of the words have been recycled from chapter 9 of his 2011 book.

None of the citations he made indicates that any of the text that he has used has been correctly quoted with quote marks and page numbers. Also four other books were not cited and there was no disclosure given that this chapter has been adapted from previously published material.

Why is this a problem?

In some cases terms had only been replaced by another term. This sometimes doesn’t reflect the real construct that is measured. This leads to less quality of science. For instance, can “competencies” and “expertise” be regarded as the same? This would lead to discussions in which the question could be if it is needed to have two concepts, when people interchangeably use these terms, such as Sternberg does.