paper clip essay

How to Stick With Good Habits Every Day by Using the “Paper Clip Strategy”

This article is an excerpt from Atomic Habits , my New York Times bestselling book.

In 1993, a bank in Abbotsford, Canada, hired a twenty-three-year-old stockbroker named Trent Dyrsmid. Abbotsford was a relatively small suburb, tucked away in the shadow of nearby Vancouver, where most of the big business deals were being made. Given the location, and the fact that Dyrsmid was a rookie, nobody expected too much of him. But he made brisk progress thanks to a simple daily habit.

The Paper Clip Strategy

Dyrsmid began each morning with two jars on his desk. One was filled with 120 paper clips. The other was empty. As soon as he settled in each day, he would make a sales call. Immediately after, he would move one paper clip from the full jar to the empty jar and the process would begin again. “Every morning I would start with 120 paper clips in one jar and I would keep dialing the phone until I had moved them all to the second jar,” he told me. 1

Within eighteen months, Dyrsmid was bringing in $5 million to the firm. By age twenty-four, he was making $75,000 per year—the equivalent of $125,000 today. Not long after, he landed a six-figure job with another company.

Good Habits That Stick vs. Habits That Fail

When I asked Dyrsmid about the details of his habit, he simply said, “I would start calling at 8 a.m. every day. I never looked at stock quotes or analyst research. I also never read the newspaper for the entire time. If the news was really important, it would find me from other ways.”

Trent Dyrsmid’s story is evidence of a simple truth: Success is often a result of committing to the fundamentals over and over again. 2

Compare Trent’s results to where you and I often find ourselves. We want to be consistent with our workouts , but struggle to make it into the gym. We know we should write more Thank You notes or eat healthier meals or read more books , but can’t seem to find the motivation to get it done. We’d like to achieve our goals, but still procrastinate on them.

What makes the difference? Why do some good habits stick while others fail? Why did Trent’s paper clip strategy work so well and what can we learn from it?

The Power of a Visual Cue

I believe the “Paper Clip Strategy” works particularly well because it creates a visual trigger that can help motivate you to perform a habit with more consistency. I’ve heard from readers who have employed it in a variety of ways. One woman shifted a hairpin from one container to another whenever she wrote a page of her book. Another man moved a marble from one bin to the next after each set of push-ups.

Making progress is satisfying, and visual measures—like moving paperclips or hairpins or marbles—provide clear evidence of your progress. As a result, they reinforce your behavior and add little bit of immediate satisfaction to any activity.

Here are a few reasons visual cues work well for building new good habits…

Visual cues remind you to start a behavior. We often lie to ourselves about our ability to remember to perform a new habit. ( “I’m going to start eating healthier. For real this time.” ) A few days later, however, the motivation fades and the busyness of life begins to take over again. Hoping you will simply remember to do a new habit is usually a recipe for failure. This is why a visual stimulus, like a bin full of paper clips, can be so useful. It is much easier to stick with good habits when your environment nudges you in the right direction .

Visual cues display your progress on a behavior. Everyone knows consistency is an essential component of success, but few people actually measure how consistent they are in real life. The Paper Clip Strategy avoids that pitfall because it is a built-in measuring system. One look at your paper clips and you immediately have a measure of your progress.

Visual cues can have an additive effect on motivation. As the visual evidence of your progress mounts, it is natural to become more motivated to continue the habit. The more paperclips you place in the bin, the more motivated you will become to finish the task. There are a variety of popular behavioral economics studies that refer to this as the Endowed Progress Effect , which essentially says we place more value on things once we have them. In other words, the more paper clips you move to the “Completed” bin, the more valuable completing the habit becomes to you. 3

Visual cues can be used to drive short-term and long-term motivation. The Paper Clip Strategy can provide daily motivation, but you start from scratch each day. However, another type of visual cue, like the “Don’t Break the Chain” Calendar that I described in my article on the Seinfeld Strategy can be used to showcase your consistency over longer periods of time. By stacking these two methods together, you can create a set of visual cues that motivate and measure your habits over the short-run and the long-run.

Creating Your Own Paper Clip Strategy

There are all sorts of ways to use the paper clip strategy for your own goals.

• Hoping to do 100 pushups each day? Start with 10 paper clips and move one over each time you drop down and do a set of 10 throughout the day.
• Need to send 25 sales emails every day? Start with 25 paper clips and toss one to the other side each time you press Send.
• Want to drink 8 glasses of water each day? Start with 8 paper clips and slide one over each time you finish a glass.
• Not sure if you’re taking your medication three times per day? Set 3 paper clips out and flip one into the bin each time you swallow your pills.

Best of all, the entire strategy will cost you less than $10.

• Grab a box of standard paper clips ( here is a cheap set ).
• Get two standard paper clip holders ( here you go ).
• Pick your habit and start moving those bad boys from one side to the other.

Trent Dyrsmid decided that success in his field came down to one core task: making more sales calls. He discovered that mastering the fundamentals is what makes the difference.

The same is true for your goals. There is no secret sauce. There is no magic bullet. Good habits are the magic bullet.

This article is an excerpt from Chapter 16 of my New York Times bestselling book Atomic Habits.  Read more here . 

I was introduced to Trent Dyrsmid through my friend Nathan Barry . The quotes in this article come from an email exchange I had with Dyrsmid on April 1st, 2015 and April 2nd, 2015.

Related article: “Everybody already knows that” is very different from “Everybody already does that.”

On a related note, visual cues can also be used to provide fear-based motivation. I have heard of weight loss clients moving glass marbles from one jar to another for each pound they lose. Once you move a marble over, you definitely don’t want to move it back.

Thanks for reading. You can get more actionable ideas in my popular email newsletter. Each week, I share 3 short ideas from me, 2 quotes from others, and 1 question to think about. Over 3,000,000 people subscribe . Enter your email now and join us.

James Clear writes about habits, decision making, and continuous improvement. He is the author of the #1 New York Times bestseller, Atomic Habits . The book has sold over 20 million copies worldwide and has been translated into more than 60 languages.

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The Perfection of the Paper Clip

It was invented in 1899. it hasn’t been improved upon since..

Getty Images/BananaStock via Thinkstock.

The paper clip is something of a fetish object in design circles. Its spare, machined aesthetic and its inexpensive ubiquity landed it a spot in MoMA’s 2004 show Humble Masterpieces . This was a pedestal too high for design critic Michael Bierut, who responded with an essay called “ To Hell with the Simple Paper Clip .” He argued that designers praise supposedly unauthored objects like the paper clip because they’re loath to choose between giving publicity to a competitor and egotistically touting their own designs. Bierut might be right about his colleagues’ motives, but he’s wrong about the paper clip: It’s not all that simple.

Most everyday objects—like the key , or the book , or the phone —evolve over time in incremental ways, and the 20 th century in particular revolutionized, streamlined, or technologized the vast majority of the things you hold in your hand over the course of an average day. But if you could step into an office in 1895—walking past horse-drawn buses and rows of wooden telephone switchboard cabinets—you might find a perfectly recognizable, shiny silver paper clip sitting on a desk. What was then a brand-new technology is now, well over a century later, likely to be in the same place, ready to perform the same tasks. Why did the paper clip find its form so quickly, and why has it stuck with us for so long?

Before the paper clip, there was paper. When it was developed in China in the first century A.D., paper was made from cotton and linen. (Some contemporary paper is still made this way; most currency is printed on it.) This rag paper was expensive to produce, so it was primarily reserved for permanent writing and sewn into bound volumes. Temporary writing—tracking Sumerian accounts payable or inviting a friend to a birthday party in Pompeii—was done in clay or wax tablets that could be wiped clean and reused.

In the 19th century, the invention of wood pulping and industrial paper mills made inexpensive paper widely available; the rise of commerce, bureaucracy, and literacy transformed it into masses of loose sheets of paperwork. The figure most responsible for the creation and care of all this paperwork was the clerk. As Adrian Forty points out in Objects of Desire: Design and Society Since 1750 , the clerk was a creature of uncertain status, someone who had attained a middle-class respectability but who frequently lacked both managerial responsibility and a middle-class salary: Think of Bob Cratchit in A Christmas Carol , working endless hours for a thankless boss. These clerks were often surrounded by papers that had to be sorted into cubbyholes or tied into bundles with string. This was a new sort of of urgent but essentially meaningless work. (No wonder Melville’s famously reticent scrivener, Bartleby , was forever intoning “I would prefer not to.” * ) And in the shop of Mr. Snagsby, the law-stationer in Charles Dickens’ Bleak House, we get a glimpse of this tidal wave of 19th-century office supplies:

“Mr. Snagsby has dealt in all sorts of blank forms of legal process; in skins and rolls of parchment; in paper—foolscap, brief, draft, brown, white, whitey-brown, and blotting; in stamps; in office-quills, pens, ink, India-rubber, pounce, pins, pencils, sealing-wax, and wafers; in red tape and green ferret; in pocket-books, almanacs, diaries, and law lists; in string boxes, rulers, inkstands—glass and leaden—pen-knives, scissors, bodkins, and other small office-cutlery; in short, in articles too numerous to mention…”

Here in Mr. Snagsby’s inventory we find the most direct precursor to the paper clip: the straight pin. As Henry Petroski notes in his book The Evolution of Useful Things , the pin-making industry was illustrative of the industrialization taking place prior to mechanization. The first chapter of Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations features a passage describing the manner in which the manufacture of iron pins took advantage of the division of labor, with one man drawing the iron wire, another straightening it, a third cutting it, and so on. Smith noted that 10 individuals engaged in 10 different parts of the process could together make about 48,000 pins a day, whereas a single individual working by himself could not make even 20. By the end of the 19 th century, this process was so efficient that a half-pound box of pins could be bought for 40 cents. But while iron pins were cheap, easy to use, and disposable, they had the obvious downsides of rusting and piercing, leaving stains and holes in the papers they pressed together.

Epinglier/Defehrt/Goussier via artoftheprint.com.

What enabled the shift from the pin to the clip was the development, in 1855, of low-cost, industrially produced steel, which has the right balance of strength and flexibility to make tracks, pipes, wire, and nearly every other piece of 20 th -century metal infrastructure. Manufacturers could use the new supple steel wire to draw in space, making strong, rust-free hooks, safety pins, clothes hangers, and paper clips. And in the last quarter of the 19 th century, patents were issued for nearly every shape of steel wire that could be imagined to be useful.

Image of box via Officemuseum.com.

The paper clip we think of most readily is an elegant loop within a loop of springy steel wire. In 1899, a patent was issued to William Middlebrook for the design, not of the clip, but of the machinery that made it. He sold the patent to the American office-supply manufacturer Cushman & Denison, who trademarked it as the Gem clip, in 1904. Middlebrook’s rather beautiful patent drawing shows the clip not as an invention but as the outcome of an invention: the best solution to an old problem, using a new material and new manufacturing processes. Coiled in this form, the steel wire was pliant enough to open, allowing papers to nestle between its loops, but springy enough to press those papers back together. When the loops part too far from each other and the steel reaches its elastic limit, the clip breaks. This property, however, also belonged to the many other clip shapes developed around the same time.

1899 US patent for paper clip machine/USPTO.

The Early Office Museum has collected a remarkable array of these . There was the simple and angular Fay clip which, at 1867, is probably the earliest patented paper clip. The slightly intestinal-looking Wright clip, patented in 1877. The Niagara clip—looking charmingly like two clips holding hands—patented in 1897. The more marketably named Common-Sense and Hold-Fast clips of the early 1900s. Some of these, like the bow-shaped Ideal paper clip and the two-eyed Owl clip, can still be found in supply cabinets today. Some of these clips were better for securing larger stacks of paper; some used less wire and were therefore cheaper; some are less likely to get tangled in the box. But the key to the success of the Gem clip can be found in the fact that it was patented first as a mechanism: the shape, which took only three gentle bends and a snip to produce, was easy to automate cheap to produce , and the resulting form, which tidily tucks the sharp ends of the wire away, was lightweight, easy to use, and unlikely to tear the paper it secured.

Patent images via Officemuseum.com.

Once the paper clip was in, the straight pin was out, abandoned to seamstresses and hat-makers. At the same time, its office habitat was in flux. In Forty’s book, he points out that the typical clerk’s desk of the 19 th century was backed with rows of cubbyholes: “A clerk seated at a high-backed desk could see his work in from of him and a little to either side, but he could not see beyond his desk, nor could anyone else see what he was doing without coming to look over his shoulder. Such a desk,” Forty notes, “assumed that the clerk was responsible for its contents, and for his work; it represented a small private domain, perhaps with a roll top that could be closed down at any time to secure its privacy.” With the advent of scientific management, which applied the same division of labor found in pin manufacturing to the tasks of clerical workers, permanent filing was moved to a separate department. Paper clips could handle the rest. With cubbyholes no longer necessary, the flat-top desk, with more access to light and air but less privacy, became the standard.

In the years since, the Gem clip has faced competitors offering notches, points, and eyes, but it is still the best-selling form of paper clip. Many of these other paper clips improve on aspects of the Gem clip, but they also raise new problems. Ridged clips , first patented in 1921, grip paper more strongly, but also are more inclined to tear it. Clips with a bent-up lip are easier to slip on, but they make stacks bulky. Other competitors address problems that—frankly—aren’t that problematic. A “time-saving” clip patented in 1992 has two loops on either end, but the time lost by office workers locating the correct end of the clip doesn’t seem to be keeping anyone up nights. And the Gothic clip, patented in 1933 , has a pointed inner loop and longer “legs” than the Gem clip, making it less likely to bend and tear paper. It is used by some libraries and archives, and it is in many ways a genuine improvement on the Gem shape, but for most of us, the occasional rip or indent in that top sheet of that stack of invoices just isn’t that important. Sometimes, the best design is the one that is—like the Gem—just good enough.

An ad for Gem paper clips appearing in Office Appliances , Volume 36, 1922.

Minimal, relentlessly plain, and instantly familiar to a contemporary eye even in an advertisement from 1894, its persistence has made the paper clip the epitome of the disposable, anonymous, manufactured object. It is made for secretaries, for assistants, for subordinates and gofers. It only became most useful once there were millions of pieces of paper that had to be grouped, but that also had to be taken apart again. The staple may contain more potential for physical harm, but the threat of the paper clip is Sisyphean: once you’ve clipped the papers together, you’re probably going to have to unclip them, and then clip together some others, and then unclip those and keep going until you retire, or you get that break in your acting career. Perhaps if Microsoft had chosen an object less reminiscent of mindless toil, the optimism of its much-loathed Clippy office assistant would have seemed less demented, and thus less prime for ridicule . This unconscious association of the form of paper clips with the oppression of endlessness is at play in Sarah Morris’ Clip paintings .

Courtesy of the artist and Friedrich Petzel Gallery, New York.

But if the paper clip can be a symbol for endless drudgery, it can also be twisted, pulled apart, and used as a tool. And in this capacity, many of the practices to which it is best suited are the opposite of the commercially productive, sanitary, and morally meaningless act of clipping together papers. Paper clips can be used to pick locks, clean under fingernails, and hack into phones. Straightened out, they are used by office workers to distract themselves from the monotony of their intended use. Nearly every reader of Joshua Ferris’ novel of office life, Then We Came to the End , becomes part of his collective narrator as they read the sentence, “If a stray paper clip happened to be lying around we were likely to bend it out of shape,” and every white-collar underling must find familiar David Foster Wallace’s description of office life in The Pale King : “The way hard deskwork really goes is in jagged little fits and starts, brief intervals of concentration alternated with frequent trips to the men’s room, the drinking fountain, the vending machine, constant visits to the pencil sharpener, phone calls you suddenly feel are imperative to make, rapt intervals of seeing what kinds of shapes you can bend a paperclip into, &c.” The paper clip, which possesses inexpensiveness, interchangeability and consistency, has also been used as a symbol for the numerous: a Tennessee school collected 6 million paper clips to symbolize the Jews killed during the Holocaust, a project documented in a 2004 Miramax film . And its affordability can be a symbol of humble beginnings: In 2005, a Canadian named Kyle McDonald took a red paper clip and began a series of online trades that eventually netted him a house (not to mention a blog, a book, and a lot of public speaking gigs ). A philosophical conceit called the “ paperclip maximizer ” is an artificial intelligence that, programmed by humans solely to manufacture as many paper clips as possible, eventually takes over the Earth and increasing portions of space in its quest for material, leaving trillions of paper clips with no one to use them.

Finally, the simplicity of the paper clip has allowed it to become a graphic symbol on the digital desktop. For many a 21 st -century office worker, it is more often encountered as the “attachment” icon in an email program than in the physical form of a bent steel wire. As we move further and further toward a paperless society, that loop-the-loop form might become more familiar in two dimensions than in three. But this semiotic doppelganger, like the clip’s colored plastic and novelty-shaped variants, is likely to accompany the original, not replace it. Office life, despite plane flights and email, just isn’t all that different than it was 100 years ago, and it’s likely to be largely similar in another 100 years. And the paper clip—which is just exactly good enough—is likely to be around to see it.

Don’t forget to read about the design of the key, the book, and the other items featured in our   series on the evolution of everyday objects .

Correction, May 25, 2012 : This article originally misquoted Melville’s character. Bartleby’s famous retort was “I would prefer not to,” not simply “I prefer not to.” ( Return to the corrected sentence.)

How to make a video essay: A guide for beginners

What type of content do you primarily create?

Video essays are an incredibly popular genre on YouTube, and many new creators are eager to have their views heard on topics in culture and politics. But making a video essay involves a lot more than just sitting in front of a camera and pressing record. This guide is intended for beginners who don’t quite know where to start. 

What is a video essay?

A video essay’s primary defining feature is that it sets out to make an argument. It is, to put it simply, like an essay you wrote in school. Video essays often cover politics, popular media, or science.

But unlike the essays you wrote in school, video essays need extensive visual accompaniment, whether that’s footage (or B-roll ), still images, or animation.

Here’s how you can get started:

Step 1: Craft a thesis

Good video essays will have a central thesis explored throughout the piece. If you can’t summarize your thesis in a sentence (sometimes two), you’ve still got work to do. The best theses immediately leave the viewer wanting to know more. Test it on friends: If you state your thesis to friends and get reactions of curiosity or excitement you’re on to something.

Consider one of my favorite video essays, whose thesis is right in the title: "Why Snowpiercer is a sequel to Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory."

‎ Sometimes, a thesis is a little more subtle, but nonetheless important. In Yhara Zayd’s video on horror movies, she argues that horror has always been a genre for social criticism.

‎ The rest of your video isn’t just proving that thesis, though that’s important. You'll want to explore the twists and turns of the idea. What questions does your thesis raise? What are the big doubts about your thesis, and how do you address them? How can we zoom out from your thesis and ask even bigger questions? 

Step 2: Determine your audience  

Your audience will dictate what level of complexity and detail you should cover in your video. If you’re an engineering channel, maybe you want to appeal to working engineers who understand the jargon of the profession. But if you’d like a broader audience, you’ll need to take the time to define terms and give background information. The best video essays usually appeal to both—their topics are unique enough to be interesting to people with prior knowledge of the topic, while accessible enough to be understood to a casual viewer.

Step 3: Organize your research early

Your video essay should have lots of supporting evidence. Aside from the usual list of articles and books, video essays can also use visual evidence.

If you’re commenting on media, that means hyper-specific shots and lines of dialogue. If you’re commenting on history, that means old news clips. Filmed interviews are a great resource regardless of the topic.

Whenever I'm trying to cover a show, I’ll watch the show (sometimes twice), take extensive notes, pause to write out lines of dialogue, and mark where specific moments supported various themes, motifs, or ideas. 

I've always regretted telling myself I’d remember a specific line or shot because I'd find myself spending an hour to hunt it down later in the process.

Whether you’re commenting on news footage, video games, or film and TV, I cannot stress enough how much extensive notetaking will improve your video essay later in the process.

The same advice goes for any books or news articles you might cite: annotate extensively and cite them in your piece.

Step 4: Familiarize yourself with "fair use"

Many video essays source footage from the news, TV, and film without licensing them. I'm not here to give advice on the legality of that, but I do think any video essayist should familiarize themselves with fair use .

Fair use is a set of criteria that a creator can use to defend their use of copyrighted work. It's not a license to freely use copyrighted work if you think you fit those standards; it’s a series of tests a judge should weigh in court. 

Usually, it doesn’t come to that. Most copyright issues go through YouTube’s copyright claim system , which you should also read up on. A film studio may claim your content, or block it altogether, for using their copyrighted material. YouTube allows you to appeal these claims , but if both parties won’t give up, the question can only be settled by a judge (in the US, at least).

Step 5: Start your script

Be sure to use a two-column script, rather than just writing out everything as if it were a traditional essay.

In one column, you’re writing what you’re saying, or what the footage is saying. In the other, write what you plan to show. Your notes here should be specific enough to help you later in the editing process. You may want to add a third column for notes, or sources to cite later.

Writing a video essay follows some different rules than what your English teacher might have expected. Most video essays use a conversational style, and include words, phrases, and grammar that would never fly with the written word. Sometimes that includes filler words, like starting a sentence with “so” or putting an “um” for effect. Just don’t overdo it.

Other writing rules still apply. Be concise, use active verbs, and otherwise just make sure you sound like a human.

Step 6: Film (or record)

You don’t need a $10,000 filming setup to make good video essays. Plenty of  people start with just a microphone, completely avoiding the camera altogether in what's known as a faceless YouTube video .

The two most important things to recommend: get good sound, and be natural. People can tolerate a lot of visual sins, but usually won’t put up with bad audio quality. Similarly, you don’t need to have the charisma of a talk show host, but people have no tolerance for on-screen performances that seem forced or fake.

That is all to say, get a decent microphone and be yourself. If you’re on-screen, buy a cheap teleprompter setup for your phone or camera.

Step 7: Start editing

There are many options for video editing software out there (and Descript is a great one), even for people with limited video editing experience. This article isn’t long enough to be an editing guide , but a few quick tips for a true novice:

• Don’t linger on any one visual for too long. Instead, mix up the visual interest of your video.
• Emphasize important concepts with text on screen.
• Take the time to learn a little about color grading .
• Clean up any noticeable background noise .

Step 8: Figure out your title and thumbnail

This may be the last step of this article, but it should often begin while you’re brainstorming. Your title and thumbnail should generate intrigue without giving it all away. Video essays often lean on titles with “How” and “Why.” Lessons from the Screenplay is a good example:

But video essays can also make provocative statements that make the viewer curious about how you’ll back it up. Consider Kurzgesagt – In a Nutshell’s “ Smoking is Awesome ,” which I promise is not pro-tobacco.

Step 9: Publish

Finally, it's time to put your video out into the world and see how it fares. Your first video essay won't be perfect. It's important to put your work in public, take in feedback, and move on to your next project. Like all things, skill comes with time.

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How to do a Video Essay: The Video Essay Process

• Plan, Prepare & Create

Storyboarding

• Finding, Filming & Editing
• References & Credits
• The Video Essay Process

This section will give an introductory overview of the stages required to create a video essay.  Video essayers advice is to start simple and work through each stage of the video production process. Visit the Resources page of this guide for more.

Identify what is your argument? What is it that you want to communicate to the viewer? Write this down in a few sentences, refer and modify it as required.

Watch Video Essays

Watch a selection of video essays, read blogs and web pages from video essayers and decide what type of video essay you would like to create. Start simple.

A storyboard is a detailed outline (similar to an outline in a written essay) that helps you to organise and visualise the video essay as to what is on the screen, text, media, message and transitions between shots.

Storyboards assist in determining the length, message and meaning of the video essay and help save time with editing and post production processes.

• Free Storyboard Templates

Collect & Edit

Collect video material as downloads, ripping DVDs, screen grabs, mobile phone footage and create voice-overs. Use research skills to find information and statements to support your argument. Maintain a standard of quality and manage your videos by naming conventions and storage.

Use editing software and experiment with available functionality to enhance and support your argument. Add a voice-over, sound effects, music and other aspects of multimodality. Be sure to include references and credits to all sources used in creating the video essay.

Revisit elements of your video essay and modify as required.

Visit the Resources page of this guide for more.

• Where to find video and how to capture it
• Video Editing Basics - iMovie
• Software Guides

References & Credits

References to cite sources used in the Video Essay. Referencing is a formal, systematic way of acknowledging sources that you have used in your video essay. It is imperative that you reference all sources used (including videos, stills, music, sfx) and apply the correct formatting so that references cited can be easily traced. The referencing style used at ECU is the APA style, 6th ed. 2010. Refer to the ECU Referencing Library Guide for accurate citation in APA style.

Production credits Individuals: acknowledgement of individuals and their role in the production. Purpose: A statement for internal use, e.g. “This video was produced for [course name] at [institution’s name] in [semester, year]”

• Referencing Library Guide
• << Previous: What is a Video Essay?
• Next: Modes, MultiModality & Multiliteracies >>
• What is a Video Essay?
• Modes, MultiModality & Multiliteracies
• A Pedagogy of Multiliteracies
• Modes Of Multimodality
• Video Essay Journals
• Video Essay Channels
• Weblinks to Video Essay Resources
• Weblinks to Creative Commons Resources
• Titles in the Library
• Referencing & Copyright
• Marking Rubric
• Last Updated: Aug 28, 2023 2:57 PM
• URL: https://ecu.au.libguides.com/video-essay

Edith Cowan University acknowledges and respects the Noongar people, who are the traditional custodians of the land upon which its campuses stand and its programs operate. In particular ECU pays its respects to the Elders, past and present, of the Noongar people, and embrace their culture, wisdom and knowledge.

The Ethical Questions in the Hidden History of Operation Paperclip

As the war wound down, a group of politicians, industrialists, and scientists, designated as the Combined Intelligence Objectives Subcommittee (CIOS) met to define the targets in a wide variety of fields. As discussed extensively in Annie Jacobsen’s Operation Paperclip 1 , one of CIOS’ first conclusions was that receiving pictures and copies of paperwork was insufficient. They needed to talk extensively to the people who had generated the work and bring them to the U.S. to work with our scientists and advance our knowledge.

Nazi Scientists in America

At first, U.S. officials promised none of the Germans would be known or alleged war criminals, going so far as to suggest none had been Nazis. This, of course, was impossible, as a German scientist could not obtain a job without party membership. Not all officials agreed with the idea. The Departments of State, Justice, Labor and Commerce all objected to skipping such legal requirements as visa clearances, but their staff were eventually persuaded by the promises that the scientists would stay only temporarily. That is, they’d be here under military guard until we’d learned from them all we needed.

President Truman initially agreed to the idea and about 150 scientists came. But in the winter of 1945-46, the expanded version of CIOS became seriously concerned that Russia was ahead of us in weapons development and that a Cold War was in the offing. We needed all the German scientists we could muster to prevent advanced Nazi technology from falling into the hands of the Soviet Union. The number of German scientists brought to the U.S. expanded to 1,500 (or possibly more; records are hard to find and verify). To signal that no visa check was to be completed, the requesting staff attached a paperclip to each scientist’s folder. Thus the name of the operation. None of these scientists’ folders was subjected to the scrutiny required of other potential immigrants.

Immigration Policy and Development

On the one hand, these scientists gave a terrific jump start to our defenses. Think about the work of Wernher von Braun and his staff’s contribution to the space race. These men eventually became U.S. citizens; von Braun led NASA. But times changed, and in 1979, the Department of Justice established an Office of Special Investigations to find and deport Nazi war criminals—and, in time, anyone who contributed to genocide and had omitted those actions on their visa applications. Our political system had shifted. One might say the criterion of morality superseded political expediency.

So, do you agree that it was right to engage fully in Operation Paperclip in the late 1940’s? To what degree should we allow the times to define our immigration policy? Should our government be required to make public such decisions about exceptions to agreed-upon policies? In February 2021, we deported a Nazi war criminal in his 90’s. Should we continue to do so?

Good historical novels often chew on such large questions. And I hope you enjoy the attention Operation Paperclip has in my novel, Chasing the American Dream ! Do let me know your reactions.

And, please, do rate the novel and, if you can, post a review on Amazon and Goodreads !

_____________________________________________________________________________

1 Annie Jacobsen, Operation Paperclip: The Secret Intelligence Program that Brought Nazi Scientists to America. Little, Brown and Company, 2014

The History and Invention of the Paperclip

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Historical references describe fastening papers together as early as the 13th century. During this time, people put ribbon through parallel incisions in the upper left-hand corner of pages. Later, people started to wax the ribbons to make them stronger and easier to undo and redo. This was the way people clipped papers together for the next six hundred years.

In 1835, a New York physician named John Ireland Howe invented the machine for mass-producing straight pins, which then became a popular way to fasten papers together (although they were not originally designed for that purpose). Straight pins were designed to be used in sewing and tailoring, to temporally fasten cloth together.

Johan Vaaler

Johan Vaaler, a Norwegian inventor with degrees in electronics, science, and mathematics, invented the paperclip in 1899. He received a patent for his design from Germany in 1899, as Norway had no patent laws at that time.

Vaaler was an employee at a local invention office when he created the paperclip. He received an American patent in 1901. The patent abstract says, "It consists of forming same of a spring material, such as a piece of wire, that is bent to a rectangular, triangular, or otherwise shaped hoop, the end parts of which wire piece form members or tongues lying side by side in contrary directions." Vaaler was the first person to patent a paperclip design, although other unpatented designs might have existed first.

American inventor Cornelius J. Brosnan filed for an American patent for a paperclip in 1900. He called his invention the "Konaclip."

A History of Paperclips

It was a company called the Gem Manufacturing Ltd. of England that first designed the double oval-shaped, standard paperclip. This familiar and famous paperclip was and still is referred to as the "Gem" clip. William Middlebrook of Waterbury, Connecticut, patented a machine for making paperclips of the Gem design in 1899. The Gem paperclip was never patented.

People have been re-inventing the paperclip over and over again. The designs that have been the most successful are the Gem with its double oval shape, the "non-skid" which held in place well, the "ideal" used for thick wads of paper , and the "owl" paperclip that does not get tangled up with other paperclips.

World War II Protest

During World War II, Norwegians were prohibited from wearing any buttons with the likeness or initials of their king on them. In protest, they started wearing paperclips, because paperclips were a Norwegian invention whose original function was to bind together. This was a protest against the Nazi occupation and wearing a paperclip could have gotten them arrested.

A paperclip's metal wire can be easily unfolded. Several devices call for a very thin rod to push a recessed button which the user might only rarely need. This is seen on most CD-ROM drives as an "emergency eject" should the power fail. Various smartphones require the use of a long, thin object such as a paperclip to eject the SIM card. Paperclips can also be bent into a sometimes effective lock-picking device. Some types of handcuffs can be unfastened using paper clips. 

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During World War II, the Nazi occupation regime in Norway banned insignias with the national flag or with the emblem “H7” of King Haakon VII , the elected monarch in exile. In response, the Norwegian resistance adopted another symbol on their lapels: an innocent metal clip used to hold together sheets of paper. This humblest of objects then took on the rebellious meaning of strength and unity against the invaders, adding to the patriotic pride that already existed in the paper clip for being a Norwegian invention . Today, in the town of Sandvika , a giant seven-meter high paper clip commemorates this national symbol and its inventor, Johan Vaaler .

This might have been the story, and in fact it has been popularized in this way, but this is not exactly how it happened. While it is true that the Norwegians displayed paper clips in protest against the Nazi occupation, the symbol had already been used by the French resistance . And the Sandvika sculpture reflects the object that is found nowadays in offices and homes around the world, but it’s a different model from the design patented by Vaaler. He invented other paper clip, not THE paper clip.

Few people may know that the type of paper clip in most widespread use today has its own name: it’s called the ‘Gem’ and it’s the elongated model with parallel sides and two incomplete loops of wire. Curiously enough, it is not known who invented it. “It’s still unclear,” says engineer and historian Henry Petroski to OpenMind. Petroski, a professor of civil engineering at Duke University (USA), has explored the reasons for and the origins of the designs of many everyday items, sharing his findings in books such as Invention by Design (Harvard University Press, 1996) and The Evolution of Useful Things (Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2010).

“The patent granted to Samuel B. Fay in 1867 is often cited as the first patent of the paper clip, but its design was not intended primarily for papers,” Petroski points out. Fay’s invention was intended to replace the pins used to attach pieces of paper to clothing , especially the most delicate fabrics such as “silk, lace and all the finer class of goods, without injury or leaving the slightest trace upon the goods when removed,” detailed the American in his patent . Fay’s clip was similar to those that today we can find on shirts that are sold folded.

In the case of the ‘Gem’ paper clip, its inventor remains anonymous , perhaps forever. “The oldest clues are in advertisements from the late nineteenth century,” says Petroski. The first confirmed visual representation appears in an ad published by the American office supply company Cushman & Denison of New York in the September 1893 issue of The American Lawyer magazine , according to what the website Early Office Museum was able to discover. “Don’t mutilate your papers with pins or fasteners,” announced Cushman & Denison in their advertising. The company, which sold its clips for 25 cents a box, registered the Gem trademark in 1904, but the proof that even then it was already a popular object is provided by the patent granted in 1899 to the American William Middlebrook for a “machine for making wire paper clips.” According to the illustrations of the patent, these paper clips are clearly the Gem type.

With the end of the nineteenth century came a flood of patents for different paper clip designs , only a few of which have survived, but all of which are in the minority nowadays compared to the Gem. “There are patents for Gem variations, but the Gem itself remains unpatented,” clarifies Petroski. Among these multiple variations are those of Johan Vaaler (1866-1910). The Norwegian inventor, who ran a patent office in Oslo (then Christiania), didn’t intend to introduce improvements; he was simply unaware that his invention already existed. His paper clip was missing his last turn of the Gem, which made it less practical and less functional. Vaaler patented his design in June 1901 in Germany and the USA . Vaaler probably learned about the Gem later, and his patents expired without being exploited.

Vaaler’s invention led to the myth of the paper clip being a Norwegian invention thanks to Halvard Foss, an engineer at Norway’s Industrial Property Office who, in the 1920s, found the forgotten patent of his compatriot in the German registry, perhaps without realizing that the design differed from the Gem paper clip. Foss brought the fact to light in his country and, after the Second World War, Vaaler’s paper clip was linked to the memory of the symbol of the resistance against the Nazis.

And thus was born a patriotic emblem that is also one of the great little inventions of mankind, one that, according to Petroski, “comes fully assembled and doesn’t require batteries to operate. Nobody expects a box of paper clips to come with instructions, and they don’t tend to think too much about how they are manufactured and used.”

By Javier Yanes for Ventana al Conocimiento (Knowledge Window)

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How to Use a Paper Clip in Many Ways

Last Updated: June 19, 2023 Fact Checked

This article was co-authored by Robert Vallelunga . Robert Vallelunga is a Locksmith and the Owner of ACME Locksmith in the Phoenix Metro Area. Robert has over 15 years of experience in the industry and specializes in working with automotive ignitions, locks, keys, and master key systems. Robert and the team at ACME are the #1 Rated Phoenix Locksmith Service and the Winner of the Better Business Bureau Ethics Award. Robert has his Residential & Commercial Contractor’s License and a Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering from Arizona State University. There are 7 references cited in this article, which can be found at the bottom of the page. This article has been fact-checked, ensuring the accuracy of any cited facts and confirming the authority of its sources. This article has been viewed 134,398 times.

Paper clips are traditionally used to, well, clip together paper. But, there are plenty more creative and practical ways to make use of this common (and wonderfully inexpensive) office supply. When you take advantage of its small size, strong metal wire, and convenient bending ability, a simple paper clip can become anything from a handy tool to a work of art.

Using Paper Clips as Tools

• If you’re feeling adventurous, reshape your paper clip into a heart-shaped holder. It’ll lend a little love and excitement to your bundles. [1] X Research source

• This is also a useful way to prepare a hem to resew it. Using paper clips around the edge will help ensure that your hem is even all the way around.

• This is an easy and cheap way to hang everything from ornaments to strings of lights to wall decor. Just be sure that whatever you’re hanging is light enough that it won’t break the paper clip with its weight.
• You can even reshape the paper clip into a miniature clothes hanger.

• You can either fold the open edge of a bag over and clip it closed or unbend your paper clip to use it like a twisty tie.

• To open a padlock, you’ll need two paper clips, one unbent to be completely straight and the other bent into an “L” shape.
• Insert the straight clip into the very top of the keyhole (where the jagged edge of your key would normally go), and the L-shaped clip into the bottom. Then, you need to swiftly and firmly pull the top clip out while firmly twisting the bottom clip in the same direction as you would your key. It’s tricky to get the action exactly right, so it may take a few tries.

Crafting with Paper Clips

• Be sure that you're using a paper clip made from a substantial wire that it can hold the weight of your key(s).
• You should also be sure that the two loops of wire are as tight or close together as possible so that your key will not slip off. If you are worried about losing your key, twist the two ends of your paper clip around the loops a few times to prevent them from opening up.

• You can also add colorful flare and help mark your spot by tying a tassel to the end made from knotting together a bundle of ribbon, string, or sewing floss.

• The easiest style is a chain necklace or bracelet made from linking together multiple clips to achieve the length you want. Either attach the open ends together or twist together your clips into interlocking spirals.
• Experiment by making long necklaces and bracelets with multiple loops of different colors.
• Try decorating your jewelry with beads, ribbons, colorful paper wrapped around each clip with glue, or whatever else strikes your fancy!

• Try using multicolored paper clips to introduce multiple hues into your sculpture. Doing so can make it more vibrant or help you better represent the object you’re portraying, like a flower with red petals and green leaves.

• Try out designs that take advantage of the typical shape of a paper clip. For instance, the shape of the paper clip works really well to form the body and wings of an angel with a bead for a head. It also lends itself perfectly to being the blades on a pair of ice skates cut out from paper or felt. [12] X Research source
• Paper clips are likewise ideal for attaching ornaments to ribbons so that they can be easily hung up for display.

Expert Q&A

• Be creative! Thanks Helpful 2 Not Helpful 0
• Keep paper clips of many different sizes and colors on hand to maximize your possibilities. Thanks Helpful 1 Not Helpful 0

• Since they’re made of metal and sometimes have sharp edges, paper clips can be dangerous for kids to use. If you’re doing any of these activities with young children, be sure to supervise them closely. Thanks Helpful 6 Not Helpful 2

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Expert Interview

Thanks for reading our article! If you’d like to learn more about unlocking a safe, check out our in-depth interview with Robert Vallelunga .

• ↑ http://wonderfuldiy.com/paper-clips-crafts/
• ↑ http://www.countryliving.com/diy-crafts/g2928/paper-clip-tricks/
• ↑ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AxUI5WKDr7s
• ↑ http://www.marieclaire.com/beauty/a1883/how-to-pick-a-lock/
• ↑ http://www.pbs.org/parents/crafts-for-kids/paper-clip-bookmarks/
• ↑ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rRQYkiV6mZ4
• ↑ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XsNb7awWnTY

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Paper clip explained

A paper clip (or paperclip ) is a tool used to hold sheets of paper together, usually made of steel wire bent to a looped shape (though some are covered in plastic ). Most paper clips are variations of the Gem type introduced in the 1890s or earlier, characterized by the one and a half loops made by the wire. Common to paper clips proper is their utilization of torsion and elasticity in the wire, and friction between wire and paper. When a moderate number of sheets are inserted between the two "tongues" of the clip, the tongues will be forced apart and cause torsion in the bend of the wire to grip the sheets together. They are usually used to bind papers together for productivity and portability.

The paper clip's widespread use in various settings, from offices to educational institutions, underscores its functional design and adaptability. While primarily designed for binding papers, its versatility has led to a range of applications, both practical and creative.

Shape and composition

Paper clips usually have an oblong shape with straight sides, but may also be triangular or circular, or have more elaborate shapes. The most common material is steel or some other metal , but molded plastic is also used. Some other kinds of paper clips use a two-piece clamping system. Recent innovations include multi-colored plastic-coated paper clips and spring -fastened binder clip s. [1] Regular metal paper clips weigh about a gram. [2]

According to the Early Office Museum, the first patent for a bent wire paper clip was awarded in the United States to Samuel B. Fay in 1867. [3] This clip was originally intended primarily for attaching tickets to fabric, although the patent recognized that it could be used to attach papers together. [4] Fay received U.S. patent 64,088 on April 23, 1867. Although functional and practical, Fay's design along with the 50 other designs patented prior to 1899 are not considered reminiscent of the modern paperclip design known today. [5] Another notable paper clip design was also patented in the United States by Erlman J. Wright on July 24, 1877, patent #193,389. This clip was advertised at that time for use in fastening together loose leaves of papers, documents, periodicals, newspapers etc.

The most common type of wire paper clip still in use, the Gem paper clip, was never patented, but it was most likely in production in Britain in the early 1870s by "The Gem Manufacturing Company", according to the American expert on technological innovations, Professor Henry J. Petroski . [6] He refers to an 1883 article about "Gem Paper-Fasteners", praising them for being "better than ordinary pins" for "binding together papers on the same subject, a bundle of letters, or pages of a manuscript". [7] Since the 1883 article had no illustration of this early "Gem", it may have been different from modern paper clips of that name.

The earliest illustration of its current form is in an 1893 advertisement for the "Gem Paper Clip". [8] [9] [10] In 1904 Cushman & Denison registered a trademark for the "Gem" name in connection with paper clips. The announcement stated that it had been used since March 1, 1892, which may have been the time of its introduction in the United States. [9] Paper clips are still sometimes called "Gem clips", and in Swedish the word for any paper clip is "gem".

Definite proof that the modern type of paper clip was well known in 1899 at the latest, is the patent granted to William Middlebrook of Waterbury , Connecticut on April 27 of that year for a "Machine for making wire paper clips." The drawing clearly shows that the product is a perfect clip of the Gem type. [11] [12] The fact that Middlebrook did not mention it by name, suggests that it was already well known at the time. Since then countless variations on the same theme have been patented. Some have pointed instead of rounded ends, some have the end of one loop bent slightly to make it easier to insert sheets of paper, and some have wires with undulations or barbs to get a better grip. In addition, purely aesthetic variants have been patented, clips with triangular, star, or round shapes. [13] But the original Gem type has for more than a hundred years proved to be the most practical, and consequently by far the most popular. Its qualities—ease of use, gripping without tearing, and storing without tangling—have been difficult to improve upon. In the USA, National Paperclip Day is celebrated on May 29th. [14]

The Gem-type paperclip has become a symbol of inventive design , as confirmed below – although falsely – by its celebration as a Norwegian invention in 1899. More convincing is its appropriation as logo of the Year of Design in Barcelona 2003, depicted on posters, T-shirts and other merchandise.

Unsupported claims

It has been claimed that the paper clip was invented by English intellectual Herbert Spencer (1820–1903). [15] [16] [17] Spencer registered a "binding-pin" on 2 September 1846, [18] which was made and sold by Adolphus Ackermann for over a year, [19] advertised as "for holding loose manuscripts, sermons, weekly papers, and all unstitched publications". Spencer's design, approximately 15cm (06inches) unfolded, looked more like a modern cotter pin than a modern paper clip. [20]

Norwegian claim

See main article: Johan Vaaler .

Norwegian Johan Vaaler (1866–1910) has been identified as the inventor of the paper clip. He was granted patents in Germany [21] and in the United States [22] (1901) for a paper clip of similar design, but less functional and practical, because it was more complicated to insert into the paper Vaaler probably did not know that a better product was already on the market, although not yet in Norway. His version was never manufactured and never marketed, because the superior Gem was already available.

Long after Vaaler's death his countrymen created a national myth based on the false assumption that the paper clip was invented by an unrecognized Norwegian genius. Norwegian dictionaries since the 1950s have mentioned Vaaler as the inventor of the paper clip, [23] and that myth later found its way into international dictionaries and much of the international literature on paper clips.

Vaaler probably succeeded in having his design patented abroad, despite the previous existence of more useful paper clips, because patent authorities at that time were quite liberal and rewarded any marginal modification of existing inventions. [24] Johan Vaaler began working for Alfred J. Bryns Patentkontor in Kristiania in 1892 and was later promoted to office manager, a position he held until his death. [25] As the employee of a patent office, he could easily have obtained a patent in Norway. His reasons for applying abroad are not known; it is possible that he wanted to secure the commercial rights internationally. Also, he may have been aware that a Norwegian manufacturer would find it difficult to introduce a new invention abroad, starting from the small home market.

Vaaler's patents expired quietly, while the "Gem" was used worldwide, including his own country. The failure of his design was its impracticality. Without the two full loops of the fully developed paper clip, it was difficult to insert sheets of paper into his clip. One could manipulate the end of the inner wire so that it could receive the sheet, but the outer wire was a dead end because it could not exploit the torsion principle. The clip would instead stand out like a keel, perpendicular to the sheet of paper. The impracticality of Vaaler's design may easily be demonstrated by cutting off the last outer loop and one long side from a regular Gem clip.

National symbol

The originator of the Norwegian paper clip myth was an engineer of the Norwegian national patent agency who visited Germany in the 1920s to register Norwegian patents in that country. He came across Vaaler's patent, but failed to detect that it was not the same as the then-common Gem-type clip. [26] In the report of the first fifty years of the patent agency, he wrote an article in which he proclaimed Vaaler to be the inventor of the common paper clip. [27] This piece of information found its way into some Norwegian encyclopedias after World War II .

Events of that war contributed greatly to the mythical status of the paper clip. Patriots wore them in their lapels as a symbol of resistance to the German occupiers and local Nazi authorities when other signs of resistance, such as flag pins or pins showing the cipher of the exiled King Haakon VII of Norway were forbidden. Those wearing them did not yet see them as national symbols, as the myth of their Norwegian origin was not commonly known at the time.The clips were meant to denote solidarity and unity ("we are bound together"). The wearing of paper clips was soon prohibited, and people wearing them could risk severe punishment. [28]

The leading Norwegian encyclopedia mentioned the role of the paper clip as a symbol of resistance in a supplementary volume in 1952, but did not yet proclaim it a Norwegian invention. [29] That information was added in later editions. According to the 1974 edition, the idea of using the paper clip to denote resistance originated in France . A clip worn on a lapel or front pocket could be seen as "deux gaules" (two posts or poles) and be interpreted as a reference to the leader of the French Resistance , General Charles de Gaulle . [30]

The post-war years saw a widespread consolidation of the paper clip as a national symbol. Authors of books and articles on the history of Norwegian technology eagerly seized it to make a thin story more substantial. They chose to overlook the fact that Vaaler's clip was not the same as the fully developed Gem-type clip. [31] In 1989 a giant paper clip, almost 7m (23feet) high, was erected on the campus of a commercial college near Oslo in honor of Vaaler, ninety years after his invention was patented. But this monument shows a Gem-type clip, not the one patented by Vaaler. The celebration of the alleged Norwegian origin of the paper clip culminated in 1999, one hundred years after Vaaler submitted his application for a German patent. A commemorative stamp was issued that year, the first in a series to draw attention to Norwegian inventiveness. The background shows a facsimile of the German "Patentschrift". However, the figure in the foreground is not the paper clip depicted on that document, but the much better known "Gem". In 2005, the national biographical encyclopedia of Norway ( Norsk biografisk leksikon ) published the biography of Johan Vaaler, stating he was the inventor of the paper clip. [32]

Wire is versatile in its nature. Thus a paper clip is a useful accessory in many kinds of mechanical work, including computer work: the metal wire can be unfolded with a little force. Several devices call for a very thin rod to push a recessed button which the user might only rarely need. This is seen on most CD-ROM drives as an "emergency eject" should the power fail; also on early floppy disk drives (including the early Macintosh ). Various smartphones require the use of a long, thin object such as a paper clip to eject the SIM card and some Palm PDAs advise the use of a paper clip to reset the device. The trackball can be removed from early Logitech pointing devices using a paper clip as the key to the bezel. A paper clip bent into a "U" can be used to start an ATX PSU without connecting it to a motherboard , by connecting the green [what?] to a black [what?] on the motherboard header. One or more paper clips can make a loopback device for a RS-232 interface (or indeed many interfaces). A paper clip could be installed in a Commodore 1541 disk drive as a flexible head-stop. The steel wire from a paperclip can be used in dentistry to form a dental post. [33]

Another common use of paper clips is pipe smokers, including Cannabis smokers use straightened out paper clips to unclog their pipe or bong bowl .

Another creative use of paper clips is in "paperclip art", where enthusiasts bend and twist paper clips into intricate designs and figures, ranging from simple shapes to detailed sculptures. This form of art showcases the flexibility and adaptability of the paper clip beyond its traditional use.

Additionally, paper clips can serve as temporary bookmarks in books or documents. Their slim profile and easy placement make them useful for marking a specific page or section without causing damage or adding bulk.

Paper clips can be bent into a crude but sometimes effective lock picking device. [34] Some types of handcuffs can be unfastened using paper clips. There are two approaches. The first one is to unfold the clip in a line and then twist the end in a right angle, trying to imitate a key and using it to lift the lock fixator. The second approach, which is more feasible but needs some practice, is to use the semi-unfolded clip kink for lifting when the clip is inserted through the hole where the handcuffs are closed.

A paper clip image is the standard image for an attachment in an email client . [35]

In 1994, the United States imposed anti-dumping tariffs against China on paper clips. [36]

Other fastening devices

• Binder clip
• Brass fastener
• Bulldog clip
• Treasury tag
• Clippy – an anthropomorphic paper clip assistant in Microsoft Office
• Universal Paperclips - a game based on a thought experiment where the user plays the role of an AI programmed to produce paperclips
• Operation Paperclip
• Paper Clips Project – project where a small town American school wished to understand the grand scale of 6,000,000 Jews murdered during the Holocaust by collecting 6,000,000 (and more) physical objects, deciding to collect paperclips because of their small size and easy availability

Further reading

• Book: Henry Petroski. The Evolution of Useful Things . registration. New York. Knopf. 1992. 0-679-74039-2.
• Book: The Perfection of the Paper Clip: Curious Tales of Invention, Accidental Genius, and Stationery Obsession. James Ward. Simon and Schuster. 2015. 9781476799865.

External links

• History of the Paper Clip
• — Paper clip —E. P. Bugge

Notes and References

• Web site: The Paper Clip . Brown. Peter. September 1, 2009. Scientific American. December 12, 2018.
• Web site: Metric Mass (Weight) . 2024-06-17 . www.mathsisfun.com.
• Grace, Valerie (December 28, 2003). " Get a grip: Popularity of paper clips continue through the years ". The Times Recorder (Zanesville, Ohio, U.S.). p. D1.
• Web site: History of the Paper Clip . Early Office Museum.
• Web site: Paper Clip . The Great Idea Finder. 2010-07-20. https://web.archive.org/web/20161114090530/http://www.ideafinder.com/history/inventions/paperclip.htm. 2016-11-14. dead.
• Petroski, Henry: "Polishing the Gem: A First-Year Design Project", Journal of Engineering Education , October 1998, p. 445
• Penn, Arthur: The Home Library , Appleton, New York, 1883
• Gem Paper Clip Advertisement by Cushman & Denison . The Phonographic World . January 1893 . 8 . 5 . XIII . 2027/mdp.39015011409193?urlappend=%3Bseq=485 . 11 February 2019.
• http://www.earlyofficemuseum.com/paper_clips.htm History of the Paper Clip
• Cushman & Denison advertisement . The American Lawyer . September 1893 . 1 . 9 . 3 . 9 February 2019.
• Book: Henry Petroski. The Evolution of Useful Things: How Everyday Artifacts-From Forks and Pins to Paper Clips and Zippers-Came to be as They are. . 1 December 2010. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. 978-0-307-77305-0. 68. "From Pins to Paper Clips"
• Book: Henry Petroski. Invention by Design: How Engineers Get from Thought to Thing . registration. 1996. Harvard University Press. 978-0-674-46368-4. 17 . "Paper Clips and Design"
• Petroski. Henry. Polishing the Gem: A First-Year Design Project. Journal of Engineering Education. October 1998. 87. 4. 445–449. 10.1002/j.2168-9830.1998.tb00377.x. 111237529 . Appendix: A selected list of U.S. Patents for paper clips. Journal of Engineering Education , 1998, p. 449.
• Web site: National Paperclip Day: How to celebrate in Central Florida . Cassie. Armstrong. orlandosentinel.com. 29 May 2018 .
• G. W. . Trompf . 3119625 . 10.2307/3119625 . Radical Conservatism in Herbert Spencer's Educational Thought . British Journal of Educational Studies . 17 . 3 . October 1969 . 277 .
• Book: Lloyd . John . Mitchinson . John . QI: The Book of General Ignorance - The Noticeably Stouter Edition . 7 October 2010 . Faber & Faber . 978-0-571-27378-2 . 249 . en.
• O'Connell . James F. . Christopher Raven: A Personal Appreciation . Journal of California and Great Basin Anthropology . 1 July 1995 . 17 . 1 . 10 . 30 September 2021 . en . 0191-3557 . he often assured beginning graduate students that Herbert Spencer's greatest contribution to humanity had been the invention of the paper clip.
• Web site: Useful Registered Design Number: 809 . BT 45 — Patents, Designs and Trade Marks Office: Non-ornamental ('Useful') Designs Act 1843 Representations . National Archives . 30 September 2021 . London . English . 2 September 1846 .
• Son of Rudolph Ackermann ; see Spencer (1904) p.354 "Mr. Ackermann who was a bad man of business, and who, failing not long afterwards, shot himself"; and Web site: Rudolph Ackermann . British artists' suppliers, 1650-1950 . National Portrait Gallery . 29 September 2021 . Adolphus Ackermann also set up business close by at 15 Beaufort Buildings but committed suicide in 1858 when faced with bankruptcy proceedings.
• Book: Spencer . Herbert . An Autobiography . 1904 . D. Appleton . 352 –354; 639 –640 . English.
• Application dated 12 November 1899, Patentschrift no. 121067, patent granted 6 June 1901.
• US Patent No. 675,761 June 4, 1901.
• "Binders" Aschehougs konversasjonsleksikon , Oslo 1975, vol. 2, p. 695.
• Petroski, Henry "The Evolution of Artifacts", American Scientist , Volume 80, 1992, pp. 416–20.
• Holst, Wilhelm: "Johan Vaaler", Studenterne fra 1887 , Kristiania 1912.
• Vaaler's forgotten German patent was found by patent engineer Halvard Foss of The Norwegian Industrial Property Office (Patentstyret) while looking for patents granted to Norwegians in the German patent office. "I made this discovery known to my colleagues", Foss stated in an interview with the weekly A-magasinet no. 52, 1988.
• Foss, Halvard: "Den frittstående oppfinner", Styret for det industrielle rettsvern 50 år , Oslo 1961, p. 190.
• Bø, Finn: Forbuden frukt (First edition 1945), Oslo 1995, .
• Aschehougs konversasjonsleksikon , supplementsbind, Oslo 1952.
• Aschehougs konversasjonsleksikon , Oslo 1974, Vol. 2, p. 695.
• Hesstvedt, Ola: "Den lille norske hjelperen fyller 90 år", A-magasinet nr. 52, 1988.
• "Vaaler, Johan", Norsk biografisk leksikon , Kunnskapsforlaget, Oslo 2005. Vol. 9, p. 411, .
• Web site: Pittsburgh dentist admits using paper clips for root canals . Paul Van. Osdol. 1 September 2015. 22 January 2018.
• Book: The Most Forbidden Knowledge: 151 Things NO ONE Should Know How to Do . Powell. Michael. Forbeck. Matt. 2013-01-18. Adams Media. 978-1440560927. en.
• Book: Strange Objects Covered With Fur: 2015 UTS Writers' Anthology . 2015-05-01. Xoum Publishing. 9781921134555. en.
• Book: Paper Clips from China . US International Trade Commission.

This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License . It uses material from the Wikipedia article " Paper clip ".

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Remembering ‘Operation Paperclip,’ when national security trumped ethical concern

PBS News Hour PBS News Hour

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JUDY WOODRUFF:

Now, a look at a moment when national security interests trumped ethical concerns.

Jeffrey Brown has our book conversation.

JEFFREY BROWN:

Nazi scientists, some of them tied to war crimes including horrific concentration camp experiments, brought to the U.S. in a secret program to advance American security interests during the Cold War. It sounds like the plot of a film drama, but it actually happened and on a large scale.

The story is told in the new book "Operation Paperclip." Author and journalist Annie Jacobsen joins us now.

Welcome to you.

ANNIE JACOBSEN, Author, "Operation Paperclip: The Secret Intelligence Program that Brought Nazi Scientists to America": Thank you.

These were top scientists in the German war effort sought out by the U.S. military in the — as the war was coming to an end.

ANNIE JACOBSEN:

That's right.

These were Hitler's top weapons makers. And Operation Paperclip became a classified military program to bring them to the United States.

It also had a public face. So, there was on the one hand the truth about the program kept secret and on the other hand the idea that we will tell the public that these are the good Germans.

The good Germans. But they were dedicated Nazis, the ones you write about. We should say, there were many, 1,600 in all. Right?

You document about 21, dedicated Nazis, some, as I said, involved in horrific stuff.

What they did was known, right, to the people who were — to the Americans who were seeking them out?

Certainly to the American military intelligence officers who were interviewing them.

The idea that they were involved in war crimes was really necessary to be kept secret, and that's exactly what happened. In the book, I think I unveil a lot of the truth about this program that's remained clouded for decades.

So, give us an example of one of the figures that intrigued you.

Well, I think one of the worst-case scenarios was that the United States military made the decision to bring Walter Schreiber. This Major General Dr. Walter Schreiber, the surgeon general of the Third Reich. He wound up at a military facility in Texas.

And doing what?

Well, during the war, Dr. Schreiber had been involved in the vaccine program for the Reich, which sounds like a nice program, but it was actually a program to work on protecting German soldiers from these biological weapons that were also being manufactured.

So he was involved in war crimes in concentration camps. He became a prisoner of the Soviets, and then defected to the United States. We saw him as someone who we absolutely wanted here for his knowledge. So, in the United States, it still remains unknown what exactly he did, only that he worked for the U.S. Air Force in Texas.

You know, this becomes, of course, a story of practical vs. ethical choices, right, whether to — decisions made whether to look the other way or forget about the past in order to advance and gain advantage over the Soviets, it should be said, during the Cold War.

Absolutely.

I mean, the Cold War got hot very quickly, and the Soviet threat was this foreboding menace. And the idea was, certainly at the Pentagon and among the Joint Chiefs of Staff who were really running this program, was, if we don't get these Nazi scientists, surely the Soviets will.

Was there much debate at the time about the ethics of it?

Absolutely there was a debate, and I think that's what makes the narrative so compelling, because you have some people, including high-ranking generals at the Pentagon, who are loath to work with Hitler's former scientists. And you have others who say, this must be and it will be done.

You said we don't really know much about the case of Walter Schreiber and what he did. Some of them, do know. Right?

And the very famous case — most famous one is Wernher von Braun.

Yes, he came here. He was the head of our rocket program and brought 114 fellow V-2 rocket makers with him. And this program again had a very beneficent face.

Only now do we know the facts are very different about what those scientists were involved in at the end of the war in what was called the Nordhausen slave labor factory deep in the tunnels that you had concentration camp prisoners building the V-2 rockets.

So in a case like that and others where we know that they did accomplish things for the U.S. when they came here, then the question — and you write this — does accomplishment cancel out past crimes?

That, I think, is the conundrum of Operation Paperclip.

And I hope that people come to their own conclusion about that, because certainly the idea that you would excuse some of this horrific, horrific behavior during the war becomes, you know, that big moral question.

And what happened to these guys in the end? A number of them just lived out their days quite well here in the U.S.

You know, the obituary for Dr. Theodore Benzinger in The New York Times I think kind of sums it up. He died in 1999. And The New York Times lauds him as a good German scientist who dedicated his life to the U.S. military.

It leaves out the fact that he worked with Himmler very closely during the war and was actually on the original list of Nuremberg war crimes trials. And yet he was released into U.S. custody and came to the United States. So this idea that you can just whitewash someone's past, I think, is important to look into and to investigate, so that that truth can be reconciled.

All right. It's a fascinating story, "Operation Paperclip: The Secret Intelligence Program that Brought Nazi Scientists to America":

Annie Jacobsen, thanks so much.

Thank you for having me.

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Juleanna Glover is the chief executive of Ridgely Walsh, a corporate consultancy, and a former adviser to many Republican officials.

We long ago blew past any meaningful controls on political giving in American elections. Now we should focus on the rules governing political spending, which are in equally terrible shape. For that we can blame the Trump campaign and the federal government’s feeble enforcement efforts.

Anyone who has spent time reviewing Donald Trump’s campaign spending reports would quickly conclude they’re a governance nightmare. There is so little disclosure about what happened to the billions raised in 2020 and 2024 that donors (and maybe even the former president himself) can’t possibly know how it was spent.

Federal Election Commission campaign disclosure reports from 2020 show that much of the money donated to the Trump campaign went into a legal and financial black hole reportedly controlled by Trump family members and close associates. This year’s campaign disclosures are shaping up to be the same. Donors big and small give their hard-earned dollars to candidates with the expectation they will be spent on direct efforts to win votes. They deserve better.

During the 2020 election, almost $516 million of the over $780 million spent by the Trump campaign was directed to American Made Media Consultants, a Delaware-based private company created in 2018 that masked the identities of who ultimately received donor dollars, according to a complaint filed with the F.E.C. by the nonpartisan Campaign Legal Center . How A.M.M.C. spent the money was a mystery even to Mr. Trump’s campaign team , according to news reports shortly after the election.

All but 18 of the 150 largest expenditures on a Trump campaign’s 2020 F.E.C. report went to A.M.M.C. None of the expenses were itemized or otherwise explained aside from anodyne descriptions including “placed media,” “SMS advertising” and “online advertising.” F.E.C. rules require candidates to fully and accurately disclose the final recipients of their campaign disbursements, which is usually understood to include when payments are made through a vendor such as A.M.M.C. This disclosure is intended to assure donors their contributions are used for campaign expenses. Currently, neither voters nor law enforcement can know whether any laws were broken.

A.M.M.C.’s first president was reported to be Lara Trump , the wife of Mr. Trump’s son Eric. The New York Times reported that A.M.M.C. had a treasurer who was also the chief financial officer of Mr. Trump’s 2020 presidential campaign. Mr. Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner signed off on the plan to set up A.M.M.C., and one of Eric Trump’s deputies from the Trump Organization was involved in running it.

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Turning to essays, Edwidge Danticat makes shrewd use of the form

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We're Alone: Essays

By Edwidge Danticat Graywolf: 192 pages, $26 If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from Bookshop.org , whose fees support independent bookstores.

Essay collections appear infrequently on the lists of most popular nonfiction — memoirs and historical narratives dominate conversations about the genre. Those forms of nonfiction are wonderful in their own ways. They are also the versions that are closest to fiction. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but it can exclude the unique offerings of the essay.

An essay collection presents a compressed reading experience, sometimes poetic, and often requiring the author to demonstrate the act of forming an opinion. In its most exalted form, the essay collection is about many things at once. Its goal is not to share information about a topic but to dramatize the formation of a perspective, the development of an informed point of view — a focus that makes the form much more dependent on the writer than the subject matter. “We’re Alone,” a collection of eight short essays by the celebrated Haitian American novelist and short story writer Edwidge Danticat, exemplifies that achievement.

Readers who have appreciated other voice-driven essay collections, such as Zadie Smith’s pandemic-inspired “Intimations,” Erica Caldwell’s “Wrong Is Not My Name,” Jordan Kisner’s “Thin Places,” Cathy Park Hong’s “Minor Feelings” or Elissa Gabbert’s “ The Unreality of Memory ,” will find something familiar with Danticat in “We’re Alone.” The thematic thread of this collection binds loosely around experiences of disconnection or isolation that are exacerbated by a sense of risk predicated on racial, political or social vulnerability. In the essay “A Rainbow in the Sky,” Danticat writes: “The less stable your house, the more terror you feel.” She has elegantly captured that those who face a storm with all foundations intact have a different relationship to the experience than those who were already struggling before it.

In the preface to the book, Danticat discloses that writing essays allows her to feel alone with herself and present with a reader. These pieces represent her outstretched hand, an invitation to spend shared time in reflection. Danticat took the book’s title from the French poem “Plage” by the Haitian writer Roland Chassagne, whose tragic history of imprisonment is also explored in the book. His poem envisions a night spent under palm trees, and the longing for the end of a deep disappointment. Here Danticat finds an early foothold into one of the book’s chief concerns: thresholds where someone’s feelings have been constricted for the sake of other people’s comfort. The title also invokes a plural self, a collective that shares in the writer’s experience of solitude and disaffection.

In the literary essay, a tradition that unites personal insight with anecdotes, evidence and reasoning, one of the most satisfying moments is finding where the writer’s logic breaks and she struggles to fully accommodate the proportions of her subject. Such moments make the inquiries appear vulnerable and honest, even when in reality they are simulations of sense-making. Not all essayists are invested in showing their struggle in understanding or are given the space to do so. But Danticat invites readers into the challenge of putting facts and feelings together. She excels at showing how hard it is to know what the right questions are to ask or how to answer them, and like many of us, she struggles to talk about difficult subjects, especially with her children.

For example, in “By the Time You Read This…,” Danticat debates how much and when to tell her children about how police violence affects the way Black people and immigrants think about safety. She writes, “Each time a young Black person is killed by a police officer or by a vigilante civilian, I ask myself if the time had come for me to write to my daughters a letter about Abner Louima and the long list of nonsurvivors who have come after him.” There is dignity in her doubt, which makes way for the kind of compassion that characterizes these essays.

Danticat’s insights are informed by accounts of the trials of friends and family: Her beloved mother wanders off in an airport; an uncle suffers from an irresolvable, progressive disorientation; Louima, a family friend, is attacked and raped by police; and two mentors, Toni Morrison and Paule Marshall, live through their final months. These experiences emphasize the possibility of loss and disconnection, reflecting a kind of hypervigilance that can be an inheritance of trauma. She approaches these accounts with the courage of an intentional witness, maintaining that perspective even when she looks beyond her own circle. In “Chronicles of a Death Foretold,” Danticat tells the story of a self-proclaimed prophetess who predicted the 2021 assassination of the Haitian President Jovenel Moïse, and the collection’s penultimate essay, “Wozo, Not Mawozo,” examines the weeks following the kidnapping of Christian missionaries in Haiti in 2021.

These are clearly the essays of an accomplished novelist. They move swiftly through detailed anecdotes and varied landscapes, even when the principal action the speaker engages in is “thinking.” There is room in an essay for dramatic action, for the expression of the body as it relates to thought, which was somewhat lacking here. At times, I struggled to see the author as a figure in the dramatic action she cited. Even so, it’s a testament to Danticat’s skill that these brief, intense works about serious matters do not feel heavy. She brings us close enough to the trouble at hand that we cannot mistake what we have seen.

But we are not alone in trying to make sense of feelings that come from becoming a witness to this world. No one is.

Wendy S. Walters is the author of the prose collection “Multiply/Divide” and an associate professor of nonfiction at Columbia University.

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• 28 August 2024

Exclusive: the papers that most heavily cite retracted studies

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In January, a review paper 1 about ways to detect human illnesses by examining the eye appeared in a conference proceedings published by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) in New York City. But neither its authors nor its editors noticed that 60% of the papers it cited had already been retracted.

The case is one of the most extreme spotted by a giant project to find papers whose results might be in question because they cite retracted or problematic research. The project’s creator, computer scientist Guillaume Cabanac at the University of Toulouse in France, shared his data with Nature ’s news team, which analysed them to find the papers that most heavily cite retracted work yet haven’t themselves been withdrawn (see ‘Retracted references’).

Chain retraction: how to stop bad science propagating through the literature

“We are not accusing anybody of doing something wrong. We are just observing that in some bibliographies, the references have been retracted or withdrawn, meaning that the paper may be unreliable,” Cabanac says. He calls his tool a Feet of Clay Detector, referring to an analogy, originally from the Bible, about statues or edifices that collapse because of their weak clay foundations.

The IEEE paper is the second-highest on the list assembled by Nature , with 18 of the 30 studies it cites withdrawn. Its authors didn’t respond to requests for comment, but IEEE integrity director Luigi Longobardi says that the publisher didn’t know about the issue until Nature asked, and that it is investigating.

Cabanac, a research-integrity sleuth, has already created software to flag thousands of problematic papers in the literature for issues such as computer-written text or disguised plagiarism . He hopes that his latest detector, which he has been developing over the past two years and describes this week in a Comment article in Nature , will provide another way to stop bad research propagating through the scientific literature — some of it fake work created by ‘papermill’ firms .

Further scrutiny

Cabanac lists the detector’s findings on his website , but elsewhere online — on the paper-review site PubPeer and on social media — he has explicitly flagged more than 1,700 papers that caught his eye because of their reliance on retracted work. Some authors have thanked Cabanac for alerting them to problems in their references. Others argue that it’s unfair to effectively cast aspersions on their work because of retractions made after publication that, they say, don’t affect their paper.

Scientific sleuths spot dishonest ChatGPT use in papers

Retracted references don’t definitively show that a paper is problematic, notes Tamara Welschot, part of the research-integrity team at Springer Nature in Dordrecht, the Netherlands, but they are a useful sign that a paper might benefit from further scrutiny. ( Nature ’s news team is independent of its publisher, Springer Nature.)

Some researchers argue that retraction of references in a narrative review — which describes the state of research in a field — doesn’t necessarily invalidate the original paper. But when studies assessed by a systematic review or meta-analysis are withdrawn, the results of that review should always be recalculated to keep the literature up to date, says epidemiologist Isabelle Boutron at Paris City University.

Retracted references

These studies have the highest proportion of retracted papers in their reference lists, according to Nature ’s analysis of articles flagged by the Feet of Clay Detector.

Source: Nature analysis of data from the Feet of Clay Detector . Figures for references and retractions were hand-checked and altered where necessary; detector data sources do not always give accurate counts.

Picking up fraudsters

Some of the papers that cite high proportions of retracted work are authored by known academic fraudsters who have had many of their own papers retracted.

These include engineering researcher Ali Nazari, who was dismissed from Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, Australia, in 2019, after a university misconduct investigation into his activities. He previously worked at Islamic Azad University in Saveh, Iran, and his current whereabouts are unclear. After Nature told publishers about his extant papers 2 , 3 topping Cabanac’s lists — including Elsevier and Fap-Unifesp, a non-profit foundation that supports the Federal University of São Paulo in Brazil — they said that they would look into the articles. One of the relevant journals was discontinued in 2013, Elsevier noted.

Cabanac’s detector also flags papers 4 by Chen-Yuan Chen, a computer scientist who worked at the National Pingtung University of Education in Taiwan until 2014. He was behind a syndicate that faked peer review and boosted citations, which came to light in 2014 after an investigation by the publisher SAGE. Some of Chen’s papers that are still in the literature were published by Springer Nature, which says it hadn’t been aware of the issue but is now investigating. Neither Chen nor Nazari responded to Nature ’s requests for comment.

Another flagged study 5 is by Ahmad Salar Elahi, a physicist affiliated with the Islamic Azad University in Tehran who has already had dozens of his papers retracted, in many cases because of excessive self-citation and instances of faked peer review. In 2018, the website Retraction Watch (which also wrote about the Nazari and Chen cases) reported that according to Mahmoud Ghoranneviss, then-director of the Plasma Physics Research Centre where Elahi worked, Elahi was likely to be dismissed from the university. Now, Ghoranneviss — who has retired — says that Elahi was barred only from that centre and not the rest of the university. Elahi continues to publish papers, sometimes listing co-authors including Ghoranneviss, who says he wasn’t aware of this. Neither Elahi nor the university responded to Nature ’s queries. The IEEE and Springer Nature, publishers of the journals that ran the Elahi papers, say they’re investigating.

Unhappy authors

Some authors are unhappy about Cabanac’s work. In May 2024, editors of the journal Clinical and Translational Oncology placed an expression of concern on a 2019 review paper 6 about RNA and childhood cancers, warning that it might not be reliable because it cited “a number of articles that have been retracted”. The journal’s publishing editor, Ying Jia at Springer Nature in Washington DC, says the team was alerted by one of Cabanac’s posts on social media last year.

Computer scientist Guillaume Cabanac has flagged more than 1,700 papers that caught his eye because of their reliance on retracted work. Credit: Fred Scheiber/SIPA/Shutterstock

Cabanac’s analysis finds that just under 10% of the article’s 637 references have been retracted — almost all after the review was published. However, the paper’s corresponding author, María Sol Brassesco, a biologist at the University of São Paulo, says that removing these references doesn’t change the conclusions of the review, and that she has sent the journal an updated version, which it hasn’t published. Because the cited works were retracted after publication, the expression of concern “felt like we were being punished for something that we could not see ahead”, she says. Jia says that editors felt that adding the notice was the most appropriate action.

In other cases, authors disagree about what to do. Nature examined three papers 7 , 8 , 9 in which between 5 and 16% of the references have now been retracted, all co-authored by Mohammad Taheri, a genetics PhD student at Friedrich Schiller University of Jena in Germany. He says that criticisms of his work on PubPeer “lack solid scientific basis”. Yet, in May, a co-author of two of those works, Marcel Dinger, dean of science at the University of Sydney in Australia, told Retraction Watch that he was reassessing review papers that cited retracted articles. He now says that his team has submitted corrections for the works, but Frontiers, which published one paper, says it hasn’t received the correspondence and will investigate. Elsevier — which published the other two papers — also says that it is examining the issue.

Catching problems early

Examples in which papers cite already-retracted work suggest that publishers could do a better job of screening manuscripts. For instance, 20 studies cited by a 2023 review paper 10 about RNA and gynaecological cancers in Frontiers in Oncology had been retracted before the article was submitted. Review co-author Maryam Mahjoubin-Tehran, a pharmacist at Mashhad University of Medical Sciences in Iran, told Nature that her team didn’t know about the retractions, and does not plan to update or withdraw the paper. The publisher, Frontiers, says it is investigating.

Until recently, publishers have not flagged citations to retracted papers in submitted manuscripts. However, many publishers say they are aware of Cabanac’s tool and monitor issues he raises, and some are bringing in similar screening tools.

Last year, Wiley announced it was checking Retraction Watch’s database of retracted articles to flag issues in reference lists, and Elsevier says it is also rolling out a tool that assesses manuscripts for red flags such as self-citations and references to retracted work. Springer Nature is piloting an in-house tool to look for retracted papers in manuscript citations and Longobardi says the IEEE is considering including Feet of Clay or similar solutions in its workflow. A working group for the STM Integrity Hub — a collaboration between publishers — has also tested the Feet of Clay Detector and “found it useful”, says Welschot.

Medical trend

Medical reviews that cite studies in areas later shown to be affected by fraud are a recurring theme in Cabanac’s findings.

In theory, meta-analyses or systematic reviews should be withdrawn or corrected if work they have cited goes on to be retracted, according to a policy issued in 2021 by the Cochrane Collaboration, an international group known for its gold-standard reviews of medical treatments .

Boutron, who directs Cochrane France in Paris, is using Cabanac’s tool to identify systematic reviews that cite retracted work, and to assess the impact the retracted studies had on the overall results.

However, a 2022 study 11 suggests that authors are often reluctant to update reviews, even when they are told the papers cite retracted work. Researchers e-mailed the authors of 88 systematic reviews that cited now-retracted studies in bone health by a Japanese fraudster, Yoshihiro Sato . Only 11 of the reviews were updated, the authors told Nature last year.

Retraction alerts

Authors aren’t routinely alerted if work cited in their past papers is withdrawn — although in recent years, paper-management tools for researchers such as Zotero and EndNote have incorporated Retraction Watch’s open database of retracted papers and have begun to flag papers that have been taken down. Cabanac thinks publishers might use tools like his to create similar alerts.

In 2016, researchers at the University of Oxford, UK, began developing a tool called RetractoBot , which automatically notifies authors by e-mail when a study that they have previously cited has been retracted. The software currently monitors 20,000 retracted papers and about 400,000 papers, published after 2000, that cite them. The team behind it is running a randomized trial to see whether papers flagged by RetractoBot are subsequently cited less than those not flagged by the tool, and will publish its results next year, says project lead Nicholas DeVito, a integrity researcher at Oxford.

The team has alerted more than 100,000 researchers so far. DeVito says that a minority of authors are annoyed about being contacted, but that others are grateful. “We are merely trying to provide a service to the community to reduce this practice from happening,” he says.

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