When I use a word . . . Academic and other sleuths—a taxonomy

The story so far

In my search for the earliest instances of the word “sleuth” and its derivatives in relation to observers of academic misconduct, I have found that there is a wide range of different types of sleuths, together calling out for a taxonomy.

The origin of the word has so far been traced back only to a Norwegian word, slōð, meaning a track or a trail. However, that word must itself have had an antecedent form with a corresponding theoretical IndoEuropean forerunner. IndoEuropean roots starting with consonants such as K, L, M, P, T, or W sometimes have an S prefixed to them. For example, the root LEU, meaning to loosen or unbind, gives us words such as loose and lost, words ending in –less, implying absence, and lysis and its derivatives; and LEU has a counterpart, SLEU, to relax, giving us words such as sloth, slouch, and slow, sludge, slush, and slumber.

I have therefore hypothesised that the IndoEuropean root LEIS, a track or furrow, could have had a counterpart, namely SLEIS, perhaps meaning to track or follow, which would give us a word such as sleuth and, in its o-grade form, slot, the track of an animal such as a deer.1

Sleuths—a taxonomy

In surveying various types of sleuths I have identified four broad categories:

1. Investigative sleuths. By this I mean detectives who investigate crimes.

2. Diagnostic sleuths. By this I mean clinicians who, after taking a patient’s medical history, performing an examination, and ordering tests, reach a diagnosis. Under this heading I also include pathologists, who not only assist clinicians in diagnosis, but also make their own post-mortem diagnoses.

3. Research sleuths. By this I mean clinicians, including epidemiologists, who search for the causes of diseases and academics in any discipline who undertake research of any kind.

4. Integrity sleuths. By this I mean academics who scrutinise the publications of others looking for evidence of misconduct. They have also been called “academic sleuths” and “scientific sleuths,” although the latter term could also apply to research sleuths. Occasionally the actual form of misconduct has been used in the description, as in “plagiarism sleuths.”2

Investigative sleuths

As I have previously discussed, the earliest use of the term “sleuth” was in describing investigative sleuths. It dated back to 1872, as an abbreviated form of “sleuth-hound,” which itself dated from 1849, and had originally meant a bloodhound.1

There are three subtypes of investigative sleuths—amateur detectives like Miss Marple, consulting detectives like Sherlock Holmes, and police detectives like Inspector Morse. In illustration of the principle that sleuths can belong to different categories at different times, consider Kay Scarpetta, as portrayed in novels by Patricia Cornwell. She is both a forensic pathologist and an amateur sleuth, and although fictional she was inspired as a creation by the real-life Virginia chief medical examiner, Marcella Farinelli Fierro.3

Diagnostic sleuths

All clinicians are potentially diagnostic sleuths. The English physician Sir Thomas Clifford Allbutt first used the term “sleuth-hound” in reference to medical practice in 1882, in a lecture published in The British Medical Journal: “But do we not now see whence the light is coming? Are not many of our young physicians tracking, like sleuth-hounds, the causes of these effects, and surely learning why a kidney shrivels, and why a heart or lung decays?”4 His remark can be taken, perhaps, to refer to both diagnostic and causative, i.e. research, sleuthing.

An early example of “sleuth” on its own is in a description of the use of angiography in identifying bleeding points in or adjacent to colonic diverticula, the angiographer being referred to as a super sleuth.5 Nurses have also been similarly described.67

Research sleuths

An early example of the use of the word “sleuth” in the context of medical research comes from 1965, in a description of “sleuths of causation,” referring to epidemiologists, “valuable members of the medical community … who pursue, with quiet and indefatigable persistence, the search for ‘How many? What kind? Where?’ and finally ‘Why?’”8 An earlier instance still can be found in the field of agricultural research,9 and there are several later examples as well, for instance in haematology10 and cancer research.11 Marketing researchers12 and gemmologists13 have also been labelled with the term.

Integrity sleuths

In my first, somewhat desultory, attempt to find early uses of the term “sleuth” in describing those who have become expert in identifying the perpetrators of academic misconduct of all kinds, I found an example from 2022.14 Subsequently, however, Ivan Oransky, one of the founders of Retraction Watch, told me that the word had been used in this sense in a piece published on the RW website in 2018,15 in which the names of nearly 50 integrity or academic sleuths were listed.

At that point I reserved judgment on the question of the earliest such instance, and started looking harder. I have since found earlier examples, although not necessarily the earliest—antedatings are always possible.

The earliest examples I have now found date from the 1980s. This is not perhaps surprising. Although examples of fraud of all kinds can be traced back to ancient times, fraud has been described as “the growth industry of the eighties.”16

In the 1950s a Mexican ceramicist, Brigído Lara, began creating forgeries of pre-Columbian antiques.17 In 1974 he was arrested, accused of trafficking antiquities, and confessed that he was not a trafficker but a forger. Sleuths, using thermoluminescence, confirmed the dating.18

The French art historian François Daulte (1924–98) has also been described as a “scholarly sleuth”19 and was himself the target of forgers of his signature, apparently authenticating the works of artists such as Renoir.20

Other examples from the 1980s and 1990s have been published.21222324

My search for earlier examples continues. More sleuthing is required.