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Steve McIntyre at Climate Audit has a very interesting discussion on the giving of credit.
Update: Roger Pielke Jr. blogs on this in rather frank terms:
The short story is that a professor from Ohio State found an error in a paper on Antarctic temperature trends in Nature. He published his analysis of the error on the blog Climate Audit and sent a gracious note to the authors letting them know of his discovery.The Steig Corrigendum (Link)
What did the authors do? They turned around and submitted the correction to Nature as their own work, and then had it published under their own names without so much as an acknowledgment to the Ohio State professor who actually did the work and made the discovery of the error.
by Steve McIntyre on August 5th, 2009
US. federal policy defines plagiarism as follows:
Plagiarism is the appropriation of another person's ideas, processes, results, or words without giving appropriate credit.Here is a discussion of the topic from Penn State, where Michael Mann of Steig et al has an appointment.
In an entirely unrelated development, Steig et al have issued a corrigendum in which they reproduce (without attribution) results previously reported at Climate Audit by Hu McCulloch (and drawn to Steig's attention by email) - see comments below and Hu McCulloch's post here.
They also make an incomplete report of problems with the Harry station - reporting the incorrect location in their Supplementary Information, but failing to report that the "Harry" data used in Steig et al was a bizarre splice of totally unrelated stations (see When Harry Met Gill). The identification of this problem was of course previously credited by the British Antarctic Survey to Gavin the Mystery Man.
You throw out false claims against your opponent and make them spend all their time and money defending themselves against your lies. Classic. It costs little in time or money, just morals if you have any, which isn't often the case for those practicing this style of descrediting the opponent.
I'm not surprised to find the same tactic has spread like a virus to our entire society. You know them by their actions still holds true.