tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-90912189500799821542024-03-14T06:48:40.314+01:00Copy, Shake, and PasteA blog about plagiarism and scientific misconductDebora Weber-Wulffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01602911135725939409noreply@blogger.comBlogger570125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9091218950079982154.post-76616991281670847722022-12-14T16:16:00.002+01:002022-12-14T16:16:27.202+01:00Plagiarism scandal at the University of St. Gallen<p>The <i>Neue Züricher Zeitung</i> (NZZ) started the ball rolling on October 9, 2022 (p. 23) with an article in the printed newspaper about plagiarism accusations concerning a business school professor at the prestigious <a href="https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universit%C3%A4t_St._Gallen" target="_blank">University of St. Gallen</a> (HSG). A <i>Titularprofessor</i> (that is, a person who has sucessfully submitted their <i>habilitation</i>—the second doctorate—, but without tenure and often without a salary) was accused of plagiarism in his dissertation that had been submitted to the TU Darmstadt in Germany. The NZZ had requested that Stefan Weber investigate the thesis, he later <a href="https://plagiatsgutachten.com/blog/plagiat-hofmann/" target="_blank">published some of his findings</a> on his blog, <i>Plagiatsgutachten</i>. The TU Darmstadt has been deliberating since February 2022 about the case. </p><p>The professor, currently in charge of an institute at the HSG, had faced similar charges about his <i>habilitation</i> submitted to the HSG. Students had found the text similarity and informed the university back in August 2021, but an investigative committee did not find academic misconduct. </p><p>Early in December 2022 more issues turned up. The professor lists over 400 publications to his name, but as the <i>St. Galler Tagblatt/</i><i>Appenzeller Zeitung</i> reported on December 5, 2022 (p. 21), quite a number of the publications that have the professor as first author are acutally theses by HSG students. The AZ contacted a number of these students for comments. One noted that he found it strange that the professor was so insistant on publishing his master's thesis, and was irritated that the professor's name was on it, although it was completely the student's own thesis. </p><p>The AZ manged to obtain a dozen theses that they could compare with the professor's publications. Indeed, they were practically the same. </p><p>According to the ethical codex of the HSG, this is not permissible. Students are not to be ghostwriters for professors. Interviewed professors from the HSG who did not want to be named, noted that this might be typical, as the number of publications is used as an indicator of researcher quality, but that it was a very questionable practice. The professor was unavailable for comment.</p><p>On December 7 the <i>St. Galler Tagblatt</i> interviewed some students on p. 18 and quoted the rector as saying the similarity between the dissertation and the habilitation of the professor was not as extensive as the lawyer who was representing the students had stated in August 2021. He also stated that the external examiners had found no plagiarism at all. </p><p>And of course, by now all the rest of the media in Switzerland was banging on about the story. <br /></p><p>On December 9, the <i>St. Galler Tagblatt</i> included not only a front-page article, but also a large report on p. 22 and two letters-to-the-editor on p. 33. They had interviewed Stefan Weber, and the rector of the HSG had <a href="https://www.unisg.ch/de/newsroom/plagiatsvorwurf-die-position-der-hsg/" target="_blank">published an article on its home page</a> in the form of an interview. The rector noted that they had looked at the habiliation and even used Turnitin, but of course since it was a cumulative habiliation there was much similarity found to the original papers. </p><p>On December 10 the rector was interviewed by the <i>St. Galler Tagblatt</i> and admitted that he had himself not even looked at the habilitation, and tried to excuse not having contacted the students who got the ball rolling because he didn't know who the students were. But he now wanted to speak to Weber. A lawyer for the students later noted that their names of the students where of course known, something the rector later had to concede was correct, as letters existed showing that the names were, indeed known. The lawyer noted that the case would have to be investigated even if the names were not known. <br /></p><p>Things get really wild on December 12: Another professor at the HSG who had advised the first professor during his habilitation and had himself done his first and second doctorate in Darmstadt, wrote a threatening letter to students of the HSG. The letter, appearing to speak for the university, threatened the students. They must stop talking to the press or they will face civil and criminal lawsuits. Of course, this letter made it to the newspaper and it now appears to be an all-reporters-on-deck case. The <i>St. Galler Tagblatt</i> dug up an IT consultancy company that lists both professors as members of the board. Both have published papers together, including ones that were part of the habilitation at the HSG, meaning that the one professor should not have been the advisor for the <i>habilitation</i> of the other, as he can be considered to be biased. The NZZ dug up another company that appears to have diverted funds from the HSG into the company's account. </p><p>The university held a public meeting on December 12 with students, staff, and administrators. The students are angry, because when their work is found to have plagiarism in it, they are harshly punished. The rector makes it clear that the university will not try to keep people from speaking to the press. He promised to make progress on clearing up all the issues as fast as possible, but warns that it won't be before Christmas. </p><p>I can barely keep up with all the news. The NZZ published a <a href="https://www.nzz.ch/schweiz/eine-uni-kaempft-um-ihre-reputation-an-der-hochschule-st-gallen-steht-die-wissenschaftliche-exzellenz-auf-dem-spiel-ld.1716799" target="_blank">summary of the situation</a> today, December 14, including references to all sorts of scandals the HSG has had in the past years: copy&paste in reports about theses, fudged expenses, professors having to step down from company boards because of scandals there, market manipulations, and an instructor convicted for economic crimes. We'll see how this spins out!<br /></p>Debora Weber-Wulffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16036864220530629908noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9091218950079982154.post-55034846981544239762022-12-01T20:42:00.000+01:002022-12-01T20:42:04.537+01:00Plagiarism Discussion in Luxembourg<p>On November 23, 2022 there was a discussion in the Luxembourg National Library about plagiarism that was filmed and is available <a href="https://www.forum.lu/diskussion-plagiate-in-der-wissenschaft/" target="_blank">online</a>. The discussion is in German. </p><p><b>Diskussion: Plagiate in der Wissenschaft</b> (with Dr. Jochen Zenthöfer, Prof. Dr. Martin Stierle, Dr. Henning Marmulla)</p><p></p><p>Jochen Zenthöfer is a journalist and recently published a book in German, <i>Plagiate in der Wissenschaft – Wie VroniPlag Wiki Betrug in Doktorarbeiten aufdeckt</i> in transcript-Verlag<i>.<br /></i></p>Debora Weber-Wulffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16036864220530629908noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9091218950079982154.post-56088379140150982772022-05-26T00:40:00.005+02:002022-05-26T00:42:38.175+02:00ECAIP 2022, Day 3<p>And now to conclude the conference! Unfortunately, I had THREE things booked for today, the conference and two others. Luckily, a friend took over one and I was able to do one via Zoom (having to get up early, as the 8:30 meeting started at 7:30 local time). I was able to use the internet at the Porto university, and then join up with the conference a little later.</p><p><a href="https://copy-shake-paste.blogspot.com/2022/05/ecaip-2022-day-1.html" target="_blank">Day 1</a> - <a href="https://copy-shake-paste.blogspot.com/2022/05/ecaip2022-day-2.html">Day 2</a> - <b>Day 3</b></p>
<hr /><p>
I missed the keynote by <a href="https://scienceintegritydigest.com/" target="_blank"><b>Elisabeth Bik</b></a><span class="event pinned ev_0">, "The Dark Side of Science: Misconduct in Biomedical Research". I've heard her a number of times, her talks are always fascinating (and scary when you see how much research misconduct she is uncovering - imagine how much more is out there that she does not see.</span></p><p><span class="event pinned ev_0">The next talk I attended was by </span><span class="event pinned ev_0"><span class="event pinned ev_0"><b>Thomas Lancaster</b> on "</span>Artificial Intelligence Led Threats To Academic Integrity." He casually demonstrated text generators, even a scientific literature review generator and an image and slide generator. With all of this out there (and used and the papers accepted by predatory publishers) we need to see that there is a big threat to scientific integrity out there for which we have absolutely no idea what to do about it.</span></p><p><span class="event pinned ev_0"><b>Suraj Ajit </b>(University of Northhampton) was to be speaking on "A rule-based decision support system for detecting, reporting, and substantiating contract cheating within assignments in computing courses in UK Higher Education" with an emphasis on computer science assignments. However, he used most of his time to tell us about the processes at his university for dealing with academic misconduct. At an academic integrity conference (as opposed to an introductory course for teacher) one can assume that people know about this. So he didn't have time to actually speak about his work, other than flashing a few decision tables that I didn't have time to read. He has unfortunately not posted his slides on the Sched site for the conference, so I was unable to read them later. </span></p><p><span class="event pinned ev_0"><b>Rafael Ball</b> (Director of the ETH Library and Collections) then spoke on "Awareness Mentality and Strategic Behaviour in Scientific Publishing and Dissemination." He bemoaned a percieved shift in academic behavior from "being good" to "looking good" in bibliometrics and altmetrics. The awareness mentality deals with the strategic behavior of scientists and publishers: Scientists focus on career building, awarding, funding, while publishers focus on competition, having high rejection rates, and of course high spectacularity. He has noted that more and more article titles are ending with a question mark :) External goals are pre-empting scientific goals. He asks if publishing a translation of a paper is self-plagiarism, or if publishing with a slight shift in focus is an unnecessary second publication? </span></p><p><span class="event pinned ev_0"><span class="event pinned ev_0"><b>Beatriz Antonieta Moya</b> and <b>Alex Paquette</b> (University of Calgary) spoke about "</span>Graduate students' reflections as partners of academic integrity advocacy during Covid-19" (<a href="https://prism.ucalgary.ca/bitstream/handle/1880/114599/ENAI%202022-%20Moya%20et%20al%20%28compressed%29.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y" target="_blank">Slides</a>). In the past, grad students were not part of the Academic Integrity Week, but their mentor <b>Sarah Elaine Eaton</b> got them interested. They have a number of things they started like academic integrity trivia quizzes each day on Instagram or live session AMA with Sarah. </span></p><p><span class="event pinned ev_0"><span class="event pinned ev_0"><b>Kelley Packalen</b> (Queen's University) spoke on "</span>What’s the Harm? The Professor Will Never Know: Understanding How Students Justify Participating in the “Grey Areas” of Academic Integrity." She and Kate Rowbotham looked at three research questions:<br /></span></p><ol style="text-align: left;"><li><span class="event pinned ev_0">Under which scenarios do students determine it is permissible to engage in specific trivial and</span><span class="event pinned ev_0"> common violations of academic integrity?</span><span class="event pinned ev_0"> </span></li><li><span class="event pinned ev_0">Is there a slippery slope effect as related to violations of academic integrity?</span><span class="event pinned ev_0"> </span></li><li><span class="event pinned ev_0">What explanations do students use to justify violating academic integrity in general?</span><br /><span class="event pinned ev_0"></span></li></ol><p><span class="event pinned ev_0">They determined that there is a slippery slope effect, and deduce the following practical implications that are similar to what is used to discourage students from binge drinking:</span></p><ol style="text-align: left;"><li><span class="event pinned ev_0">Share your thinking with students.</span></li><li><span class="event pinned ev_0">Debunk myths that everyone is cheating.</span></li><li><span class="event pinned ev_0">Reframe the choice as a moral decision instead of a business decision. </span></li></ol><p><span class="event pinned ev_0"><b>Erja Moore </b>closed the session with "</span><span class="event pinned ev_0"><span class="event event-loggedin ev_11 ev_11_sub_1 sub">Internationalisation
of higher education in Finland – A challenge for integrity in academic
writing at Master’s level." She chose 28 Finnish Master's theses in English, 1 % of the 2020 Master's theses and 15 % of the master's theses in 2020 and gave them a close read. They varied in length from 23-101 pages, the reference lists were between 2 and 11 pages. She found a lot of problems in the theses: no written methodology, no in-text references, pseudoreferences, invented sources, inappropriate sources, etc. </span></span></p><p><span class="event pinned ev_0"><span class="event event-loggedin ev_11 ev_11_sub_1 sub">The conference closed with a keynote by <b>Teddi Fishman</b> "How we Succeed? Goals, Metrics, and Successes for Academic Integrity Initiatives in a Post-Covid, "PostTruth" World." In order to have some fun, <b>Sonja Bjelobaba</b> inserted random slides into her slide deck. Teddi asked us how we define "success" and in particular if our methods are valid, reliable, attainable and useful. We have to conclude that we are using data that is deeply flawed. We don't know how many students are cheating, we only know what we catch! We are in the post-truth era already (nicely illustrated with a a shop selling "Genuine Fake Watches). She introduced us to the "<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window" target="_blank">Overton Window</a>", the idea that leaders are limited to those possibilities that already enjoy popular support. In effect, we have moved from stocks and pillories through shunning and public flogging to restorative justice in many areas. In academic integrity we are stuck in point penalties, revocation of degrees, loss of position or prestege, or demotion. Restorative justice is not quite inside the window yet. A random slide of Teddi in a Flying Spaghetti Monster costume got us off topic a bit, but she steered us back to some food for thought:</span></span></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li><span class="event pinned ev_0"><span class="event event-loggedin ev_11 ev_11_sub_1 sub">To what extent have we shown sufficient transparency and accountabilitiy in our research practices so that the public can have faith in our outputs?</span></span></li><li><span class="event pinned ev_0"><span class="event event-loggedin ev_11 ev_11_sub_1 sub">Students who learn about knowledge production in concert with integrity become researchers with greater appreciation for integrity, who become supervisors of integrity.</span></span></li><li><span class="event pinned ev_0"><span class="event event-loggedin ev_11 ev_11_sub_1 sub">How do we bring about institutional as well as societal change? From the ground up! </span>
</span></li></ul><p>And then we had the closing ceremony! A large group of (male) medical students in traditional Porto garb and traditional instruments serenaded us and <b>Laura Ribeiro</b>, the organizer of the conference, including some spectacular gymnastics:</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen='allowfullscreen' webkitallowfullscreen='webkitallowfullscreen' mozallowfullscreen='mozallowfullscreen' width='320' height='266' src='https://www.blogger.com/video.g?token=AD6v5dwXjl-etFkLQLYHlLMsOz5q4Ray-8MijjhvSBSHYLsKdJiMo8qDYVssL2Ajts9MB-5olgMJf4NL5pBeI29aPg' class='b-hbp-video b-uploaded' frameborder='0'></iframe></div><br /><p>The next conference will be in June 2023 in Derby, UK, organized by <b>Shiva Sivasubramaniam</b> under the motto "Reflecting the Past for Reforming the Future".</p>Debora Weber-Wulffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16036864220530629908noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9091218950079982154.post-33028832113432411632022-05-19T16:21:00.005+02:002022-05-26T00:41:49.310+02:00ECAIP2022, Day 2<p><a href="https://copy-shake-paste.blogspot.com/2022/05/ecaip-2022-day-1.html">Day 1</a> - <b>Day 2</b> - <a href="https://copy-shake-paste.blogspot.com/2022/05/ecaip-2022-day-3.html" target="_blank">Day 3</a> </p><hr />
<p>And on to the second day of the conference!</p><p>The day began with a keynote speech by <b>Ana Marušić</b>, "Challenges in publishing ethics and integrity" Ana is a professor at the University of Split School of Medicine, Croatia,<br />Co-editor-in-chief, <a href="https://jogh.org/" target="_blank"><i>Journal of Global Health</i></a>, a <a href="https://publicationethics.org/" target="_blank">COPE</a> council member, and President of <a href="https://www.embassy.science/wiki/Main_Page" target="_blank"><i>The Embassy of Good Science</i></a> Foundation. Coming from the standpoint of a journal editor she discussed research and publishing ethics, noting that there is a spectrum, from honest error over poor reporting to outright fraud (detrimental research practices). She first ran us through the history of journals, from the first journal, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journal_des_s%C3%A7avans" target="_blank"><i>Journal des sçavans</i></a> in 1665. She noted that the concept of peer review didn't appear until the middle of the 18th century, and <i>Nature</i> didn't even start until the 1950s! She had a good SWOT analysis of the challenges that editors face:</p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjDd5lFM3MH0WNbATUjLRUCk0rm8xamDHLzi80cQFWrzbKFaf-eCasJB99V_i3Rvu1P2DKxS-kHb5mmyMVr17tolHiDc7AeJkCyCOqSENh3m4pDtBErzm-1S5dEcPxLkIl5fa5_mlVsGtU9SpBJJ9gEgeLBwPkyYzwG0mJsiE-_LtHYO_bfbZ7iDaz7/s2711/SWOT-Marusic.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1527" data-original-width="2711" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjDd5lFM3MH0WNbATUjLRUCk0rm8xamDHLzi80cQFWrzbKFaf-eCasJB99V_i3Rvu1P2DKxS-kHb5mmyMVr17tolHiDc7AeJkCyCOqSENh3m4pDtBErzm-1S5dEcPxLkIl5fa5_mlVsGtU9SpBJJ9gEgeLBwPkyYzwG0mJsiE-_LtHYO_bfbZ7iDaz7/w533-h300/SWOT-Marusic.jpg" width="533" /></a></div><br />The main challenges of today are: dealing with image manipulations, correcting articles with honest errors, sorting out pre-prints, and trying to avoid paper mills and predatory publishers. <p></p><p>Her summary is: Quality assurance in editing is the key to responsible publishing!</p><p>I then attended the workshop on "Coming Clean – Addressing the Issues Where a Student Self Declares Contract Cheating" with <b>Thomas Lancaster, Michael Draper, Sandie Dann, Robin Crockett</b>, and <b>Irene Glendinning</b>. I liked that they explicitly asked for consent to record the session, as they want to have input from the audience. Contract cheating represents choosing the wrong path - what if a student wants to come clean? The information that we provide to students should highlight and detail the whistleblowing processes and the support that is available to them, should they wish to admit to having cheated using contract cheating. Some cheating companies attemt to blackmail the students, say that they will tell the university if they don't pay more for the services used. There was a good discussion about the appropriate level of penalty that should be assessed in this situation. <b>Teddi Fishman</b> made it clear that there should be a path towards amnesty, with a focus on retributive or restorative justice. Others felt that there should be no credit given for contract cheating. <b>Mike Reddy</b> spoke about the 4 Cs: <b>C</b>onscious <b>c</b>opying of <b>c</b>ontent/concepts for <b>c</b>redit. If they do not submit, it is not a crime. The lack of any one of the Cs is just poor academic practice, he thinks. </p><p>Then we had a plenary session with a panel discussion (sponsored by Turnitin) moderated by <b>Sonja Bjelobaba</b>:<br /></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li><b>Andreas Ohlson</b> (Turnitin, former head of Urkund and Ouriginal, from Sweden)</li><li><b>Tomáš Foltýnek</b> (Researcher, ENAI president), from Brünn, in the Czech Republic </li><li><b>Martine Peters</b> (Prevention researcher, professor), from Québec, Canada<b><br /></b></li><li><b>Katrīna Sproģe</b> (European students union), from Latvia<br /></li></ul><p>KS noted that not all students have access to Turnitin. I realize that students want this, because they are afraid of plagiarizing by "mistake", but this won't help. They will rewrite to the number the software spits out (and really, really needs to lose!), but their writing won't be better. She also noted that students often translate texts they find online, and indeed, <a href="https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s41239-020-00192-4" target="_blank">our 2020 test</a> showed, that translation is in general not found by such systems.</p><p>TF (who let the 2020 test effort mentioned above) noted that even German to English cases are being found, so it is not just non-English languages that are being used. He criticized the interface that spits out a number that people take to be the decision. He also noted that with Turnitin buying up/out all the good competition, we are losing the competition. Each system finds different plagiarism, so it was better when we had more choice.<br /></p><p>AO asked where the market will be in 5-10 years. He feels the consolidation is important, as it is easier to try new things if you are part of a larger company. The company has lots of discussions and research going on, in particular about how to use text-matching software in education? [The <i>Times Higher Education</i> <a href="https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/ouriginal-chief-defends-turnitin-takeover-against-monopoly-jibes" target="_blank">reported</a> on his comments in detail.]</p><p>MP suggested using the tool <b>with</b> the student <b>in front of</b> the student. <br /></p><p>TF noted that so many universities have policies that are quite different, and many use the number reported by Turitin as a discriminator. There can be many reasons why there is a lot of text match (for example, the student submitted text earlier), there are tables, illustrations, etc. Not every plagiarism is detectable as a text match. He noted that paraphrasing tools are getting better and better, how do we deal with this?</p><p>AO admits that if you look at a single document, it is hard to do. But he notes that Turnitin are looking at the issue. One key is that we could compare with the same student's work over time. So if universities use our solution for everything a student does, they can see when the style changes. [But we WANT the students to change their writing style to become more academic in their writing! -- dww]</p><p>MP notes that we often don't even bother teaching referencing at universities, we focus just on the number.</p><p>KS wants the playing field to be more level. Students need an understanding of what the teachers expect and the teachers must understand what the students know. Who is the person you are teaching? Why are you teaching this material?</p><p>Thomas Lancaster from the audience asked "What answers are most different to the ones being given 10 years ago?"<br /><br />MP: We as educators did not reflect as much on our role in plagiarism detection and prevention. We just blamed students. Now we look more at our role, it is a rude awakening.<br /><br />KS: I wasn't a student 10 years ago :) but we are involved in the discussion now. <br /><br />TF: There has been a huge shift from the technological point of view to pedagogical approaches. From "What do we do when we discover plagiarism?" to how to prevent plagiarism.<br /><br />AO: Percentages :)<br /><br />And then we had to hurry to the hotel to drop our stuff, and we were off for a bus tour of the city, a port wine tasting, and dinner. Tomáš and Dita had<b> </b><a href="https://twitter.com/TFoltynek/status/1522254433245093889" target="_blank">this nice picture </a>of Elisabeth Bik and myself standing with them taken while we were waiting. <br /></p>Debora Weber-Wulffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16036864220530629908noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9091218950079982154.post-42479819700698818282022-05-16T13:35:00.011+02:002022-05-26T00:41:10.339+02:00ECAIP 2022, Day 1<p>After two years of virtual conferences (2020, 2021), we are back in
person in Porto, Portugal - with the talks of the <b>European Conference on Academic Integrity and Plagiarism</b> being broadcast so that
people can attend at a distance. How wonderful it is to see people!!
I can't help hugging people I've know for more than a decade and
haven't seen in person since 2019 or earlier. And wow, I'm not the
only person from Germany here, there is someone from the University
of Constance. And wonderful technology: The European wireless network
eduroam works seamlessly here! But there are no desks in the
auditorium, that makes it a bit hard to organize one's work. I will report on the talks that I attended. </p><p>The <a href="https://academicintegrity.eu/conference/wp-content/files/2022/Book_of_Abstracts_2022.pdf" target="_blank">book of abstracts</a> and the <a href="https://academicintegrity.eu/conference/wp-content/files/2022/ECAIP2022_Final_programme.pdf" target="_blank">final program</a> are on the general conference <a href="https://academicintegrity.eu/conference/" target="_blank">web site</a>. I was goint to post this during the conference, but I ended up with no free time and spent Saturday enjoying Porto and Sunday returning home (with sore calf muscles from all those steep streets). So I will try and get this out as soon as possible.</p><p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<b>Day 1</b> -- <a href="https://copy-shake-paste.blogspot.com/2022/05/ecaip2022-day-2.html" target="_blank">Day 2</a> -- <a href="https://copy-shake-paste.blogspot.com/2022/05/ecaip-2022-day-3.html" target="_blank">Day 3</a> </p>
<hr />
The conference was opened with a keynote speech by <a href="https://danielefanelli.com/" target="_blank"><b>Daniele Fanelli</b></a>, (Fellow, London School of Economics
and Political Science) "Research
integrity in a complex world". Among other publications, Daniele is the author of "<a href="https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0005738" target="_blank">How many scientists fabricate and falsify Research? A
systematic review and Meta-Analysis of survey data"</a> from 2009. He dove right into the question of complexity and how we can go about actually measuring complexity. In a nutshell, the more "moving parts" a topic has, the complexer it gets, and the more complex a system is, the more prone it is to questionable research practices (QRP). And the more QRPs, the more there is a possibility of research integrity problems. One of the big questions is the irreproducability crisis, which he tried to boil down to a mathematical formula that I think very few understood. He closed looking at various factors and concluding that we really don't know exactly, but his formula is an attempt to get a handle on it. It was a great start, as discussions of complexity ran throughout the discussions during the rest of the conference.
In the first breakout session I attended 3 talks:
<p></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li><a href="https://www.duq.edu/academics/faculty/patrick-juola" target="_blank"><b>Patrick Juola</b></a> from Duquense University in Pittsburgh, PA, USA (and that is pronounced "do-cane", I come from that neck of the woods!) created a controlled test corpus for looking at text overlap by having 91 participants write two short texts: One on how to get from A to B on a map and one on how to make lemonade. He then used the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaccard_index" target="_blank">Jaccard similarity coefficient</a> to calculate how many words the text had in common pairwise: 0.0 means no words in common, 1.0 all words. The average similarity was only 0.21 +/- 0.07 for Map and 0.19 +/- 0.07 for Lemon (thus the name of the corpus, MapLemon). We giggled at one of the outliers that described making lemonade without using the words "lemon", "sugar", or "water": The author just wrote: Go to the store and buy it. This provides empirical evidence that even people writing on the same topic will use different words, because they are using their own voice. He want to replicate this for other languages and additional topics. </li><li><b>Tutku Sultan Budak-Özalp</b> from the Canakkale Onsekiz Mart University in Turkey looked at perceptions towards academic integrity in English as a Foreign Language teachers. She interviewed 25 Turkish EFL (we tend to call it ESL, English as a Second Language) instructors in an online survey with 39 questions. Unfortunately, she was presenting at a distance and we hadn't yet figured out how to make the PowerPoint slides larger (Zoom and PowerPoint don't play nicely together), so I was unable to read the results. She said in summary that the teachers are knowledgable about academic integrity, but there is not yet a nationwide policy, although the Higher Education Council in Turkey is working on one.</li><li><b>Pegi</b> <b> Pavletić </b>and other students from the <a href="https://esu-online.org/" target="_blank">European Students' Union</a> presented about the work of students in the area of academic integrity. As Teddi Fishman, the chair of the session noted: There should be "no talks about us without us!" It was great to hear that students are getting active! The ESU is an organization of 45 student unions from 40 countries, in Ireland the <a href="https://www.qqi.ie/what-we-do/engagement-insights-and-knowledge-sharing/national-academic-integrity-network" target="_blank">National Academic Integrity Network </a>(NAIN) has 13 student members among their 92 and has published guidelines, Croatia is dealing with a number of academic freedom issues. These students want to serve as ombuds, go-betweens between students and the various decision-making bodies. But there are so many different forms of decision making bodies at universities that the concept rather becomes an enigma. </li></ul><p>Lunch was awesome, the medical school in Porto has a dining room with linens, cutlery, and wine glasses laid out. They had three buffets, salad, main course, and dessert, although without signs it was hard to determine what was vegetarian. The lentil salad turned out to have chicken in it, and there was ham mixed into the noodles, but one managed and the food was delicious. I turned down the wine, however, until the last day. Without a siesta after lunch it would be difficult to not fall asleep during the afternoon sessions, and I didn't want that. </p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li><b>Zeenath Reza Khan</b>, <b>Sreejith Balasubramanian</b>, and <b>Ajrina Hysaj</b> spoke on "Using the IEPAR Framework - a workshop to build a culture of integrity in higher education". They have started the Centre for Academic Integrity in the United Arab Republic. IEPAR stands for "<b>I</b>nspiration, <b>E</b>ducation, <b>P</b>edagogical Consideration, <b>A</b>ssessment Design, <b>R</b>esponse and Restorative Practice". They are focusing on prevention instead of policing and sanctioning.</li><li>One of <b>Thomas Lancaster</b>'s students, Pundao Lertratkosum, wrote their thesis on "Contract Cheating Marketing in Thailand". The question was whether or not there is marketing going on in non-English-speaking countries for contract cheating. The answer is a sad and resounding: yes! They looked at various social media and found lots of marketing, even videos that try to make it sound normal to use such services. The transactions themselves are then often conducted by messenger, the essays were asked for in Thai, English or Mandarin. The typical advertised price for a 1000-word essay in Thai: $80 to $140 US dollars. There are serious risks to students, who for example post receipts on Twitter, testamonials. They can be reverse-engineered and blackmailed. Thailand closely mirrors other countries with there being offers even for exam impersonation and admissions fraud. Even though this is a localized market (because most of the papers are written in Thai), we need to look to see how we deal with this normalization of cheating.</li><li>The talk on "Contract Cheating in Lithuania" by <b>Simona Vaškevičiūtė</b> and <b>Eglė Ozolinčiūtė </b>was unfortunately quite short, as Zoom seemed to be misbehaving. We eventually solved the problem: when telling people to "share their slides" they would share only PowerPoint, not their screens. We would only see the last slide they had open, while they saw the current slide on their screens. Orally they spoke about visiting various web sites every day for one month and copying the advertisements found there. In particular they found that the advertising focusses visually on achievements with photos showing people reading, writing, or wearing a cap & gown. </li><li>The session ended with a shocking talk by <b>Anna Abalkina</b> on "Publication and collaboration anomalies in academic papers originating from a paper mill: evidence from a Russia-based paper mill." She, too, had issues with Zoom, but we managed to get it sorted out. The organization "International Publisher LLC" is no longer just Russia-based, they have clients are all over the world. It published papers online, and then sells additional authorships, first author is more expensive than somewhere in the middle. She looked at 1000 paper offers and found 441 that had been published online. There were some 800 authors that could be identified from >300 universities in 39 countries. 152 of the journals appeard to be authentic and 3 so-called hijacked journals. In all, more than 6000 co-authorships slots appear to have been sold. She contacted many editors, only to be brushed off with statements like "We have strict peer review!" For an additional price, a city could be inserted into the abstract to localize the paper. Most of the authors were from Russia, but there were also authors from Kazakhstan, China, Ukraine, UAE, Azerbajan, Uzbekistan, UK, Israel, Vietnam, Egypt, Jordan, Spain, ..... Most of the purchased authorships were first authors. She calculates this to bring the company more than 6 million dollars in 3 years. So there are many problems in publishing that have not yet been discovered. The journals' (non)reactions to information about what appears to have happened is a serious challenge for academic integrity.</li></ul><p>The next session I attended was more about technical tools for dealing with academic integrity questions.</p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>First off was <b>Clare Johnson </b>(working with Ross Davies and Mike Reddy) with her tool Clarify. It can be used to do forensic research on Word documents, as Word stores a lot of metadata in the saved version. There is information about formating, revisions, cropped images and sources and so on that are compressed, as it were, in the document. So this tool decompresses that and looks to see if it appears to have genuinely been written over a period of time, or if just one big copy & paste action put in all the text. She visualizes the text runs, i.e. the text that was inserted at one time. She showed us some examples. I really want to give this a test-drive, but have been unable to find it online. I have written to Clare to ask her if she can please let me have a copy of the tool.</li><li><b>Evgeny Finogeev</b> from the Russian company Antiplagiat spoke about "Image reuse detection in large-scale document scientific collection." It was made clear that this paper had been accepted before the war, and that sponsorship money that Antiplagiat had paid for the conference was being donated to a Ukrainian relief charity. They were not allowed to advertise at the conference, only present the academic paper. They took 1.9 million papers from the <a href="https://doaj.org/" target="_blank">DOAJ</a>, extracted the images, classified them, vectorized them and used a <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siamese_neural_network" target="_blank">Siamese neural network</a> to try and identify images that had been reused. The neural network identified 43 000 cases, 4051 of these were checked by hand. Most of them were self-reuse, very little correct re-use. Possible plagiarism was found in 8 cases, possible falsification in 11, there was permission to use the images in 4, 93 were paper copies, the rest were no problem. I objected to them using the "Lena" image from Playboy for their presentation, they did not seem to understand that we are trying to convince people to <a href="https://www.losinglena.com/" target="_blank">no longer use this image</a>. </li><li>Finally, <b>Christopher Nitta</b> (UC Davis) spoke on "Detecting Potential Academic Misconduct in Canvas Quizzes." The learning management system Canvas has an API that can be used, and a Python library (canvasapi) that makes use of the API. The problem is that the lock-down browser doesn't work with Linux, which many students use. [my solution is to devise exams that use the entire internet - after all, at work they can Google... -- dww] <br />Their solution tries to identify potential misconduct and highlights these exams for further analysis. How long did they spend away from the quiz? Of course, this could be dealing with a child at home. Formating from copy & pasting is preserved on Canvas, so web links and other formatting are tell-tale signs of misconduct. Large exam time windows permit answers to be shared with others, so the timing of the questions is analyzed for outliers. If students start within seconds of one another on all questions, this could be a sign of collusion. Of course, if they are using secondary devices, this cannot be seen. [See? So just quit with the proctored exams already! -- dww].<br />UC Davis had 1415 referrals to the academic integrity office in the 4 terms prior to the pandemic, but 3246 in the first 4 terms of the pandemic. They see this as evidence of increased cheating [I see this as evidence of increased looking! We don't know how much cheating was going on prior to this, only how much cheating we found. -- dww]<br />Almost 20 % of the cases were misconduct on Canvas quizzes. The manual review takes much more time. Of course, the false negative rates unknowable, and the false positive rate seems to also be muddled.<br />The code is not open source because they don't want the students to figure out how to get around the system. [I wish to remind them of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kerckhoffs%27s_principle" target="_blank">Kerkhoffs's Principle</a>. They are smart, they will figure it out, so make it public anyway! -- dww]</li></ul> And that concluded the first day! There was a reception in the foyer with some nibbles and a bit of port wine. After dumping our stuff at the hotel, we braved the tram system out to Matosinhos for a grilled sardine dinner. The staff didn't bat an eye at 20 people showing up, and they kept the good wine and food flowing. The only issue was another hour on the tram back to the hotel. For Irene I found this picture of the <a href="https://buenosairesstreetart.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/mr-dheo-mural-matosinhos-burger-king-porto-portugal-street-art-graffiti-fish-peixe-buenosairesstreetart.com_.jpg" target="_blank">Man Eating Fish</a> graffiti mural by <i>Mr Dheo</i> next to a Burger King.Debora Weber-Wulffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16036864220530629908noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9091218950079982154.post-66106964631013741482022-05-09T13:01:00.002+02:002022-05-09T13:01:14.507+02:00President of Peru being investigated for plagiarism<p><a href="https://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory/peru-prosecutors-probe-plagiarism-claim-president-84530492" target="_blank">ABCnews</a> reports that the president of Peru is being investigated for plagiarism in his Master's thesis, which he wrote together with his wife. Journalists apparently used a freedom of infomation act application to obtain the thesis, then shoved it through a system that sells its product as a plagiarism detection system. They report, as people are wont to do, on the number reported.</p><p>This bears repeating: Software cannot determine plagiarism! The <a href="https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s41239-020-00192-4" target="_blank">most recent study</a> that I participated in was published in 2020, we sum it up as:</p><blockquote><p>There is a general belief that software must be able to easily do things
that humans find difficult. Since finding sources for plagiarism in a
text is not an easy task, there is a wide-spread expectation that it
must be simple for software to determine if a text is plagiarized or
not. <b>Software cannot determine plagiarism</b>, but it can work as a support
tool for identifying some text similarity that may constitute
plagiarism. [...] The
sobering results show that although some systems can indeed help
identify some plagiarized content, they clearly do not find all
plagiarism and at times also identify non-plagiarized material as
problematic.</p></blockquote><p>Emphasis added. Quit thinking software will solve this problem! <br /></p>Debora Weber-Wulffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16036864220530629908noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9091218950079982154.post-19314338108401932842022-04-13T18:14:00.003+02:002022-04-13T18:14:26.270+02:00Japanese Prince found plagiarizing in prize essay<p>The Japanese newspaper <i>Ashai Shimbun</i> published an <a href="https://www.asahi.com/ajw/articles/14551359" target="_blank">article</a> on February 17, 2022, about plagiarism in an essay that Prince Hisahito, the second in line to the Japanese throne, wrote for school. The essay had been submitted to a contest and was awarded the second prize. <i>The Telegraph</i> in the UK <a href="https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2022/02/23/japans-15-year-old-prince-keep-literary-award-despite-plagiarism/" target="_blank">details the plagiarized portions</a> a few days later. It appeared to be picked up in many UK outlets such as <a href="https://royalcentral.co.uk/asia/japan/prince-hisahito-of-japan-accused-of-plagiarism-in-award-winning-essay-172879/" target="_blank">Royal Central.</a> Today, April 13, 2022, the German <i>Süddeutsche</i> <a href="https://www.sueddeutsche.de/panorama/japan-prinz-hisahito-plagiatsvorwuerfe-1.5565538" target="_blank">picked up the story</a>. </p><p>Strangely, he was allowed to keep the prize despite the plagiarism. <br /></p>Debora Weber-Wulffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16036864220530629908noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9091218950079982154.post-33750309233196034162022-04-12T11:27:00.002+02:002022-04-12T11:27:33.148+02:00Germany's problem with academic integrity<p>This <a href="https://academicintegrity.org/resources/blog/362-student-perspective-learning-about-academic-integrity-in-the-united-states-as-an-international-student" target="_blank">blog post</a> at ICAI by <a href="https://academicintegrity.org/integrity-matters-author-bio/80-sebastian-burkholdt" itemprop="url"><span itemprop="name">Sebastian Burkholdt</span></a> with a student perspective on academic integrity from a German student in the USA just nails it: </p><blockquote><p>Of course, we were not allowed to cheat in school and university in
Germany, and the consequences could have been as severe as they can be
at American institutions, but I don’t remember ever having had an
explicit conversation with a German teacher or professor about how to be
academically honest. There was no academic honesty policy, no Office of
Academic Honesty, and no official institutional process for dealing
with academic misconduct at my university—at least not that I was aware
of—and I never had any formal education about cheating and how to avoid
it beyond learning how to correctly cite sources. It was just expected
to know how appropriate academic conduct looks like.</p></blockquote><p>Exactly. That is the problem here in Germany. Despite the plagiarism scandals involving politicians, there is very little discussion here about academic integrity. The universities perhaps purchase software and offer a course or two about proper citation. Some universities have writing clinics, but that is about the size of it. Deep and continuous conversations about good academic practice are seldom. Still, I'll keep trying to drag Germany into such conversations! <br /></p><p> </p>Debora Weber-Wulffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16036864220530629908noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9091218950079982154.post-40418161626253222512022-03-10T21:57:00.006+01:002022-03-10T22:40:27.498+01:00ICAI 2022<p>I was going to be exceedingly lazy and not blog about the ICAI 2022 (which is celebrating its 30th year of existence!), but then I decided that I wanted to rant about one of the talks, so I will try and pull together something on the other talks that I have visited. The conference is being offered online only. It is excellent that the Zoom room chats are left open—we have had some great discussions in parallel with the talks. It will be difficult when we go back to in-person talks to shut up during the talks :) Unfortunately, they are using waiting rooms and this causes quite a number of problems: extra work for the session chairs letting people in, and not letting us speak to each other before the talk begins. For one session the room didn't get opened until a good 6 minutes after it was to start, that was a bit unfortunate. But on the whole, people have got the hang of how to run an online conference, which is great!</p><p>I asked an organizer, <b>Camilla J. Roberts</b>, about the numbers. There were 790 registrations (!) from 209 universities in 18 countries: US, Canada, Chile, Australia, UK, Ireland, Germany, UAE, Indonesia, Mexico, Brazil, Jamaica, Japan, Taiwan, India, South Africa, Columbia, and Egypt! I haven't seen anyone else from Germany here, though. <br /></p><p><b>Day 1, March 8, 2022</b><br /></p><p>It is International Women's Day and a holiday in Berlin, and there is a horrible war going on in the Ukraine. The latter makes it hard to concentrate, to get into the groove of academic integrity discussions. But there are so many great people here and fantastic discussions going on.<br /></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>The opening was about the past of ICAI (and the next days will be present and future). <b>Tricia Bertram Gallant </b>put together a document about the history: <a href="https://academicintegrity.org/images/conference/It_Takes_a_Village.pdf" target="_blank"> “It Takes a Village”: The Origins of the International Center for Academic Integrity</a>. Well worth a read!</li><li><b>Thomas Lancaster</b> and <b>Prakhar Nagpal</b> spoke about "Are Students Using Homework Help Sites to Breach Academic Integrity?". They scraped 46 million questions asked at the Chegg web site and metadata such as date and time of the question. They wanted to see if they were able to verify a statement that is often heard from such sites: They are there for the 3 am questions students have. From the data that they gleaned, however, it was obvious that the questions were being asked Monday through Thursday during normal working hours in the UK. More were also seen in April and December, typical exam times. The also saw a two-fold jump in the number of questions asked after Covid closed the universities than in the year before. </li><li>A panel discussion that surprised me was the one on "Real Life with Academic Integrity Case Management Databases" (the conference web app is a real pain, it won't let me copy the names of the people presenting, so apologies if I misspell your names). <b>Tricia Bertram Gallant </b>moderated presentations from<b> Camilla J. Roberts, Emily C. Perkins, </b>and<b> Christina McGilvray Lane</b> who each use a different computer system for handling academic integrity violation cases. There is not only specialized software for that, there are multiple systems??? We don't even have clear processes at universites in Germany and in the US they not only have people who have jobs dealing with such cases (and working on prevention), but there is a choice of software? And honestly, it makes sense to have a well-formulated email that gets sent to everyone and a good record of all of the documentation sent in. I didn't think to ask how they deal with documenting things like 3D designs. The systems are Macient, Guardian, and Advocate and I forgot to note down which one was used where, sorry. </li><li><b>Blaire Wilson</b> and <b>Christian Moriarty</b> (not <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Professor_Moriarty" target="_blank">that one</a>) spoke about "Writing Academic Integrity Policy: How Justice and Consistency Collide". They have an open-access publication available (<a href="https://doi.org/10.1080/2194587X.2021.2017971" target="_blank"><i>Justice and Consistency in Academic Integrity: Philosophical and Practical Considerations in Policy Making</i></a>) that deals with, among other questions, restorative justice. It really got me thinking about why we punish certain behaviors and in particular, how we deal with mitigating circumstances. It seems everyone has a specific reason for why they did something, and not all of these reasons can be codified in law. So making things consitent can cause unjustness, and making things just keep them from being consistent.</li></ul><p><b>Day 2, March 9, 2022 </b><br /></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>I attended the <b>Canadian Regional Consortium</b> before the conference started. As a Canadian I am interested in what is happening at the various universities. It turned out to be a very wise move, as I got to hear the keynote by Cory Scurr, the Academic Integrity Coordinator at Conestoga College<span class="text-body-small inline t-black--light break-words"> in Kitchener, Ontario [boy, do those names ring a bell! Cousins of my Mom lived in Kitchener]. Cory has developed a <a href="https://continuing-education.conestogac.on.ca/micro-credentials/M1056" target="_blank">Micro-Credential for instructors about academic integrity</a>. They are 6 units of about 6 hours each, 1 hour synchronous discussion and 5 hours of reading/watching videos. The topics were just right for getting deeper into the topic of academic integrity. Half-jokingly someone asked if he would do a train-the-trainer course and start a franchise of the course. I'd sign up in a minute for that and translate the course into German, it is just what is necessary to get instructors aware of problems and solutions!<br /></span></li><li>Today the conference opened with ICAI present, or rather, since the move from Clemson University to a non-profit organization. It seemed to me that there was a bit of walking on eggshells going on, not sure what exactly happened. </li><li><b>Mary Davis </b>spoke about "Promoting Inclusive Practice in Academic Integrity". She analyzed many guidance and process documents from UK universities that are used in academic integrity violation cases. The literature has identifed a number of issues:<br /></li><ul><li>the continued over-representation of students from certain ethnic groups, including international students, in academic conduct investigations (Gray, 2020; Pecorari, 2016); </li><li>the opinion of some staff that plagiarism is an international students’ problem (Mott-Smith, Tomaš and Kostka, 2017); </li><li>the difficulties some student groups experience with understanding academic conduct regulations and good academic practice (Morris, 2018; Tauginiené et al., 2019);</li><li>academic literacy teaching being available to some students and not others (Wingate, 2015). </li><ul><li>Gray, D. (2020). <i>Closing the black attainment gap on access – Project review 2018-2020. </i>Open University. Available at: <a href="http://www.open.ac.uk/about/wideningparticipation/site/www.open.ac.uk.about.wideningparticipation/files/files/BAME-Evidence-Base.docx">http://www.open.ac.uk/about/wideningparticipation/site/www.open.ac.uk.about.wideningparticipation/files/files/BAME-Evidence-Base.docx</a><br /></li><li>Morris, E. (2018). Academic integrity matters: five considerations for addressing contract cheating.<i> International Journal of Educational Integrity</i>, 14(15) Available at <a href="https://doi.org/10.1007/s40979-018-0038-5">https://doi.org/10.1007/s40979-018-0038-5</a></li><li>Mott-Smith, J., Tomaš, Z. and Kostka, I. (2017). <i>Teaching effective source use</i>. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.</li><li>Pecorari, D. (2016). Plagiarism, international students and the second-language writer. In T. Bretag (Ed.) <i>Handbook of Academic Integrity,</i> pp.537-550. Singapore: Springer.</li><li>Tauginiené, L., Gaižauskaité, I., Razi, S., Glendinning, I., Sivasubramaniam, S., Marino, F., Cosentino, M., Anohina-Naumeca, A. and Kravjar, J. (2019). Enhancing the taxonomies relating to academic integrity and misconduct. <i>Journal of Academic Ethics</i>, pp.1-17, Available at <a href="https://doi.org/10.1007/s10805-019-09342-4">https://doi.org/10.1007/s10805-019-09342-4</a></li><li>Wingate, U. (2015). <i>Academic literacy and student diversity: the case for inclusive practice</i>. Bristol: Multilingual Matters</li></ul><li>I included all the literature here, because this is an important topic. Mary looked for problems with respect to these issues and has formulated recommendations for inclusive academic integrity, which are to be published soon.<br /></li></ul><li><b>Sarah Elaine Eaton</b> chaired a panel on "Reconceptualizing Contract Cheating as Part of the Stress Process Model". This was a presentation of sociologists talking about how we process stress and how contract cheating can be seen as a method of alleviating stress. It made me think about all the stress that we produce in education for our students and for us. What can we do to reduce this stress that doesn't result in cheating?</li><li><b>Leeanne Morrow</b> and <b>Lee-Ann Penaluna</b> from the University of Calgary presented on "Expanding into the digital: supporting academic integrity using artificial intelligence". I was especially interested to see what type of artificial intelligence they would be using. It turns out, they purchased a bot that jumps at everyone who surfs to their pages at the library and asks if you need help. I personally hate these pesky things, but whatever. They also have a live chat during office hours, so a real human being can answer student questions.<br />One thing I must make clear: A chatbot is NOT in any way, shape, or form "artificial intelligence" (as I call it, "magic fairy dust"). It is an algorithm that I have my first-semester programming students program to show them that what we percieve of as being "intelligence" is merely a very simple algorithm. I also want to kindly request that people not anthropomorphisize computers! They do not have a "brain". You do not "feed" them. They don't "answer". They have storage, receive input, and produce output. <br />The authors of this research accessed a large amount of questions that students had asked both in live chat and in bot chat and analyzed it. They looked for key words that they felt were related to academic integrity and had a look at how often typical questions were asked and what the bot answered. The bot upon first install traverses their site to parse through the texts that are offered. After looking at the answers given for specific questions, they fine-tuned the system by editing the bot output for certain keywords.<br />What really concerned me about this research was that, although it was about academic integrity, there appeared to be no informed consent that was given by the users of the bot to have their conversations stored. Apparantly, the conversations are "anonymous" and given cute names like "Red Squirrel", but the date and time is stored, as most certainly the IP address would also be stored. This is considered identifying information.<br />I asked about informed consent and ethics board approval for this research, apparently neither was done. I looked at the bot myself, looking for where I am being informed that what I am typing is being stored and can be used for future research. Since I am in the EU using this system, it must either ask my permission or not permit me to use it. <br />Alright, enough bitching. They meant well, but the company that sold this bot to them needs to shape up their advertising language and be open about what they are storing. As long as you are transparent about what you are doing, people have a choice of using the system or not. <br /></li><li>The day closed with "30 Years of Research & Lessons Learned":<b> David Rettinger</b> and <b>Trician Bertram Gallant</b> decided to put together an issue of the <i><a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/toc/ujcc20/23/1" target="_blank">Journal of College and Character</a></i> on academic integrity. They asked around and got lots of great papers—and realized they were not only over the page count for the issue, they were MASSIVELY over the page count for the issue. So they decided to make a virtue out of necessity and put split the papers between the journal and a book, <i>Cheating Academic Integrity: Lessons from 30 Years of Research</i>, that will appear in June 2022. What a great way to make all these papers available! The authors who were at the conference spoke a bit about what they were writing about. The journal issue is available open-access, so I downloaded all the papers right away, and have the book on order!<br /></li></ul><p><b>Day 3, March 10, 2022</b></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>I started off visiting the COIN group,<b> Consortium for Online Integrity</b>. I wanted to hear more about how people were doing assessments online. There are a number of universities that swear by remote proctoring, either personal remote proctoring or "AI"-based (remember, the term "artificial intelligence is a synonym for "magic fairy dust") proctoring. I find remote proctoring to be an invasion of privacy and to use algorithms that are heavily biased. People believe that they can "lock down" browsers, but my CS students don't need more than 10 minutes to get out of that. So it doesn't do what people want it to. Don't project what you want onto a software! Software cannot solve social problems. <br /></li><li><b>Christian Moriarty</b> moderated a town hall on the future of ICAI. Thomas Lancaster and I had a nice little public disagreement about the use of technology that really lit up the chat :) I believe that academic integrity is a social issue and thus cannot be solved by technology alone, as I just mentioned. We need to focus on pedagogy.<br /></li><li><b>Angela Murphy</b> asked in her presentation "The Usage of Remote Proctoring Technologn to Uphold Academic Integrity During a Pandemic": Is there more cheating going on in the pandemic? Many instructors think so, but maybe they just didn't see the cheating that went on before the pandemic! She was very enthusiastic about remote proctoring, but I find it an invasion of privacy and a waste of instructor time reviewing the videos. I personally thnik that we need to focus more on alternative assessments that what we have been doing before. </li><li><b>Kathryn Baron</b>, the host of the <a href="http://podcastthescore.com">podcastthescore.com</a> podcast, spoke on "Helping journalists inform the public about cheating". She apparently didn't realize who was in the audience, as she spent 15 minutes telling us what we already know in depth: There is a lot of cheating out there. It was a bit disappointing. I already help journalists who contact me by sending them links to sources for what I am saying. And I patiently explain over and over again that we don't know how much plagiarism is out there because we only know what we find, not what we don't find. And yes, there was plagiarism before the Internet. My major problem is that journalists are generally only interested when the person found having submitted a plagiarism is well-known, i.e. a politician. And the universities, well, this <a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/12023825@N04/2898021822" target="_blank">picture of a man with his head in the sand</a> rather sums it up. </li><li>Unfortunately, the presenters on "Factors impacting academic integrity: a review" didn't show up and didn't let anyone know that they were not coming. So I went to the session by <b>Ide Bagus Siaputra</b> from Indonesia "Transforming modular training into integrated immunization programme for
promoting academic integrity: Celebrating 9 Years of progress". He has been instrumental in getting a discussion going about academic integrity in his country and has prepared materials for teachers there.</li><li><b>David Rettinger</b> finished up the conference talking about the ICAI/McCabe Survey. I am so glad that Don McCabe's work is continuing! The survey is geared to determine the rates of academic misconduct, assessing the climate of integrity, understanding student perspectives, and providing a benchmark against other institutions. They are starting with a first round in 2022 for ICAI member institutions, currently have 7800 surveys completed. It will be exciting to hear these results! And during the discussion I realized that David and I met years ago [I looked it up: 2012] in Bielefeld, Germany, where Don McCabe was giving a talk after having given a talk in Berlin. I drove Don down and we had very intensive discussion during the drive down.<br /></li></ul><p>Whew, it's been an exhausting 3 days, starting so late in the day. But I'm so glad I attended, lots of new ideas and meeting a few new people, if not as many as one meets at in-person conferences. </p><p>Now, hope to see people at the ENAI conference <a href="https://academicintegrity.eu/conference/" target="_blank">ECAIP 2022</a> in Porto, Portugal 4-6 May 2022 in real life!<br /></p><p><br /><br /> </p>Debora Weber-Wulffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16036864220530629908noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9091218950079982154.post-58939477399658675312022-01-31T22:38:00.003+01:002022-02-01T11:25:19.791+01:00Czech researcher found guilty of academic misconduct, resigns position as rector<p>Leonid Schneider reported in his blog <a href="https://forbetterscience.com/2021/10/25/moravian-rhapsody/" target="_blank"><i>For Better Science</i></a> on October 25, 2021 about a series of comments that Elizabeth Bik left on <a href="https://pubpeer.com/search?q=Vojt%C4%9Bch+Adam" target="_blank">PubPeer</a> about 21 of the 720 publications of a Czech cancer and nanotechnology researcher, Vojtěch Adam. He had been elected to have assumed the role of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rector_(academia)" target="_blank">rector</a> of the Mendel University of Brno on February 1, 2022.</p><p>However, as Elizabeth Bik reported in <a href="https://scienceintegritydigest.com/2022/01/25/new-mendel-university-rector-found-guilty-of-misconduct/" target="_blank"><i>Science Integrity Digest</i></a> on January 25, 2022, the investigation committee has found him guilty of academic misconduct. <span class="VIiyi" lang="en"><span class="JLqJ4b" data-language-for-alternatives="en" data-language-to-translate-into="cs" data-number-of-phrases="1" data-phrase-index="0"><span>The committee came to this conclusion in record time, only three months. The <a href="https://www.ceitec.cz/vojtech-adam-investigation-report-pdf/f52720" target="_blank">investigation report</a> is available in English and concludes: </span></span></span>"The Committee recommends retracting at least 6 papers to correct the scientific record." </p><p>Today Adam resigned from the position as rector, leaving it vacant. <br /></p><p>In a <a href="https://mendelu.cz/wcd/web-mendelu/akce/2022/q1/vyjadreni-vojtech-adam.pdf" target="_blank">statement</a> in Czech issued on January 31, 2022, Vojtěch Adam stated that he is putting the needs of the university above his own as a scientist and thus will not become rector tomorrow. The university has <a href="https://mendelu.cz/35124n-prof.-adam-rezignoval-na-pozici-rektora-mendelu" target="_blank">noted</a> that the <span class="VIiyi" lang="en"><span class="JLqJ4b" data-language-for-alternatives="en" data-language-to-translate-into="cs" data-number-of-phrases="1" data-phrase-index="0"><span> Academic Senate of the Mendel University today appointed an election commission to start a new search for a rector. It is not clear who will lead the university from tomorrow.</span></span></span></p><p><span class="VIiyi" lang="en"><span class="JLqJ4b" data-language-for-alternatives="en" data-language-to-translate-into="cs" data-number-of-phrases="1" data-phrase-index="0"><span><b>Update</b>: I just found a <a href="https://petrkreuz.blog.idnes.cz/blog.aspx?c=782561" target="_blank">very long blog article</a> by </span></span></span><span class="VIiyi" lang="en"><span class="JLqJ4b" data-language-for-alternatives="en" data-language-to-translate-into="cs" data-number-of-phrases="1" data-phrase-index="0"><span><span>Petr Kreuz </span>in Czech (Google translate is your friend) from January 30, 2022 about Adam, who was previously responsible for PhD studies at the Mendel University. Some doctoral dissertations from that institution appear to be plagiarized, VroniPlag Wiki has currently published two documentations, <a href="https://vroniplag.fandom.com/de/wiki/Sai" target="_blank">Sai</a> and <a href="https://vroniplag.fandom.com/de/wiki/Kst">Kst</a>, and have more currently under consideration. The Mendel University worked closely with an Austrian company that was offering doctorates from Mendel University for a fee of 25.000 €. <br /></span></span></span></p>Debora Weber-Wulffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16036864220530629908noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9091218950079982154.post-27707988630434082592021-08-27T17:45:00.001+02:002021-08-27T17:45:12.093+02:00Swedish national academic integrity board posts 2020 report<p>Sweden started a new national academic integrity board, <a href="https://oredlighetsprovning.se" target="_blank">Npof</a> (<i>Nämnden för prövning av oredlighet i forskning</i>, The National Board for Assessment of Research Misconduct) on January 1, 2020. It has been tasked with investigating cases referred to it by Swedish universities or by individuals who directly inform the body. They look at cases of suspected FFP (Falsification, Fabrication, Plagiarism) that arise, since at the same time a new law took effect: <i>Lagen (2019:504) om
ansvar för god forskningssed och prövning av oredlighet i forskning</i>. All researchers in Sweden are now legally required to follow a codex for good academic practice, which is based on the <a href="https://allea.org/code-of-conduct/" target="_blank">ALLEA code of conduct</a>. Universities are still permitted to examine cases themselves, but now have a place to refer complicated cases. Decisions of Npof can be appealed to the Administrative Court in Uppsala. <br /></p><p>The vision statement of Npof is</p><blockquote><p>Everyone should be able to rely on Swedish research. Therfore, every researcher must follow good research practices. Suspicions of research misconduct need to be examined in a legally secure, transparent, and clear fashion. [my translation]<br /></p></blockquote><p>The body is subordinate to the Swedish Ministry of Education. They are required to publish a report on the cases they have investigated every year. The <a href="https://oredlighetsprovning.se/rapporter" target="_blank">report for 2020</a> is now published on their web page along with a few statistics. They still have 8 cases from 2020 to deal with, and 16 new complaints have been lodged in 2021 already. There were 46 cases in 2020, of which 11 were ones that were already being investigated by the universities and were handed over as part of the law coming into effect. In the decisions they only found 4 persons guilty of misconduct, the rest were either not considered (11) or found not guilty (10) of serious misconduct. <br /></p><p>The current list of final <a href="https://oredlighetsprovning.se/beslut" target="_blank">decisions</a> (with the names redacted) from both 2020 and 2021 are also available on the web site. </p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li><b>9 </b>decisions concern both falsification and fabrication, 2 from Karolinska Institutet, 1 each from Lund and Umeå, and 5 registered from an individual. </li><li><b>1</b> decision is only about fabrication of data, from Linköping, and is the appeal of a researcher who was previously found guilty of research misconduct.</li><li><b>7</b> decisions are only about falsification of data, an appeal from Karolinska, 2 cases from Lund, 1 from Göteborg, and 3 registered from an individual.</li><li><b>14 </b>cases have to do with plagiarism (and self-plagiarism). 3 are from Lund, 2 from Linköping, one each from Uppsala, Göteborg, Örebro and Umeå, 3 from individuals. One case involves an appeal from the individual in a case from Uppsala and one other is also an appeal by the informant. </li><li>They don't publish reports on cases they don't investigate.<br /></li></ul><p class="page_speed_595379470">The 68-page, richly illustrated report notes in the introduction that so many of the cases that were investigated actually involved personal conflicts or other kinds of problems, in particular authorship questions. But Npof only looks at FFP, not at the many other types conduct that could be considered academic misconduct, or at questionable research practices. They also note that when the preparations were being made for setting up Npof, they were only expecting about 15 cases a year. </p><p class="page_speed_595379470">They report that the cases brought to Npof were in all fields with the exception of agriculture and veterinary medicine, but most of the cases were in medicine and health. The universities have to report back what they have done in the cases in which a researcher is found guilty of misconduct. In two cases, the researcher quit the university. In another, the university started a course on research ethics for the entire institution. A fourth case resulted in discussions about research ethics being conducted within the research group. </p><p class="page_speed_595379470">Npof can also initiate their own investigations, but they had so much else to do, that they haven't yet had such a case. I do find it unfortunate that the person who informs Npof of a case is not considered part of the case and thus is not included in any future communication. </p><p class="page_speed_595379470">The report includes much reflection on how the universities found this switch to a new body and how the body itself saw the problems that the universities have. It will be interesting to see how the work of Npof continues in the future!<br /></p><p class="page_speed_595379470"><span dir="ltr" role="presentation" style="font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 15px; left: 348.799px; top: 976.153px; transform: scaleX(0.97123);"></span><span dir="ltr" role="presentation" style="font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 15px; left: 332.269px; top: 996.148px; transform: scaleX(0.959224);"><br /></span></p>Debora Weber-Wulffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16036864220530629908noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9091218950079982154.post-57040474802258630202021-06-11T17:40:00.001+02:002021-06-11T17:40:32.772+02:00ECAIP 2021 - Day 3<p> What? It's Friday already? Last day of the conference! Lots of good stuff still to hear.</p><p>Day 0 - <a href="https://copy-shake-paste.blogspot.com/2021/06/ecaip-2021-day-1.html" target="_blank">Day 1</a> - <a href="https://copy-shake-paste.blogspot.com/2021/06/ecaip-2021-day-2.html" target="_blank">Day 2</a> - <b>Day 3</b></p><span><a name='more'></a></span><p>I first took part in the panel on the "Future of software tools for academic integrity" with Tomáš Foltýnek as moderator. Participating was: <b>Frédéric Agnès</b> (Compilatio), <b>Aaron Yaversky</b> (Turnitin), <b>Artemy V. Nikitov </b>(Antiplagiat), <b>Peter Witasp </b>(Ouriginal), <b>Ali Tahmazov</b> (StrikePlagiarism), and <b>Lewis McKinnon</b> (Studiosity), and <b>me</b> (HTW Berlin). We had a good discussion with a very lively chat going on in parellel! My take-home message was that a support tool for detecting plagiarism is not the end: it is the beginning of a complicated process. We need help in preparing documentation for our various boards. The companies need focus groups with real instructors, not the university buyers who have other needs and desires. On the <a href="https://vroniplag.wikia.org/de/wiki/%C3%9Cbersicht" target="_blank">VroniPlag Wiki site</a> they can see documented examples of how real doctoral students have plagiarized. They need to focus more on true usability and not on fancy clicky-colorful sites. And our needs are more than text - we need image search, 3D-Model comparison, etc. etc. These are hard problems with other tools possible to use. Help us to include things we find elsewhere in the reports. And the publishers should use their ill-gotten gains to provide a programming interface so that software companies can send over a list of hash values generated by an agreed on algorithm and the publishers can return DOIs of potential sources. That way the data remains private to each company, but the knowledge of matching can be exchanged.</p><p>Off my soap-box! </p><p>I had to run to the library, so I missed a bit of the Pecha-Kucha, but saw the last few videos, they were very interesting.<br /></p><p>I then zoomed into <b>Kelley A. Packalen & Kate Rowbotham</b> (Queen's University, Canada) presenting the results of their work on "Student insight on academic integrity." We so often hear from teachers, but seldom from students on how they perceive academic integrity. They get asked what they do and why, but we don't hear what they think can be done to improve behavior. They used computer-facilitated focus groups with 44 undergraduates, and ran a companion survey on 45 % of the population (n=852). 85 % self-reported at least one questionable behavior in the past year. The focus group students were given 1.5 hours of research pool credit (gives them a grade bump). </p><p>Their results are interesting - AI is a non-essential concept, some don't know the rules, some make the rational choice (grade boost vs. likelihood of getting caught). Some noted that if the professors don't make any effort, why should they? They understand why problems are happening, and even know what do do, but have difficulty actually doing it. <br /></p><p>Their suggestions: make assignments policy-related, provide learning support and logistics, give good and fast evaluation. Students seem to think professors only teach their class and don't understand why the same example is used every year. Do everything possible to eliminate the temptation for students to violate academic integrity. Align expectations around workload: those that students have for faculty and those that faculty have for students. Take-away: Academic Integrity is <i>not</i> a student issue, but an institution issue!</p><p>The next session was to be "A Universal Approach to A Culture of Integrity: 'A Family Built on Trust'”
by <b>Camilla J. Roberts</b> (Kansas State University), but she didn't come, so a video was played. KSU had a <a href="https://www.chronicle.com/article/cheaters-punished-at-kansas-state-u/" target="_blank">cheating incident</a> in 1994 with 115 students investigated and 75 students failing. The students pushed for a policy change, as they were having trouble in job interviews. She discusses communication, for example via the syllabus. I posted a link to the PhD-Comic "<a href="https://phdcomics.com/comics/archive_print.php?comicid=1583" target="_blank">It's in the syllabus</a>" that has a slightly different take on this. She encourages every faculty member to explain for each class what unauthorized aid is in this class, and have the students promise to follow it. It needs to be communicated amongst students that it is the norm to be honest, the norm to not cheat. </p><p>I had a nice lunch discussion with Ouriginal and Compilatio and completely forgot to take notes. Olu and I were quizzing Ouriginal in particular about their new stylometric tool.</p><p>Then I heard <b>Thomas Lancaster & Rahul Gupta</b> on "Contract Cheating And Unauthorised Homework Assistance Through Reddit Communities." Reddit is a rather unruly collection of message boards that is popular (not only) with computer science people. Thomas has his extensive collection of slide decks openly availablae at <a href="https://www.slideshare.net/ThomasLancaster" target="_blank">SlideShare</a> - thank you Thomas! Where do students go when they feel overwhelmed? Google, family, TikTok, fellow students, random people on the internet, library, friends, .... Reddit is full of people complaining about plagiarism issues, and there is even a so-called subreddit on the topic. Rahul collected data from r/HomeworkHelp in September 2020 from 1 January 2016 to 13 August 2020. No significant difference between the number of posts on weekdays and weekends, the pattern of requests largely follows the Western teaching year. Significant increase in the number of posts after March 2020. Most posts occur in the evening US time zones. 28 % made by high school students, the rest university students. 60 % had wording suggesting they were maths requests, the other two most popular ones were Physics and Chemistry. </p><p>And there are scams here - students ask tutors to complete "sample questions" to gauge their skill - then they claim to have found one, but they just look for agreement between the various tutors. They also pay less than the agreed-on rate. Tutors will offer cheaper work, then not do it. Some extort students by threatening to reveal incidents of contract cheating to their institutions. They will sometimes supply substandard work on purpose. And most shocking: University lecturers providing contract cheating services. There are even Chegg answers available. Rahul has had some success at identifying students, because they used the same account for other Reddit posts revealing their university, and the university was able to identify the student. </p><p>Problems: More access to evidence needed, as online evidence can be deleted. And we have to somehow get CourseHero and Chegg to cooperate (but that would wreck their business model). Students need to understand what a "tutor" is, and institutions need to react to the use of "homework help" - Contract cheating is not limited to essay mills! Someone posted a link to an article "<a href="https://every.to/cybernaut/caught-in-the-study-web" target="_blank">Caught in the study web</a>". It was noted that some companies operate in countries such as Belarus, but give a UK address & telephone number. Thomas notes that these services are not illegal in the UK, but there are apparently plans to change this sometime in the future. <br /></p><p>I was then so thrilled to attend the talk by <b>Mary Davis</b> (Oxford Brookes University) on "Raising awareness of inclusive practice in academic integrity". I take the booklet she wrote together with Kate Williams and Jude Carroll, "<a href="https://www.macmillanihe.com/page/detail/Referencing-and-Understanding-Plagiarism/?K=9781137530714" target="_blank">Referencing and Understanding Plagiarism</a>" to every single talk that I give on plagiarism to pass around. It has cartoons in it, so Germans rumple up their noses, but I put the bit on "When do you need to reference" (pp. 36-7) on my slides as well. It is so concise and they really need to see that it fits on 2 slides. In the UK there is increased focus on Equality Diversity and eliminating discrimination. </p><p>What are the problems? Various publications by many authors have identified: There is a continued over-representation of students from certain ethnic groups (incl. international students) in academic conduct investigations, many faculty think international students are the problem, non-native speakers man misinterpret Turnitin results, academic literacy instruction not available to all. There can be age or financial or disability circumstances, and cultural aspects. She wanted to see: To what extent are the guidance documents, teaching, support and processes in the UK inclusive?</p><p>She looked at guidance documents, interviewed 11 key staff and 5 students who experienced the academic conduct referral process. Academic development staff noted that having a referral in your first few months can make a student feel like an outsider. One noted that she felt pre-judged, that she was a criminal in the eyes of her children. Many students are mature, not native speakers (L1s). Lower socio-economic people, first in family to study are less likely to ask for help, as they feel they don't belong there, so they are more likely to mess up. Dyslexic students are often scared of visiting the library! Many undergraduates don't know what the library is for, feel they don't belong there. Very important: A friendly face greeting people to the library. </p><p>Teaching staff spoke about students from different academic cultures, that seem to be in a black hole. They get rapped on the knuckles, but don't learn anything. Academic conduct officers have so much to do, they focus on ticking all the boxes. Education instead of referral would be more inclusive. Senior management felt all was in place, but did acknowledge that faculty maintain a good critical self-aware reflective space.</p><p>The student union noted that the more marginalized students are the most susceptive because they're the least familiar with the concepts. They feel referrals is more like calling the cops instead on knocking on the neighbor's door when the music is too loud. Distinguish between cheating and not understanding how things work!</p><p>The student's accounts were detailed and emotional. They felt overwhelmed, alone, anxious. She concludes that academic integrety is still not accessible, relevant and engaging to all students", as it was supposed to be. Mary notes that at her school, first-year students are given education and not a referral on academic misconduct.</p><p>Then <b>Bob Ives </b>(Univ. of Nevada) & <b>Ana-Maria Cazan</b> (Brasov, Romania) spoke on "Changes in Academic Misconduct Related to the COVID-19 Pandemic". There has been an explosion of anectodal information about how the pandemic has affected education. They conducted a study to investigate the beliefs and experiences of HE students before and after the pandemic. 414 students in 11 universities in the US, and 480 students at 5 universities in Romania over various majors/specialties. They did an anonymous online survey with 18 items on beliefs and experiences selected from previous research. <br /></p><table class="program"><tbody><tr class="AICR"><td class="cont_authors">Students in both countries reported higher rates of misconduct for all three types of cheating after the move to online. Romanian students, however, reported less cheating on assignments. Students from both countries reported less plagiarism. Overall, the US students reported less misconduct than the Romanian ones did. Theory: The move to online provided more possibilities to cheat on exams, but nothing changed for plagiarism. They now have more students and are starting in more countries. However, the <a href="https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/students-twice-likely-cheat-online-exams" target="_blank"><i>Times Higher Education</i></a> has noted that German students are saying that they cheat twice as much as pre-Covid. [He says that the word is supposed to be pronounced c<b>oo</b>vid now ;)]<br /></td><td class="cont_authors"><br /></td></tr></tbody></table><p>And oh, my, we are down to the last talk, the keynote by <b>Sarah Elaine Eaton</b> (University of Calgary) on "Communities of Integrity: Engaging Ethically Online for Teaching, Learning, and Research." She starts with having us reflect on who the original inhabitants were of the grounds on which we stand. And then she quotes Sonja from the dinner last night: Coming to this conference is rather like coming home. Home to people who understand where you are at, as opposed to you being generally the lone warrior in your day jobs. </p><p>She notes the difference between emergency remote teaching/learning and online learning. It is not about the technology, but also the didaktics. Those who have previously, voluntarily worked online, saw that as a safe space. They were told what to expect. Those who have only experienced online during the pandemic have a completely different view on this. Before the pandemic there was an immense body of literature about the factors affecting academic misconduct. But this was all on face-to-face instruction. The research in <i>inconclusive</i> or <i>contradictory</i> about online environments!<br /></p><p>Prior to the pandemic she did a study about academic integrity online. It turned out that all of the resources were only available on campus - academic integrity online had been completely ignored! They then developed a tutorial and had their online students invited to participate. Only 21 did, but they obtained good insights. Many students wanted to talk with someone and ask questions, not just experience a one-way, transmission model of academic integrity education. Students noted that instructors are often inconsistent. Students craved interactivity! They wanted to practice their skills of citing and referencing. Thus, a "set it and forget it" (one-and-done) model for academic integrity education does not work. </p><p>Sharing is normal online! Why is this misconduct when we teach online? There has also been an increase of businesses offering online services. Now people are talking about hybried or high-flex learning that might continue in some form. Creating excellent onlne teaching and learning experiences requires resources, time, and effort! We need to combat the myth that online learning causes violations of academic integrity. </p><p>Academic Integrity work is transdisciplinary work! And that means that it is uncomfortable, as you are working together with people from other fields. We have to disrupt the notion that academic integrity only affects students. Research integrity, ethics, anti-corruption efforts are all part of this endeavor. </p><p>Her calls to action: <br /></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li><b>Engage</b>: Work with colleagues in other disciplines in transdisciplinary ways;</li><li><b>Extend</b>: Focus on emerging issues;</li><li><b>Empower</b>: Create opportunities for others.<br /></li></ul><p>Powerful!</p><p>And now the closing session, chaired by Tomáš Foltýnek.</p><p>The ENAI Awards 2021 are<br /></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>Exemplary Research Award: <b>Zeenath Reza Khan </b></li><li>Outstanding Member Award: <b>Sonja Bjelobaba</b></li><li>Special Award for Pandemic Response: <b>UOWD Conference organizing committee </b></li><li>Exemplary Activism Award: <b>Debora Weber-Wulff</b></li><li>Outstanding Student Award: <b>Veronika Králiková </b></li><li>Tracey Bretag ENAI Memorial Award: <b>Teddi Fishman</b></li></ul><p>Thank you so very, very much! <br /></p><p>Student Photo Contest Award: The winner is <b>Amy Tucker</b> with a picture that you can find on <a href="https://www.facebook.com/academicintegrity.eu/photos/basw.AbqCaBPj7kOGVsDzcBfwgnRuCu20caAK4Qi5fWXHij5ZUvoZ7hCAnCSE1ynA-rTOqBhQLZSlTP8KFv5AXRkZFv3GVLEiznjNP2ltASOSWNwCeGk6v8S54TF1W5MhaKK-OObyjn1DJ2_JNXE7xx2v43HEscd8wvUZ1x3jz78os_T4jnOZGqXprrWv2lE6WAvvrtA/1585779758288316/?opaqueCursor=AbpnB_27UGEMe8wD84cB9seSLe9EvZCkrVe1gSpou10jTbuVmirxUs4xxXW8GppOP0wymY_WrGeLmw10--nlIMlVBDwjY5W-aZ6trzPjbORGTYgS8QaRoSkKAGjrsnjjUDsyPMcChULFlIjlC7qe5apFcz-bm8BQhQOU9wcOP_GQ3ASs8EjKd5guSkxK_RUF2EdOWx_EUN-Ph2NVDWvQgjhAt9412BrREYRyX1LeNG0zMhQL_RWiVlg7tpT_DNS128bCuv0H3uHzPXCONEUBrzeXtrwts5NJqQK_XPdIuXd39lQD7uIC0KjrN12MuSgteHC4N8iTo_S3SYiXTVcYymN9-7SqGGug6P91YyKUIGM-khhq6-IsQ5E6Ajh6WWfKS6Xr_ltkC_EKwpMqcuXO5zE1CchGb03E8ncjfbwFfn5HxAN-C_tTK1LX-RjwClAQI3i2dv6J34S8wvKArZc5r4c8JDp6qXNSY35AVT1h2XQ0glvPYuMcw7XgUGaj5ZfOeiA7pbItM0-6BQN2kJ3szv002tquqpSAFdmq4T61afj2n--sNq0oKQNvJ_tLebz3b70jQM5uVG-e8x7xlj44nQg-MORnnnKLr5ujdUIpmQeLFncPQE1c8dRIGuM3OyDxv_mGWWqakz4YH0vEfCJyDIszolioTa1WCT2wUzQDgcLPqT7JK3C9lmymnK6ExLLLv3ZytxO-3XQHFEz35Sco9phrCkvZQaIyozMmjwARV_7XPdAkqdmII7GHp7t5LJUoaYZbBrEFjeuZbXlt0NdcB_ddbgeTrxX5wa30bu9KzvAp94ETpBqO3v3AA3pRi2jxPKN4x5j9HFqc1I9BErlwV78UOKG7m1NYKwOJAJmq4OXZTw" target="_blank">Facebook</a>.</p><p>Best Presentation Award (keynotes excluded): <b>Irene Glendinning</b> with her talk on "Comparison of institutional strategies for academic integrity in Europe and Eurasia". Since Irene already had the book, it was given to <b>Pegi Pavletić</b> for chairing the student panel.</p><p>Dinner awards: <b>Tomáš</b> for the best dish, <b>Olumide</b> for the best dress (with his charming baby), best hat I still didn't get. </p><p><b>Sonja</b> spoke about the European Academic Integrity Week that is to be the week of October 18-22. </p><p>The next conference will be at the University of Porto, Portugal, at the Medical School in April 2022 (probably the last week) over 3 full days. <b>Laura Ribeiro </b>is chair of the conference. <br /></p><p>I'm exhausted, and still have so many videos from parallel sessions to watch! Thank you to everyone who participated - you are, indeed, family!<br /></p><p><br /></p>Debora Weber-Wulffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16036864220530629908noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9091218950079982154.post-71789281581396143852021-06-10T22:22:00.004+02:002021-08-26T12:13:50.547+02:00ECAIP 2021 - Day 2<p><b>European Conference on Academic Integrity and Plagiarism 2021</b><br /></p><p>Day 0 - <a href="https://copy-shake-paste.blogspot.com/2021/06/ecaip-2021-day-1.html" target="_blank">Day 1</a> - <b>Day 2</b> - <a href="https://copy-shake-paste.blogspot.com/2021/06/ecaip-2021-day-3.html" target="_blank">Day 3 </a></p><span><a name='more'></a></span><p>Ready to get started on Day 2!</p><p>Today's keynote is by <b>Erika Löfström</b> (University of Helsinki): Supervision as an arena for teaching and learning academic integrity and research ethics.</p><p>The focus is on PhD supervision, and it is important to see that there is a difference between academic integrity and research ethics. She is using "supervision ethics", although there is also ethics in it. Supervision is an activity nested in the research community, it is rooted within various contexts of a scholarly community - teaching about how to do research, learning how to do research. In a supervisory relationship, PhD students learn disciplinary traditions, practices, cultures and norma, including ethical codes, norms and practices of how the research community deals with ethical issues (Kitchener, 1992). </p><p>What are the challenges? The supervisor has a variety of role expectaions to juggle, they have to deal with the difference between the professional and the personal relationship. A supervisor is a person with power, how available are they? How hard to they push? Do students become overly reliant on their supervisor?</p><p>There are many ethical tensions that arise: distance vs. approchability, having a relationship but not too deep and private, needs of the group vs. of the individual, direct instruction vs. the student's independence. This relationship develops the ethical awareness and ethical problem-solving skills in the student. [I suppose this is just like children learning from their parents, and in Germany the supervisors are called <i>Doktorvater</i> or <i>Doktormutter</i>.] </p><p>Different supervisor profiles for teaching academic integrity: Some supervisors teach rules and values, some are the gatekeepers who make it easy for students to do the "right thing", some are social reformers, others emphasise sutdent responsibility, and some are skill builders.</p><p>There are ethical issues in supervision that may become ethical problems: inadequate supervision, abandonment, intrusion of supervisor views and values, abuse, exploitation, dual relationships, encouragement to fraud, authorship issues. Kitchener's ethical principles in research: Respect for autonomy, doing no harm, benefitting others, being just (being fair and objective), being faithful (keeping promises, being honest and truthful). They found instances of problems with these principles described by PhD students in both the natural and the behavioral scienced.</p><p>They found wide differences between supervisors and PhD students in their experience of ethics issues (Erika Löfström & Kirsi Pyhältö, <a href="https://researchportal.helsinki.fi/files/97520511/Ethical_issues_in_supervision_SHE.pdf" target="_blank">Ethics in the supervisory relationship</a>, 2017, Studies in Higher Education).</p><p>Her message: Ethics of supervision contributes to the doctoral students' learning environment. There are systematic issues, however, those problems can only be solved on another level. </p><p>I chaired the next session, so no time to comment on it. Presentations were from:</p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>Developing a centralised online case management system to support academic integrity breaches at an Australian university,
by Andrew Kelly & Diane Ingram</li><li>Ethical and privacy considerations of the marketing tactics used by some academic assignment providers: a case-study, by
Robin Crockett & Rachel Maxwell</li></ul>Andrew spoke about the centralized system his university has developed [I want this for my university!], Robin presented some absolutely shocking screenshots of paper mills approaching students looking for customers and misrepresenting what they are offering. <br /><div><p>The next session I attended was a workshop by my colleagues <b>Dita Henek Dlabolová & Tomáš Foltýnek</b> on "Interpreting text-matching software similarity reports". She noted before the start that the workshop was intended to be for newcomers, and here were so many experts on the topic showing up. That chased a few people off :) They first presented our recent work in the ENAI TeStoP group, <a href="https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s41239-020-00192-4" target="_blank">published online</a>. They put together two reports, not from a specific system but combining elements of many, and sneaking quite a lot of issues that arise in reports into them. The reports sport the same value, but the question is: which one is plagiarism and how did you determine it? There were very well constructed to provide lots of talking points, and talk we did! <br /></p><p><b>Thomas Lancaster & Benjamin Dent </b>were next on my list, speaking about "Academic Ghost Writing and Contract Cheating Provision Observed on a Freelancing Website." Ben had hoped to be there, but was unable to attend, so Thomas presented. He started with a current newspaper article from the Birmingham Post about Dr. Elizabeth Hall, who ran an essay mill for years. Thomas published his first paper on contract cheating 15 years ago together with Robert Clarke. Thomas and Ben collected data from a freelancing site over a few years and did a bit of <strike>machine learning</strike> advanced statistics on it, looking for how many offers were made, average price, etc. Thomas theorizes that some essay mills are themselves outsourcing writing the paper to OTHER essay mills! The requests for help came mostly from India, US, UK. The bid winners came from Kenya, Pakistan, and India. Ghostwriting is called "academic writing" in Kenya and is considered respectable work. They gathered statistics on all sorts of aspects of the work, the topic, the kind of work, the prices, etc. Some customers even recorded the audio feedback given by the supervisor and sent it on to the "freelancer" to be incorporated into the next version!</p><p>I had to take a university meeting during lunch, so I didn't hear the lunch talks.</p><p>After lunch <b>Inga Gaižauskaitė</b> coordinated a panel on "Academic integrity in Secondary education". Panel members were <b>Charlotta Rönn</b> (Sweden), <b>Mustafa Yunus Eryaman</b> (Turkey), <b>Brenda M. Stoesz</b> (Canada), <b>Vilda Kiaunytė</b> (Lithuania), <b>Zeenath Reza Khan</b> (UAE). Zeenath noted that some friends of her children have their parents helping them. Brenda noted that she has heard from so many professors that found their first-year students without skills in good academic practice. She has also seen targeted ads in school-age children for contract cheating, who do not know how to deal with them. Charlotta learned from ninth-graders how they were forming groups on social media to work on material that was supposed to be individual assessments. The pupils noted that they started this in the sixth grade, the first year they are formally graded in Sweden. This is a generation that grew up sharing on the Internet! Mustafa is specialized on evidence-based research about K-12 issues of academic integrity. This field has grown quite fast. Many pupils believe cheating is the norm, that they must cheat to succeed. Up to 95% of pupils have admitted to cheating at least once. Vildas laptop died on her :( so she was unable to speak. <br /></p><p>Zeenath noted that the parents have to be educated as to what their role should and should not be. Charlotta notes that the curriculum designers were probably not aware of how much work is going on outside of school. Brenda says that administrators, teachers, and parents need to be involved. </p><p>I then needed to interrupt my attention to deal with the news rushing in that the former German Minister for the Family, Franziska Giffey, has had her <a href="https://www.fu-berlin.de/presse/informationen/fup/2021/fup_21_109-ergebnis-pruefverfahren-franzsiska-giffey/index.html" target="_blank">doctorate revoked</a> by the FU Berlin on the grounds of plagiarism. This is the second round, the first time they evaluated it, only a reprimand was given. Giffey stepped down as minister a few weeks ago, apparently because she saw this coming. Some journalists needed fresh quotations, although they have been collecting them for weeks. <br /></p><p>Next session was <b>Anna Abalkina</b> from the FU Berlin on "Do hijacked journals attract dishonest authors?" She wished to open a discussion about hijacked journals. They mimic legitimate journals and copy their metadata (ISSN, titel) to cheat potential authors. They collect fees via a cloned, alternative web site. It is a million dollar business that exploits the open access model. She has identified more than 200 cases during the last 10 years, but the lists are not updated and many have managed to work their way into the Scopus (and other) scientometric databases.</p><p>Sometimes the web sites of journals are hijacked and many papers "published" on that site. This can sometimes be seen in a 10-fold growth in the number of papers from one year to the next. She found 7 such journals on Scopus just in the past week. There are many similarities to predatory journals, but also a few differences in the area of intellectual property rights. Publishing in a hijacked journal is not considered to be published. She has even seen the same paper published by different authors in different hijacked journals. She looked for plagiarism in articles published in hijacked journals. She used Urkund, but manually checked the text similarities. (There were a lot of false positives). She is currently finished with about 60 % of the data. Various types of plagiarism have been found. For example, 41 % of all papers attributed to Usbekistan were found to be non-authentic. </p><p><b>Clara Locher</b> (University of Rennes, France) then spoke on work she did with Alexandre Scanff, Florian Naudet, Ioana Cristea, David Moher, & Dorothy V M Bishop on: ‘Nepotistic journals’: a survey of biomedical journals. She reported on the Didier Raoult controversy about the hydroxychloroquine study. The focus is not on the study itself, but on the peer-review process. In this study, one of the authors is editor-in-chief of the journal that published the paper. [Ah, I saw a lot of that studying plagiarism in medical publications. Glad to have a good name for it!]. They found a few others with short acceptance times that included authors who are editors or editors-in-chief for the journals that published the papers. In one journal they found around 33 % of all published articles including at least one editor amongst the authors. Drilling down they found a number of journals for which the most prolific author is on the editorial board. The goal is probably to game productivity-based metrics, which itself affects promotion, tenure, and grant funding. PPMP: Percentage of papers by most prolific author. The publication lag is interesting to look at, as the most prolific author often publishes faster than other authors. And these authors have a higher H-index. 25 of the 60 most prolific authors were even editors-in-chief!</p><p><b>Iosif Peterfi</b> spoke about 'Blockchain based “Proof of eXecution”'. In my opinion, anything that states that is uses "blockchain" doesn't actually need it, so I was curious as to what this was supposed to be. He used a lot of the very short time available with a Mentimeter getting the audience of 8 persons to find words to define 'decentralization' and 'blockchain'. The rest was basically advertising for his company (which I won't name here) and had very little to do with academic integrity, although he did use the term occasionally. </p><p>I stuck around for <b>Julia Priess-Buchheit & Marie Alavi</b> speaking on "Do
students transitioning to university justify their scientific practice
in a different way than established students at universities? A
quantitative study on justification patterns in research integrity", from the path2integrity group at the Coburg University. Do students at higher university level use more "Scientific Common Sense" (SCS) when justifying their scientific practice than students transitioning into higher education institutions? They had 614 participants, but found no markable difference between students transitioning and established students. They justified their own or others scientific practice very similarly. Established students are, however, more confident when justifying with SCS. </p><p>In the evening we had a gala dinner with another pub quiz, awards for the best hat, best dress, best food, and then the ENAI awards. I am so honored to be awarded the activism award! And Teddi Fishman was given the Tracey Bretag Award, so very, very fitting. I hope to have a list of all the awards tomorrow, I'm terribly tired and heading for bed. <br /></p></div>Debora Weber-Wulffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16036864220530629908noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9091218950079982154.post-48895204604756816642021-06-09T21:20:00.009+02:002021-08-26T12:12:04.687+02:00ECAIP 2021 - Day 1<p>It's conference time again! The European Conference for Academic Integrity and Plagiarism 2021 (<a href="https://twitter.com/search?q=ECAIP2021 ">#ECAIP2021</a> on Twitter, organized by the <a href="https://www.academicintegrity.eu/wp/" target="_blank">European Network for Academic Integrity</a>) has started. I will try to make a few notes on the talks for those who are unable to attend. My plan was to do the blogging on my new iPad and use my Mac with a second screen for attending the conference, but Google won't let me into the blog if I don't give it telephone numbers and shoe sizes, so I'll have to be doing some juggling here. <br /></p><p>Day 0 - <b>Day 1</b> - <a href="https://copy-shake-paste.blogspot.com/2021/06/ecaip-2021-day-2.html" target="_blank">Day 2</a> - <a href="https://copy-shake-paste.blogspot.com/2021/06/ecaip-2021-day-3.html">Day 3</a></p><span><a name='more'></a></span><p>The conference was opened by the chairs Sonja Bjelobaba (University of Uppsala) and Tomáš Foltýnek (Mendel-University Brno), giving some background on the conference and an outlook to the conference 2022 that will hopefully be in Porto, Portugal and not just online! </p><p>The <a href="https://academicintegrity.eu/conference/proceedings/2021/book_of_abstracts2021.pdf" target="_blank">proceeding abstracts</a> are available on the ENAI web site.</p><p>Today's keynote is from <b>Guy Curtis</b>: from the University of Western Australia: Evolving an understanding of academic integrity </p><p>He starts with personal stories that we don't often hear in research as to how he started on the academic integrity journey. And he remembers Tracey Bretag, who passed away last year. We really miss her! He read John Croucher's book "Exam scams" in 1997 after hearing about it on the radio, and that got him started on the topic [I just found it at a used book store online and ordered it]. As a young teacher he encountered more and more academic integrity issues. </p><p>His early research was into cultural differences in understanding, incidence, and percieved seriousness of 7 types of plagiarism defined by (Walker, 1998). They published their results in Maxwell, A., Curtis, G., & Vardanega, L. (2008). <a href="https://ojs.unisa.edu.au/index.php/IJEI/article/view/412" target="_blank">Does culture influence understanding and perceived seriousness of plagiarism?</a> <i><span data-heap-id="paper-meta-journal">International Journal for Educational Integrity, 4</span></i><span data-heap-id="paper-meta-journal">(2)</span><i><span data-heap-id="paper-meta-journal">. </span></i>DOI: <span class="value"><a href="https://doi.org/10.21913/IJEI.v4i2.412">https://doi.org/10.21913/IJEI.v4i2.412</a></span>. A later study did a follow up at Curtis, G. & Popal, R. (2011). An examination of factors related to plagiarism and a five-year follow-up of plagiarism at an Australian university. <i><span data-heap-id="paper-meta-journal">International Journal for Educational Integrity, 7</span></i><span data-heap-id="paper-meta-journal">(1)</span><i><span data-heap-id="paper-meta-journal">. </span></i>DOI: <span class="value"><a href="https://doi.org/10.21913/IJEI.v7i1.742">https://doi.org/10.21913/IJEI.v7i1.742
</a></span></p><p>He realized that students needed to be explicitly taught how to reference. </p><p>He was able to revisit the questions 10 years later, and published the results in Curtis, G. & Vardanega, L. (2016). Is plagiarism changing over time? A 10-year-lag study with three points of measurement. <i>Higher Education research & Development, 35</i> (6), pp. 1167-1179. <a href="https://researchrepository.murdoch.edu.au/id/eprint/35573/">https://researchrepository.murdoch.edu.au/id/eprint/35573/</a><span class="value">
</span>
</p><p><i><span data-heap-id="paper-meta-journal"></span></i></p><ul class="paper-meta paper-detail__paper-meta-top" data-selenium-selector="paper-meta-subhead"><span data-selenium-selector="corpus-id"></span></ul><p>Then some serendipity happened. He met some new people and old ideas, for example Joe Clare, a criminologist who pointed out that just a few people commit the most crimes. That is, if they do it once, they they tend to do it again. And it seems that only about 3 % of people at that time used contract cheating, but 60 % of them would do it again. </p><p>He has plotted Stiles, McCabe and his own data - the amount of plagiarism appears to be decreasing! They started looking at why people <b>don't </b>cheat. I'm not sure I understand what exactly the "dark triad" (Machiavellianism, psychopathy, and narcissism) is or how exactly they are related to predictions of students not cheating. I am also concerned about "predictive" statistics, as these have an annoying tendency to be misused. </p><p>After meeting Tracey Bretag they set up <a href="https://www.teqsa.gov.au/" target="_blank">TEQSA</a> in Australia. They offer various <a href="https://www.teqsa.gov.au/toolkit" target="_blank">tools and resources</a> there for dealing with academic integrity policy and issues.<br /></p><p>He currently has a number of papers submitted or in preparation about plagiarism and contract cheating. </p><p>Next talk I attended was <b>Phillip Dawson</b> (Deakin University, Melbourne, Australia) with "Remote proctored exams: minimizing the harms and maximizing the benefits". Since I did some tests myself in 2020, I was really interested in hearing his views on this. He has written a book on defending assessment in a digital world. Very cute - <a href="https://streamgeeks.us/updated-how-to-connect-obs-and-zoom/" target="_blank">he projects his head into the slides</a>, apparently by using the slides as his background! Must try that out. A remote procotored exam is a timed exam on a student-provided computer at a location of the student's choosing that is monitored or recorded by a person and/or a computer. Generally they use some sort of lockdown, use biometrics, attempt to verify identity, and are generally third-parties. There are so many companies offering this service, it is assumed to be a $10 billion market by 2026. <br /></p><p>There is a good bit of litigation going on as well and the literature is quite polarized. </p><p>He has 10 suggestions for using remote proctored exams:</p><ol style="text-align: left;"><li>Use them only as a last resort</li><li>Exam designs must above all be sound assessments of learning</li><li>Only the minimal restrictions required are used</li><li>Students are offered an alternative</li><li>Equity, diversity, adversity, and accessibility are catered for </li><li>Providers pilot RPEs adequately before using them in assessment</li><li>A whole-of-institution approach is taken</li><li>Regulatory requirements and standards around privacy and data security are met</li><li>Effective governance, monitoring, QA, evaluation and complaints procedures are in place</li><li>Staff and student capacity building and support are available and ongoing.</li></ol><p>More information in detail at <a href="http://tinyurl.com/teqsa-exams">http://tinyurl.com/teqsa-exams</a>. <br /></p><p>Following his talk, <b>Ann Rogerson</b> (University of Wollongong, Australia) spoke on "Shifts in student behaviours during COVID-19: Impacts of social interactions." She notes that there has been a shift towards collusion. Australia had an early and very hard lockdown because of COVID-19. They are currently returning to campus. </p><p>They had a reduction in the number of cases reported to the AI office, but plagiarism is still the highest reported offence, followed by collusion. They have a collusion definition that also includes uploading class notes to some online server without faculty permission.</p><p>Snapchat became popular to share answers on an exam, as well as Instagram and gaming platforms. Once gathering restrictions were eased, students colluded in small groups, sharing work on questions and trading answers. They were more exposed to cheating sites and less aware of the rules. In a way they are re-creating the networks that normally grow during in-person studies. <br /></p><p>The policies were not designed around online exams, so that had to be changed. Students need to be made clear what "open book" means online. The integrity statement had to be adapted to include commentary on the use of social media sites, gaming platforms, support or sharing sites. </p><p>Her main message: Shifts in student behavior mean that we have to change, too!</p><p>The next session I attended was <b>Nicolaus Wilder, Doris Weßels, Johanna Gröpler, Andrea Klein & Margret Mundorf</b> (from different universities) speaking on "Who is Responsible for Integrity in the Age of Artificial Intelligence? An analysis using the example of academic writing". Their project is available at <a href="http://path2integrity.eu">path2integrity.eu</a>. Natural language generation introduces new problems in academic integrity. </p><p>There are many free and paid artificial intelligence tools that create, summarise and rewrite texts. Springer has even published fully machine-generated books. [Why would I pay for something like that?] They formulate their "AIAI challenge": Can someone take responsibility for something they do not understand, but whose non-use would be irresponsible, as it can increase quality and efficiency? </p><p>They define responsibility roles: The Creator, the Tool Expert, the User-Producer, the User-Consumer, and the Affected Person. The problem is: who is responsible? the RASCI responsibility assignment matrix is proposed: Who is Responsible, Accountable, Support, Consulted, and Informed. <br /></p><p>I have an issue with the use of the term "artificial intelligence", especially in connection with questions of responsibility. Any use of algorithms, including those which are NOT artificial intelligence, carries responsibility issues with it. And there is not just one "creator", but there is the system master who is paying for the system, the company (and the chain of bosses) that is producing it, as well as the individual programmers who acutally implement the system.<br /></p><p>We broke out into rooms to discuss the responsibility roles, there was not enough time to get very deep into the discussions.</p><p>Over lunch I attended the sponsor presentations of Studiosity and Turnitin. I realize that 24/7 tutoring is something that is good for students, but I'm a bit concerned that they don't learn the academic habitus of how we interact, how we discuss, how we obtain information, how we communicate if they focus more on learning as "getting it right". We want them to learn to think critically. </p><p>Turnitin again spoke of "originality" - it is one of my goals in life to force companies like Turnitin to stop talking about originality or plagiarism, but to focus more on text similarity or text matching. The speaker insisted that Turnitin checks for translation similarity, but in our <a href="https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s41239-020-00192-4" target="_blank">recent test</a> they (and all systems) failed miserably at this task. At least they say they now find homoglyphs and colored letters. They now have a stylometric analysis. It works, however, by comparing with all the previous work by the same student. That means that all the student's work needs to be stored at Turnitin. </p><p>I then listened to the panel "Student involvement in building culture of academic integrity". It was great to see so many students active in the area of academic integrity!</p><p>For the next session I chose <b>Irene Glendinning</b>'s workshop on "Comparison of institutional strategies for academic integrity in Europe and Eurasia." She has data that she collected from 27 EU countries (<a href="http://plagiarism.cz/ippheae/" target="_blank">IPPHEAE</a>), <a href="http://www.plagiarism.cz/seeppai/" target="_blank">SEEPPAI</a> (6 South East European countries: former Jugoslavia and Albania) and <a href="http://plagiarism.cz/paickt/" target="_blank">PAICKT</a> (Caucasus, Kazakhstan, Turkey, as yet unpublished).<br /></p><p>In this workshop she wants to talk about sanctions, penalties, and outcomes. Outcomes should be fair, proportionate, consistent, transparent, and accountable. She sees outcomes as deterrents, means of identifying missing skills & knowledge, correcting inappropriate conduct, upholding standards, fairness, ensuring students are only rewarded for genuine learning & achievement, punishment & justice. Risks arise in that students repeat the same mistakes, there is litigation, reputational damage, devaluation of qualifications, professional/graduate incompetence. </p><p>In the UK there was the AMBeR (Academic Misconduct Benchmarking Research Project) project that found huge inconsistencies. They created the <a href="https://www.plagiarism.org/paper/plagiarism-reference-tariff" target="_blank">Plagiarism Reference Tariff</a> as a tool for deciding sanctions. Currently the QAA project Shift Insight is running. 32 UK HE are being interviewed, the report is as yet unpublished.</p><p>She listed the spectrum of sanctions, and a long list of other factors that are taken into account. The thorny questions are: What is the process? Who decides? Is it formally recorded? How is it kept consistent? How are conflicts of interest avoided? Are there appeals? There were variations in 30 of the 38 countries surveyed!<br /></p><p>I'm up next, so no notes on my talk ;) I spoke on "Talking to a Wall: The Response of (German) Universities to Documentations of Plagiarism in Doctoral Theses".</p><p>In the evening we had a pub quiz while we ate and then a talk by <b>Phil Newton</b> on "Pragmatic Evidence-Based Education" (Newton et al 2020). I tried to pay close attention, as he was giving good evidence for things I often do when teaching. You need to have useful evidence, a local context, and good judgement in applying the evidence to the context. </p><p>What doesn't work? Most of the teaching we do. Matching instruction to "Learning Styles" (visual, auditory, kinaesthetic......); "Cones of learning" (we tend to remember.... - if anything appears as a triangle it is oversimplified); Bloom’s Taxonomy; ...<br /></p><p>What might work?</p><p>Phil had us do two "Lightning Learning Activities": We had to recall 10 city names, but we couldn't remember them all even for 5 seconds! There is a difference between Short-term memory, Working memory, Long-term Memory (7 +/- 2 is about what we can remember). When we learn something new, we match it to something we already know. Retrieval practice: Prompting retrieval helps learn. Taking tests/quizzes (like Mentimeter!) helps make learning more effective. Having students write their own tests or quezzes, making flashcards, write down everything you know, elaboration, not just facts, the more the better. Practice tests are better than restudying, which unfortunately is what the students do. They re-read their notes, but that doesn't work as well as taking practice tests. Tests work in authentic settings, works better than other things, and enhance transfer of the learning into different contexts. We also had to remember 10 Welsh place names, but that was much harder. It was novel information that we had never heard before, so we only had working memory with about 4-7 things.</p><p>Another theory he brushed on is the Cognitive Load Theory: Working memory is essential for learning, but only has a limited capacity. So don't overload it! Don't waste capacity!</p><p>Teaching tips: Use educational scaffolding, keep relevant inofrmation together in space and time, provide worked examples, focus on immediate goals, avoid distracting or unnecessary content.</p><p>Spaced practice - instead of a block, break things up into little blocks of 45 minutes with other stuff in between. We don't know how much space is needed, how many subjects to interleave. Cramming is really, really bad. We can tell our students Prof. Phil says so!<br /></p><p>Dual Coding - Information is coded into both words/verbal and pictures. Learning information in both ways is better - draw pictures of words! Write text descriptions of pictures! Pictures are better than text, but both is better than just one.</p><p>Basic communication skills are necessary, learn how to tell a story, to project your voice. Peer teaching works well, concrete examples of abstract ideas, feedback is often misunderstood: good feedback at the right time with an encouraging time is very effective. </p><p>Sleep is very important! Once you are overloaded, you don't get back. </p><p>So with that, I will get some sleep before tomorrow!</p>Debora Weber-Wulffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16036864220530629908noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9091218950079982154.post-77467274266815284652021-03-25T23:12:00.005+01:002021-03-29T11:43:57.341+02:00Computational Research Integrity - Day 3<p>Uff. All-day Zoom is tough. We are now on the last day of the <a href="https://cri-conf.org/conference.html" target="_blank">Computational Research Integrity Conference 2021</a>. More exciting talks to come!<br />[This ended up to be a mess of links, many apologies. But they are good links, so I am focusing more on documenting them instead of summarizing the talks. I probably have some links in twice, sorry about that.]</p><p><a href="https://copy-shake-paste.blogspot.com/2021/03/computational-research-integrity-2021.html" target="_blank">Day 1</a> - <a href="https://copy-shake-paste.blogspot.com/2021/03/computational-research-integrity-day-2.html" target="_blank">Day 2</a> - <b>Day 3: 25 March 2021</b><br /></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>First up is <b>Boris Barbour</b> of the <a href="https://pubpeer.com/" target="_blank">PubPeer</a> Foundation, which runs the world's most extensive online journal club. He gave a good overview of the system and some fun statistics about the number of comments. He noted that apparently due to the anonymity of PubPeer (it used to be partial anonymity, the staff knew who was writing, but now it is total anonymity), they have many more comments then PubMed Comments. He quoted Max Planck "Science advances one funeral at a time" [<a href="https://de.wikiquote.org/wiki/Max_Planck" target="_blank">Wikiquote</a>: "Eine neue wissenschaftliche Wahrheit
pflegt sich nicht in der Weise durchzusetzen, daß ihre Gegner überzeugt
werden und sich als belehrt erklären, sondern vielmehr dadurch, daß
ihre Gegner allmählich aussterben und daß die heranwachsende Generation
von vornherein mit der Wahrheit vertraut gemacht ist." - <i>Wissenschaftliche Selbstbiographie, Johann Ambrosius Barth Verlag, Leipzig, 1948, S. 22</i>] A sister site: <a href="https://peeriodicals.com/" target="_blank">Peeriodicals</a>.<br /></li><li><b>Walter Scheirer</b> (University of Notre Dame) "Understanding the Provenance of Visual Disinformation Targeting Science" started off with anit-vaxxers misusing Memes and then took us on a long hunt through the internet to find a surprising source for one of the current stupid memes of bat soup. He then showed how they are trying to find the source of images (of course, using graph theory, the Swiss Army Knife for computer scientists). What a fantastic idea! He published <a href="https://thebulletin.org/premium/2020-07/a-pandemic-of-bad-science/" target="_blank">A Pandemic of Bad Science</a>.</li><li><b>Mario Biagioli</b> (UCLA) "Ignorance or mimicry? Lessons from the merchants of doubt." Mario discussed a sinister development of ethical sounding cover ("transparency", "conflict of interest") for nefarious purposes. I learned a new word: "<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agnotology" target="_blank">Agnotology</a>", the organized production and distribution of ignorance. Links:<br /><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/04/climate/trump-epa-science.html" target="_blank"><i>NY Times</i> piece</a> by Lisa Friedman about the E.P.A - A book<i> <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merchants_of_Doubt" target="_blank">Merchants of doubt</a> </i>talks about this problem in the tobacco industry, global warming, etc. <i>(</i>reviewed 2010 in <i><a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2010/aug/08/merchants-of-doubt-oreskes-conway">The Guardian</a>) - </i>Video of testimony to the House Science, Space, and Technology committee "<a href="https://www.congress.gov/event/116th-congress/house-event/110203" target="_blank">Strengthening Transparency or Silencing Science? The Future of Science in EPA Rulemaking</a>" - <a href="https://www.americanscientist.org/article/reasonable-versus-unreasonable-doubt" target="_blank">Reasonable Versus Unreasonable Doubt</a> -<br /><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargo_cult_science" target="_blank">Cargo Cult Science</a> - Dorothy Bishop <a href="http://deevybee.blogspot.com/2020/01/should-i-stay-or-should-i-go-when.html" target="_blank">blogged</a> about why she thought serious scientists should NOT attend meetings like this <a href="https://www.nas.org/blogs/event/fixing-science-practical-solutions-for-the-irreproducibility-crisis" target="_blank">NAS</a> one. - <i>The Guardian</i>: <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/media/2020/jan/01/how-truth-gets-lost-in-the-bbc-search-for-balance" target="_blank">How the truth gets lost</a> (1 Jan 2020) - How to tell the difference between merchants of doubt and those who genuinely disagree? Qualifications can be good, but we need more disclosure about who these people are. People have been coached to look and act like a thoughtful scientist. Mario published a text on <a href="https://www.researchgate.net/publication/338685495_GAMING_METRICS_Misconduct_and_Manipulation_in_Academic_Research" target="_blank">Gaming Metrics</a> in 2020. <br /></li><li><b><span class="name">Thorsten Beck</span> </b>(HEADT Centre - Humboldt University of Berlin) "Image Manipulation Detection — From Visual Inspection to Technology Driven Procedures?"<br /><a href="https://headt.eu/Image-Integrity-Database" target="_blank">HEADT Image Integrity Dataset</a> (but you can't see high-resolution images or download them for legal reasons) - <a href="https://blogs.embl.org/events/2020/09/08/how-to-visualise-biological-data/" target="_blank">Workshop on data visualization</a> - <a href="https://hms-idac.github.io/ImageForensics/" target="_blank">Synthetic data sets</a> for use in training (<a href="https://hms-idac.github.io/BINDER/" target="_blank">Paper</a>) - Ansari & Tyagi (2014): <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09747338.2014.921415" target="_blank">Pixel-Based Image Forgery Detection: A Review</a> - <a href="https://petapixel.com/2016/05/06/botched-steve-mccurry-print-leads-photoshop-scandal/" target="_blank">Botched Steve McCurry Print Leads to Photoshop Scandal</a> - Bronx documentation center: <a href="http://www.alteredimagesbdc.org/national-geographic" target="_blank">Altered images</a> - <a href="https://rupress.org/jcb/article/166/1/11/34064/What-s-in-a-picture-The-temptation-of-image" target="_blank">What is a picture? The temptation of image manipulation</a> (2004). <br /></li><li><b>Yury Kashnitsky</b> (Elsevier) spoke on
"<a href="https://cri-conf.org/pdfs/CRI-CONF_2021_paper_4.pdf" target="_blank">How near-duplicate detection improves editors' and authors' publishing experience</a>". It seems to me that Elsevier has re-invented eTBLAST (now <a href="https://helioblast.heliotext.com/" target="_blank">HelioBLAST</a>) not just for published papers but for submissions so that they can identify simultaneous submissions and re-submissions. <br /></li><li><b><span class="name">Ivan Oransky</span></b> (Retraction Watch) "From Cancer to COVID-19, Does Science Self-Correct?" He was invited to review Covid-19 papers (!), apparently on the basis of algorithmic recommendations. He just recently published an article about <a href="https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32634321/" target="_blank">Covid-19 retractions</a> and one in 2020 about the <a href="https://www.wired.com/story/just-how-historic-is-the-latest-covid-19-science-meltdown/" target="_blank">Covid-19 science meltdown</a>. MDPI recently invited Jeffrey Beall to <a href="https://twitter.com/Jeffrey_Beall/status/1375083577088503817" target="_blank">guest edit a pharmacy journal</a> - Here's a <a href="https://jodischneider.com/pubs/sigmet2020.pdf " target="_blank">poster paper</a> Jodi Schneider did with a student for SIGMET about really obvious data quality problems with several databases - On the topic of self-retraction, [someone] had a few examples here where people had actually boosted their reputation by doing this - people expect it will be terrible, but others are impressed at the integrity it displays- Dorothy Bishop: <a href="https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/2515245918776632" target="_blank">Fallibility in Science</a> (2018) - Important list of <a href="https://retractionwatch.com/retracted-coronavirus-covid-19-papers/" target="_blank">retracted Covid-19 papers</a> - Chris Graf "At Wiley we have an escalating scale: Corrections < Notes/notifications (which are new, for when there's community 'interest' but no conclusive finding, yet) < Expression of concern < Retraction (with a notice, linked, watermarked, content retained) < Withdrawal (with a notice, content removed). All have DOIs."<br /></li><li>Panel 5: Journalists<br /><b>Ivan Oransky</b> (Retraction Watch), <b>Richard Van Noorden</b> (Nature), <b>Stephanie Lee</b> (Buzzfeed News) - Here is a good <a href="https://twitter.com/edyong209/status/542651367316533248" target="_blank">Ed Yong Tweet</a> on the relationship between journalists and scientists - Talking of mystery novels, Henry Forman is an academic researcher, now retired, who has a second career as a novelist. One of his books is all about <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Wrath-Grapes-Henry-Jay-Forman/dp/1537092219" target="_blank">a case of scientific misconduct that turns murderous</a> ... - Two articles by Stephanie: <a href="https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/stephaniemlee/pasta-barilla-science-funding" target="_blank">Those Studies About Pasta Being Good For You? Some Are Paid For By Barilla. </a>(2018) - <a href="https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/stephaniemlee/ioannidis-trump-white-house-coronavirus-lockdowns" target="_blank">An Elite Group Of Scientists Tried To Warn Trump Against Lockdowns In March </a>(2020). <a href="https://www.infodocket.com/2019/06/12/zotero-and-retraction-watch-collaborate-on-new-service-beta-that-notifies-users-of-article-retractions-in-their-personal-zotero-libraries/" target="_blank">Collaboration between Zotero and Retraction Watch</a> (2019). <br /></li><li>Panel 6: Investigators / Whistleblowers<br /><b>Paul Brookes</b> (Panel chair) University of Rochester, <b>Elisabeth Bik</b>, <b>Boris Barbour,</b> <b>Erica Boxheimer</b> (EMBO Press)<b>, Jana Christopher</b> (FEBS Press; Image-Integrity). There was a very lively discussion in the chat about the purpose of retractions, the length of time they take (if anything happens), and how allegations are proven. The links were flying fast, so here's what I managed to grab and the tabs I still had open at the end of the conference: <a href="https://referee3.org/" target="_blank">Referee3</a> - <a href="https://publicationethics.org/resources/flowcharts/image-manipulation-published-article" target="_blank">COPE flowchart on image manipulation</a> - <a href="https://retractionwatch.com/2018/07/03/a-university-went-to-great-lengths-to-block-the-release-of-information-about-a-trial-gone-wrong-a-reporter-fought-them-and-revealed-the-truth/" target="_blank">A university went to great lengths to block the release of information about a trial gone wrong. A reporter fought them and revealed the truth.</a> (2018, from a story told by Ivan) - <a href="https://www.nature.com/collections/prbfkwmwvz/" target="_blank">Challenges in irreproducible research</a> (2018) - <a href="https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2021/01/many-scientists-citing-two-scandalous-covid-19-papers-ignore-their-retractions" target="_blank">Many scientists citing two scandalous COVID-19 papers ignore their retractions</a> (2021) - <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/ncb0306-203a" target="_blank">Appreciating data: warts, wrinkles and all</a> (2006) - <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6141194/" target="_blank">What is Recklessness in Scientific Research?: The Frank Sauer Case</a> (2017) -<i> </i><a href="https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/hidden-data-john-b-carlisle/1134569508" target="_blank"><i>Hidden Data: The Blind Eye of Science</i></a> (book by Helene Z. Hill) -<br /><a href="https://www.nature.com/news/i-was-sued-for-libel-under-an-unjust-law-1.10979" target="_blank">I was sued for libel under an unjust law</a> (2012) - <a href="https://www.nature.com/news/courts-refuse-scientists-bids-to-prevent-retractions-1.18175" target="_blank">Courts refuse scientists' bids to prevent retractions</a> (2015) - <a href="https://www.boredpanda.com/world-war-2-aircraft-survivorship-bias-abraham-wald/" target="_blank">Survival bias</a> (2019) - <a href="https://elemental.medium.com/when-science-needs-self-correcting-a130eacb4235" target="_blank">Scientists Make Mistakes. I Made a Big One</a> (2020)<b> - </b><a href="https://101innovations.wordpress.com/" target="_blank">Innovations in scholarly communication</a> (Bianca Kramer's tool overview site) - <a href="https://embassy.science/wiki/Main_Page" target="_blank">Embassy of science</a><b>.<br /><br /></b></li><li><b>Daniel Acuna</b> then chaired a 56 person brainstorming session about what voices are missing from the discussion. And it worked! Susan Garfinkel noted that the institutions (RIOs) and their processes for research misconduct investigations are missing. Other voices: Information exchange between reviewers. In biomedical research: patients! Non-journal publishers. Money!!! Physicians and professional organizations (impact on treatments). Federal regulations. Insights from the fakers - <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/28/magazine/diederik-stapels-audacious-academic-fraud.html" target="_blank">The Mind of a Con Man</a> (2013) - <a href="https://errorstatistics.files.wordpress.com/2014/12/fakingscience-20141214.pdf" target="_blank">Faking science</a> A True Story of Academic Fraud Diederik Stapel Translated by Nicholas J. L. Brown (2014). Legal barriers to sharing of sensitive information between stakeholders. A sense that some of these tools are being used for scientists, to help them avoid errors. What if the institution is not responding? Cultural influences (gift authorship being regarded as positive). International perspective. Different types of misconduct in the various scientific areas. Clearer COPE guidelines for corrections/retractions/expressions of concern. COPE representative. Usability testing between tool developers and users. Someone from MOST (Chinese Ministry of Science and Technology)<br /></li><li>CRICONF attendees may be interested to attend the WCRI2021 digital event webinars from 30 May – 2 June 2021. Free registration and more information is available at <a href="https://wcri2022.org/digital-event-2021/">https://wcri2022.org/digital-event-2021/</a>.<br /> <br />Over and out, I need some sleep!<br /></li></ul>Debora Weber-Wulffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16036864220530629908noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9091218950079982154.post-80928240767436616092021-03-25T00:48:00.007+01:002021-08-26T12:04:15.329+02:00Computational Research Integrity - Day 2<p>All right! I slept in this morning to try and have my body be in New York time and not Berlin time. Looking forward to the talks today, I will be on second after Elisabeth Bik. I changed my slides about 17 times yesterday to adapt to the discussions, it's about time I give the talk. </p><p><a href="https://copy-shake-paste.blogspot.com/2021/03/computational-research-integrity-2021.html" target="_blank">Day 1</a> - <b>Day 2, 24 March 2021</b> - <a href="https://copy-shake-paste.blogspot.com/2021/03/computational-research-integrity-day-3.html" target="_blank">Day 3 </a><br /></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li><span class="name"><b>Elisabeth Bik</b>, the human image duplication spotter, gave us some great stories: How she got started on this (a plagiarism of her own work), what tools she uses, what tools she wishes she had, and even gave us some images to try and spot ourselves. On her Twitter feed (<a href="https://twitter.com/MicrobiomDigest" target="_blank">@MicrobiomDigest</a>) she runs an #imageforensics contest. I'm ususally too slow to respond to them. What really puzzles me is: Why are people messing with the images? Why not do the experiments for real? Or if you must fake, use a different picture? We just need to let her get her hands on Ed Delp's tool! That would bring her superpowers up to warp speed!</span><br /></li><li>I was up next with "Responsible Use of Support Tools for Plagiarism Detection", Elizabeth did a great<a href="https://twitter.com/MicrobiomDigest/status/1374724201534222341" target="_blank"> tweet thread on the talk</a>, thanks! I referred to Miguel Roig's work on <a href="https://t.co/LCi8LJYtph" target="_blank">self-plagiarism</a> in response to a discussion yesterday. Here's our <a href="https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s41239-020-00192-4" target="_blank">paper</a> on the test of support tools for plagiarism detection and our <a href="https://plagiat.htw-berlin.de/software/softwaretest-2020/" target="_blank">web-page</a> with all the gory details. And of course, the<a href="https://people.f4.htw-berlin.de/~weberwu/simtexter/app.html" target="_blank"><i> similarity-texter</i></a>, a tool for comparing two texts. Sofia Kalaidopoulou implemented it as her bachelor's thesis. It is free, works in your browser, and nicely colors same text so the differences jump out and hit you in the eye. <br /></li><li><b>Michael Lauer</b> from the National Institute of Health then spoke about "Roles and Responsibilities for Promoting Research Integrity." He fired off a firework of misconduct cases that had to do with things like exfiltrating knowledge and research to China or misusing NIH funds with which I couldn't keep up. Some of the schemes were really brazen! A few that I got noted: The Darsee Affair in the 1980s (Article in the <a href="https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJM198306093082311" target="_blank"><i>New England Journal of Medicine</i></a>) - an internal peer-review tampering case - Duke University affair around <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anil_Potti" target="_blank">Anil Potti</a> - <a href="https://www.justice.gov/usao-ma/pr/chinese-researcher-sentenced-making-false-statements-federal-agents" target="_blank">Chinese Researcher Sentenced for Making False Statements to Federal Agents</a>. Espionage seems to be a really big problem!<br /></li><li><b><span class="name">Matt Turek</span></b> Information Innovation Office (I2O), Program Manager at DARPA, spoke on "Challenges and Approaches to Media Integrity." He calmly and matter-of-factly presented some absolutely TERRIFYING, bleeding-edge research on image generation. We had seen some things Ed Delp spoke about yesterday. But things like a Deepfakes <a href="https://moondisaster.org/" target="_blank">video of Richard Nixon</a> appearing to read a speech that was written in case the moon shot (the Apollo 11 mission, I watched this in black and white on my grandmother's TV) ended in tragedy makes me despair that we will ever manage to deal with fake news. Nixon's lips move to the text he is reading, it is almost impossible to tell that this is a fake - except that I know that I saw a different ending in my youth. Matt ended with the possibility of "Identity Attacks as a Service", that is, ransomware that threatens to publish real-looking videos of someone unless they pay up. I'm glad his time was up, afraid that he would have more deeply unsettling things to show. Much as I personally do not agree with a lot that the military is wasting money on, this seems to be a good investment. <br /></li><li><b>Zubair Afzal</b> spoke on "Improving reproducibility by automating key resource tables", I have no idea what key resource tables are, but it seemed to be useful to biomedical researchers. <br /></li><li><b>Colby Vorland</b>, with "Semi-automated Screening for Improbable Randomization in PDFs", attempted to see if data makes sense by looking at the distribution of p values, which should be random. (Note from Elisabeth Bik:
See e.g. <a href="https://associationofanaesthetists-publications.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/anae.13938" target="_blank">Carlisle's work</a> on p values in 5,000 RCTs). He has to go to enormous trouble to scrape table data out of PDFs. I suggest using Abbyy FineReader, which does a good job of OCRing tables. Why, oh why do PDFs not have semantic markup?<br /></li><li>Panel 3: Funders<br /><b><span class="name">Benyamin Margolis</span></b>
(ORI), <span class="name"><b>Wenda Bauchspies</b> (NSF),<b> </b></span><span class="name"><b>Michael Lauer</b> (NIH), and </span><b><span class="name">Matt Turek</span></b>
(DARPA) discussed various aspects of the funding of research integrity research. All sorts of topics were addressed with the links flying in the chat as usual:<a href="https://www.nsf.gov/oig/report-fraud/" target="_blank"><br /></a><a href="https://www.nsf.gov/oig/report-fraud/" target="_blank">Report Fraud, Waste, Abuse, or Whistleblower Reprisal to the NSF OIG</a> - A link to help PIs<a href="https://onlineethics.org/" target="_blank"> prepare to teach or learn more about RCR</a>. - <a href="https://www.nsf.gov/oig/report-fraud/" target="_blank">NIH Policy for Data Management and Sharing</a> - <a href="https://blog.myheritage.com/2021/02/deep-nostalgia-goes-viral/" target="_blank">Deep Nostalgia</a> - <a href="https://www.darpa.mil/work-with-us/heilmeier-catechism" target="_blank">The Heilmeier Catechism</a> - <a href="https://beta.sam.gov/" target="_blank">Find US government funding</a> - <a href=" https://www.nsf.gov/pubs/2020/nsf20048/nsf20048.jsp" target="_blank">Build and Broaden</a> for encouraging <a href="https://www.nsf.gov/pubs/2021/nsf21542/nsf21542.htm?org=NSF" target="_blank">diversity, equity and inclusion</a> - <a href="https://www.nsf.gov/pubs/2021/nsf21542/nsf21542.htm?org=NSF" target="_blank">DORA</a>. The tabs I still have open probably came from this session, they are in the bullet list below. <br /></li><li><b>Daniel Acuna</b> and <b>Benyamin Margolis</b> introduced a competition: Artificial Intelligence for Computational Research Integrity. ORI is offering a grant (<a href="https://taggs.hhs.gov/Detail/AwardDetail?arg_AwardNum=ORIIR200062&arg_ProgOfficeCode=241" target="_blank">ORIIR200062</a>: Large-scale High-Quality Labeled Datasets and Competitions to Advance Artificial Intelligence for Computational Research Integrity) for running the competition.</li><li>Panel 4: Tool Developers <br /><b>Daniel Acuna</b> (Syracuse University), <b>Jennifer Byrne</b> (University of Sydney), <b>James Heathers</b> (Cipher Skin), and <b>Amit K. Roy-Chowdhury</b> (UC Riverside) were discussing. <br />Jennifer and Cyril Labbé have published their protocol for using <i>Seek & Blastn</i> at <a href="https://www.protocols.io/view/seek-amp-blastn-standard-operating-procedure-bjhpkj5n" target="_blank">protocols.io</a>. And they have a paper on <a href="https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11192-021-03871-9" target="_blank">biomedical journal responses</a> that closely mirrors my own experiences.<br />James talked about his four projects <a href="https://medium.com/@jamesheathers/the-grim-test-a-method-for-evaluating-published-research-9a4e5f05e870" target="_blank">GRIM</a> (<a href="https://peerj.com/preprints/2064v1/" target="_blank">Preprint</a>), <a href="https://medium.com/hackernoon/introducing-sprite-and-the-case-of-the-carthorse-child-58683c2bfeb#.asr5byvja" target="_blank">SPRITE</a> (<a href="https://peerj.com/preprints/26968v1/" target="_blank">Preprint</a>), <a href="https://osf.io/pm825/" target="_blank">DEBIT</a>, and <a href="https://osf.io/8q32b/#!" target="_blank">RIVETS</a>. His statistical work should scare the daylights out of data fabricators. As he points out: by the time they falsify their data to fit the statistical models, they might as well have done the experiments.<br />Amit spoke a bit more in depth about the work Ghazal presented yesterday and the challenges involved in developing an image analysis tool.<i> </i><br />Daniel talked about <a href="https://beta.drfigures.com" target="_blank">Dr. Figures</a> (<a href="https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/269415v3" target="_blank">Preprint</a>)<br />Someone (I didn't catch who, James?) said "Death to PDF!" Indeed, or rather, it needs to be easily parseable so that we can easily mine metadata, get the text and images separated, etc. Cyril posted a link to a <a href="https://grobid.readthedocs.io/en/latest/Introduction/" target="_blank">good PDF extractor</a> in the chat, I shall look into this very soon. </li></ul><p>Links to things in tabs I still have open that someone put in the chat at some time:</p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>Jodi Schneider, et al.: <a href="https://f1000research.com/documents/10-211" target="_blank">Reducing the Inadvertent Spread of Retracted Science: Shaping a Research and Implementation Agenda</a></li><li>David Barnes (who wrote the fantastic <a href="https://www.bluej.org/objects-first/" target="_blank">textbook</a> I use for teaching introductory programming in Java) sent me a private link to a demo of a prototype he has on YouTube on his <a href="A demonstration of a prototype version of an image duplication analyser for papers in the biosciences" target="_blank">Image Duplication Analyser</a>. </li><li>A 2016 paper often quoted yesterday and today by Bik, Casadevall & Fang on image duplication: <a href="https://mbio.asm.org/content/7/3/e00809-16" target="_blank">The Prevalence of Inappropriate Image Duplication in Biomedical Research Publications</a></li><li>Dorothy Bishop's blog entry "<a href="https://deevybee.blogspot.com/2021/03/time-for-publishers-to-consider-rights.html" target="_blank">Time for publishers to consider the rights of readers as well as authors</a>" really pings with me, I keep pleading with people to understand publishing as communication between writers and readers and to quit with the write-only publications no one reads. </li><li>Jana Christopher's "<a href="https://febs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/1873-3468.13201" target="_blank">Systematic fabrication of scientific images revealed</a>" in FEBS letters</li><li>The <i>New England Journal of Medicine</i> article with the <a href="https://www.nejm.org/doi/10.1056/NEJMc1700150" target="_blank">citation analysis</a> of the 5-sentence 1980 letter many people cite and a "study" proving that opiods are not addicting that I referred to in my talk. </li><li>The <a href="https://www.academicintegrity.org/survey/" target="_blank">ICAI International Academic Integrity Survey</a> that is being conducted, also mentioned in my talk. </li></ul><p>And now for a terribly geeky note on my talk. I have been bothered by presenting online with Zoom that I couldn't have my notes. I use Keynote on a Macbook Pro, and it either assumes the second screen is a beamer (and I can't talk it out of it), or I can only present on my laptop. And I either share the laptop or the second screen on the Mac. There has to be a better way! So I googled yesterday. And found this lovely article with the exact solution to my problem: <a href="https://www.macworld.com/article/3572431/how-to-use-keynote-play-slideshow-in-window-with-videoconferencing-services.html" target="_blank">How to use Keynote’s new Play Slideshow in Window feature with videoconferencing services</a>.</p><p>I had just upgraded my iPad to a new operating system, so my Mac (Catalina) needed to install some do-hickey. Then all I had to do was: Start Keynote sharing in the window of my laptop, then share only Keynote on Zoom, and klick on the little remote thingy on Keynote on the iPad. I now set the iPad down on my keyboard, and I had the audience on Zoom (and myself to make sure I'm still in the camera view when speaking) on my second screen behind the laptop, my slides on the laptop screen, and on the iPad I selected the presentation of my notes and the next slide! How utterly perfect! I just needed to tap anywhere on the iPad to advance the slide. If I needed to go back, I could tap on the slide number and it would open up a long string of slides for me to choose how far back I wanted to go. It felt so good being in complete control, although I didn't have any brain cells left to read the chat, as I normally do when presenting. I'll learn once I can relax that this really does work. So thank you <span class="byline"><span class="author vcard"><a href="https://www.macworld.com/author/glenn-fleishman">Glenn Fleishman</a> from MacWorld!</span></span> </p><p> </p><p> </p>Debora Weber-Wulffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16036864220530629908noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9091218950079982154.post-72497537904332680892021-03-24T00:18:00.009+01:002021-08-26T11:53:33.325+02:00Computational Research Integrity 2021 - Day 1<p>This week I am attending (and presenting at) the Computational Research Integrity Conference 2021 that is sponsored be the US Office of Research Integrity. I will try and record the highlights here.</p><p>The purpose of this conference is to bring computer scientists together with RIOs (Research Integrity Officers) so that a good discussion and exchange about tools for dealing with research integrity issues. The conference was organized by <b>Daniel Acuna</b> from Syracuse University. </p><p><b>Day 1: 23 March 2021 -<a href="https://copy-shake-paste.blogspot.com/2021/03/computational-research-integrity-day-2.html" target="_blank"> </a></b><a href="https://copy-shake-paste.blogspot.com/2021/03/computational-research-integrity-day-2.html" target="_blank">Day 2</a> - <a href="https://copy-shake-paste.blogspot.com/2021/03/computational-research-integrity-day-3.html" target="_blank">Day 3</a> <br /></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li><b>Ranjini Ambalavanar,</b> the Acting Director of the Division of Investigative Oversight at ORI kicked off the conference explaining the workflow at ORI from allegation to decision. It takes a long time, and there are many things to think about, from saving a copy of perhaps a terabyte of data to discovering small discrepancies. She showed us a few cases of really blatant fabrication of data and falsification of images, some of which can be found with simple statistical analysis or image investigation. ORI has a list with some <a href="https://ori.hhs.gov/forensic-tools" target="_blank">forensic tools</a> they use to produce evidence for their cases. She pleaded with computer scientists to produce more and better tools.<br /></li><li><b>Jennifer Byrne</b> presented some research that she is doing with <b>Cyril Labbé</b> on gene sequences that are used in cancer research. They found numerous papers that said they were using specific genes for some purpose, but that they were actually not using them correctly or were stating that they were using one gene but actually using another. Genes are expressed with long strings of characters representing the bases involved. These sequences are not easily human-understandable, but are easy to find in publications. They have a tool, "<a href="http://scigendetection.imag.fr/TPD52/Va/" target="_blank">Seek / Blastn</a>" that looks for nucleotide sequences in PDFs and querys the sequence against the human genomic + transcript database to output a human-readable name for the sequences that help show up problems. <br /></li><li><b>Lauren Quakenbush</b> & <b>Corinna Raimundo</b> are RIOs from Northwestern University. They train young researchers with RI bootcamps and gave us some good insights into how research misconduct investigations are done for serious deviations at a university in the USA. They have many new issues that are arising: an increasing volume of data that needs to be sequestered (terabytes!), unrealistic time frames, measures to protect the identity of whistleblowerd, determining responsibility and intent, co-authors who are at other institutions, respondents who leave the university, the litigous nature of the cases, communication with journals, and so on. Germany really needs to see that they need staff and resources and not just name a lone RIO....<br /></li><li><b>Kyle Siler</b> gave a short presentation about predatory publishing. He began making it clear that predatory publishing is not a binary attribute, but quite a spectrum of problematic publishing. He spoke of some fascinating investigations that he is doing in trying to identify what is meant by a predatory publisher. He scraped a large database of metadata from various publishers and is trying to measure some things like time-to-publish and number of articles published per year. His slides flew by so fast and I was so engrossed that I forgot to take any snapshots. He found one very strange oddity while cleaning his data: a presumably predatory journal that scraped an article from a reputable journal with Global North authors, and reprinted it. BUT: they made some odd formating mistakes and some VERY odd substitutions (like the first name "Nancy" becoming "urban center"). He assumes that the journal is trying to build up an image of looking respectable in order to gain APC-paying customers. Some are even back-dated, so that the true publication looks like a duplicate publication, or even a plagiarism. <br /></li><li><b>Edward J. Delp</b> described a tool for image forensics that he is developing with a large research group at Purdue + other governmental organizations, in particular with Wanda Jones from ORI. His <i>Scientific Integrity System</i> seems to be just what many of the RIOs need, they wanted to know when he will be releasing the system! The problem is that it can probably only be used for people working for the US government, not for real cases, for legal reasons apparently involving the US military. But he has a user manual online: <a href="https://skynet.ecn.purdue.edu/~ace/si/manual/user-manual-scientific-integrity-v5.pdf">https://skynet.ecn.purdue.edu/~ace/si/manual/user-manual-scientific-integrity-v5.pdf</a> and a demo video: <a href="https://skynet.ecn.purdue.edu/~ace/si/video/sci-int-system-demo_v5.mp4">https://skynet.ecn.purdue.edu/~ace/si/video/sci-int-system-demo_v5.mp4</a>. He uses Generative Adversarial Networks to produce synthetic data for training his neural networks. They use retracted papers with images and non-retracted ones for populating their database. <br />David Barnes noted that getting annotations off of PDFs is not easy, Ed replied that it indeed hard, but his group knows how to do it!<br /><b>Update 2021-03-26</b>: Wanda wrote to me to make it clear that it is of course an entire team of people at ORI and NIH who are working with Ed on this project. She also notes:<span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-size: 11pt;"><div>"the
reason we’re not using it on active ORI cases is because of evidence
integrity standards, and a federal computing requirement that we operate
within the HHS Cloud environment with anything involving personally
identifiable information (PII).
New systems must undergo rigorous testing before they can “go live” in
our internal environment. (Even commercial products must be reviewed,
though it’s not as arduous as a newly-developed product.) Purdue hosts
the system in its own secure cloud, but we
cannot put information that might identify anyone named in our active
cases into a non-HHS system. We have full freedom to develop what we
need, though, using the thousands of published/retracted PDFs and other
file formats that Ed and his team have assembled,
including a growing library of GANS-generated images. We couldn’t be
more excited about where this is going, and we’re hopeful we can go live
in the next year or so. We’re exploring how best to do that. </div></span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-size: 11pt;">
<div>Further, we’re not restricted because of any military uses of the
technology – everything being used with it is published and/or
open-source and has been, for years. We’re merely benefitting from
DARPA’s years of investment in technology (albeit for national
security purposes) that clearly has other worthwhile uses. After all,
DARPA gave us the internet (for better or worse)! " </div></span></span>Thank you, Wanda, for clearing this up!<br /></li><li>Panel 1: We segued right into the first panel with institutional investigators. [Note to the conference organizers: More and longer breaks needed!] <b>Wanda Jones</b>, the deputy director of ORI moderated the session with <b>William C. Trenkle</b> from the US Department of Agriculture, <b>Wouter Vandevelde</b> from KU Leuven in Belgium, and <b>Mary Walsh</b> from Harvard Medical School. They again picked up on the problem of an overwhelming amount of data and file management they have to do. The panel members briefly presented the processes at their institutions. Will noted that there is no government-wide definition of scientific integrity, although I am very pessimistic on any government deciding on a definition of anything. I was impressed that they made it clear that any analyses are only done on copies, never the original data itself, and that the tools that they use only detect problems, they do not decide if academic misconduct has taken place. A lively discussion raged on in the chat, with Dorothy Bishop noting that the young researchers are the ones who come to research with high ideals and get corrupted as they work. Will noted that agriculture integrity issues are different from medical ones, stating that it is a bit more difficult to fake 2000-pound cows than mice. Ed offered to generate an image of one for him, I really want to see that! It was made clear that there has to be some senior person, be it an older academic or a vice president of research, that protects the RIOs when they are investigating cases, particularly if "cash cows" of the university are under suspicion. [Will got us started on cows, I wonder how many there will be tomorrow!] I asked what one thing the panelists would wish for if a fairy godmother was to come along and grant that wish. The wishes were for a one-stop image forensic tool, more resources, and the desire for people who commit FFP (Fabrication, Falsification, Plagiarism) to have their hands starting to burn 🙌. The chat started discussing degrees of burn, starting with a light burn for QRP (questionable research practices) and a harder burn for FFP 😂.<br /></li><li>Panel 2: We were awarded a 5 minute break before the next round, I made it to the refrigerator for a hunk of cheese. <b>Bernd Pulverer</b> from EMBO Press was moderating the panel with <b>Renee Hoch</b> from PLOS, <b>IJsbrand Jan Aalbersberg</b> from Elsevier and <b>Maria Kowalczuk</b> from Springer Nature. Renee detailed the pre-publication checks that they run in order to siphon off as much problematic material as possible before publication. IJsbrand had some nice statistics about the causes for retractions from Elsevier journals. There are more author-reported scientific errors causing retractions, so this helps make it clear that retractions do not always mean academic misconduct. About 20 % of the retractions are for plagiarism and image manipulation is 10-20 %. Bernd was of the opinion that plagiarism is infrequent, so I was back over at my slides, which I must have changed 17 times during the talks, to include a statement that it is NOT infrequent, just not found. He noted that it costs about $8000 per article published in <i>Nature</i>, because so many are evaluated and rejected. An interesting question from Dorothy Bishop was: What do we do if editors are corrupt? There was much discussion in the chat about how to find an appropriate address to report issues and how journals cooperate with institutions. A number of people want to move to versioning in publishing, something I find abhorrent unless there is a wiki-like way of being able to specify the exact version of an article that you are quoting. IJsbrand had a list of twelve (!) grades of <strike>retraction</strike> corrective tools ranging from in-line correction to retraction. The fairy godmother was now granting two wishes, which brought out things like a fingerprinting or microattribution tool (it's called a wiki, people, you can see exactly who did what when to the article), a user verification tool (sometimes people are listed as authors who do not know that they are being listed), an iThenticate for images, and so on. It was also noted that once the NIH started suing universities for research misconduct, they started perking up and getting on with research integrity training. Money focuses university administration minds!<br /></li></ul><p>There were various interesting links that popped up in the chat on Day 1, I gave up trying to put them in context and just started a bullet list here: <br /></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li><i>Kyle Siler, Philippe Vincent-Lamarre, Cassidy R. Sugimoto and
Vincent
Larivière</i>, "<a href="https://cri-conf.org/pdfs/CRI-CONF_2021_paper_2.pdf" target="_blank">The Lacuna Database: Empirical Data to Identify Obscure, Unconventional, Questionable and/or Predatory Journals</a>" <br /></li><li>2018 UK Parliamentary <a href="https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201719/cmselect/cmsctech/350/35002.htm" target="_blank">report</a> on Research Integrity - I think every country needs one of these, especially Germany! The <a href="http://data.parliament.uk/writtenevidence/committeeevidence.svc/evidencedocument/science-and-technology-committee/research-integrity/oral/72112.html" target="_blank">oral evidence</a> of Dorothy Bishop is great. <br /></li><li>A <i>Nature </i>news feature from<time itemprop="datePublished"> 23 March 2021: </time><a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-00733-5" target="_blank">The fight against fake-paper factories that churn out sham science</a></li><li>NIST <a href="https://www.nist.gov/topics/organization-scientific-area-committees-forensic-science/digitalmultimedia-scientific-area">Digital/Multimedia Scientific Area Committee</a></li><li><a href="https://infoqualitylab.org/projects/risrs2020/ " target="_blank">Reducing the Inadvertent Spread of Retracted Science</a> - Paper: <a href="https://f1000research.com/documents/10-211" target="_blank">Reducing the Inadvertent Spread of Retracted Science: Shaping a Research and Implementation Agenda</a> <br /></li><li>Preprint: <a href="https://osf.io/preprints/metaarxiv/9sm4x/ " target="_blank">Towards minimum reporting standards for life scientists</a></li><li>bioRxive: <a href="https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/118356v4" target="_blank">Amending published articles: time to rethink retractions and corrections?</a></li><li>Hot topic: <a href="https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.1002165" target="_blank">The Economics of Reproducibility in Preclinical Research</a>: "An analysis of past studies indicates that the cumulative (total) prevalence of irreproducible preclinical research exceeds 50%, resulting in approximately US$28,000,000,000 (US$28B)/year spent on preclinical research that is not reproducible—in the United States alone." - Cochrane Collaboration used figure of USD170 billion (2019) here: https://www.cochrane.org/news/apply-now-cochrane-reward-prize-reducing-waste-research - This paper from 2014 reported average ~$400k costs per retracted paper, in wasted grant money... https://elifesciences.org/articles/02956 - From https://www.bmj.com/content/308/6924/283 (1994). See also Chalmers, Glasziou http://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.k4645 (2018) and http://doi.org/10.1097/AOG.0b013e3181c3020d (2009) - Elizabeth Gammon has done good work on economics of misconduct (using retracted articles), e.g. Gammon, E., & Franzini, L. (2013). Research misconduct oversight: Defining case costs. Journal of Health Care Finance, 40(2), 75–99. - her related dissertation https://mdsoar.org/handle/11603/4071 - [Jodi Schneider] been doing a scoping review of empirical literature about retracted research - there’s a bibliography (up to April 2020) here: https://infoqualitylab.org/projects/risrs2020/bibliography/ and we’re currently screening items up to Feb 2021. I’d love to share what we’ve found with anybody who wants to look more into what’s known about economics of misconduct (based on studies of retracted papers), email jodi@illinois.edu if you want to discuss!<br /></li><li>Renee Hoch mentioned a FORCE11 initiative on research data publication ethics, that’s this: https://www.force11.org/group/research-data-publishing-ethics</li><li>Example of folks working on training, in the US - National Center for Professional & Research Ethics https://ethicscenter.csl.illinois.edu </li></ul><p>I'm exhausted and heading for bed, looking forward to day two! <br /></p>Debora Weber-Wulffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16036864220530629908noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9091218950079982154.post-45401281474892532862021-03-13T15:27:00.000+01:002021-03-13T15:27:02.076+01:00Rector of Turkish university accused of plagiarism<div style="text-align: left;">There was an <a href="https://taz.de/Streik-an-Istanbuler-Universitaet/!5754582/" target="_blank">article</a> in the German <i>taz</i> this weekend (13/14 March 2021) about the rector of the Boğaziçi University in Turkey that just briefly mentioned that there have been plagiarism allegations against him. Turns out that Elizabeth Bik already has done a deep dive into the allegations in her <a href="https://scienceintegritydigest.com/2021/01/07/newly-appointed-bogazici-university-rector-accused-of-plagiarism/" target="_blank">Science Integrity Digest</a> blog. She has documented a substantial bit of plagiarism. <span style="font-size: xx-small;">Note: I didn't develop the <a href="https://people.f4.htw-berlin.de/~weberwu/simtexter/app.html" target="_blank"><i>similarity texter</i></a>, that was the work of my student Sofia Kalaidopoulou,
adapting and enhancing code published by Dick Grune. It is a great tool for documenting plagiarism, though!<br /></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">There is a brief article in <a href="https://www.duvarenglish.com/erdogan-appointed-bogazici-university-rector-melih-bulu-at-the-center-of-controversy-over-plagiarism-yet-again-news-56184" target="_blank">duvaR</a>, an English-language news site about Turkey, and the <a href="https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/plagiarism-questions-swirl-around-controversial-turkish-rector"><i>Times Higher Education</i></a> also reported on this in January 2021. </div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">The rector, of course, finds all this slander, stating that it's only about a few missing quotation marks and that citation styles have changed since he wrote his thesis.</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">Styles may change, but it has been the case for quite some time that you have to make a clear distinction between words by someone else and words from you. Just slamming a reference on the end of a paragraph or putting it in the literature list does not cut it.<br /></div>Debora Weber-Wulffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16036864220530629908noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9091218950079982154.post-38187875350111422552021-03-04T21:37:00.007+01:002021-03-29T11:44:55.615+02:00ICAI Annual Conference 2021<p>There are advantages to the pandemic. Many conferences that I would have been otherwise unable to attend in person are now online, so I acutally can go. I do miss the smalltalk (and the inside information no one would dare tell me in writing), especially over breakfast at the conference hotel or with a glass of wine at dinner. But Zoom we must, so we have to make the best of it.</p><p>Luckily, the International Center for Academic Integrity (ICAI) is making the best of Zoom by keeping the chat window open during all of the sessions. There have been a number of very lively discussions going on there! I want to report on the sessions I attended (or watched the video later). During one session I realized that my notes from a conference 11 years ago were actually quite useful for determining when a discussion had begun. That has encouraged me to do a detailed discussion of this conference!<b> </b></p><p><b>1 March 2021 </b><br /></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>Amanda Mckenzie and Camilla J. Roberts opened the pre-conference explaining what ICAI is. With over 1000 attendees, there were many first-time participants.</li><li>Amanda Mckenzie, Camilla J. Roberts, Valerie Denney, and James Orr (all board members of ICAI) then gave a short overview of what academic integrity entails. The <a href="https://www.academicintegrity.org/fundamental-values/" target="_blank">six fundamental values of academic integrity</a> that ICAI defines are a commitment to: honesty, trust, fairness, respect, responsibility, and courage. <span style="font-size: xx-small;"><br /></span></li><li>Jen Simonds, Maureen O'Brien, Kelly Lockwood, Carissa Pittsenberger, and Christian Moriarty opened the conference with a panel on project COIN, the Consortium for Online Integrity. Some of the points they made was how important it is that we clearly communicate to students what we expect from them. <br /></li><li>Since Thomas Lancaster was on parallel with my talk, I watched the video later. Surprise, he was <b>not</b> talking about contract cheating! There were many other people discussing that topic. He talked about a series of <a href="https://www.imperial.ac.uk/study/ug/i-explore/stemm-modules/" target="_blank">modules in STEMM</a> developed at Imperial College London including one on academic integrity. It surprised me that the students in his initial course did not realize that academic integrity was not just something for students, but involved all participants in teaching, learning, and research!<br /></li><li>Tomáš Foltýnek and I presented the results of our test of support tools for plagiarism detection, which we <a href="https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s41239-020-00192-4" target="_blank">published in 2020</a>. </li><li>I was fascinated by the talk by Olu Popoola on "Detecting Contract Cheating Using Investigative Linguistics." I have been doing some stylometry myself recent years, and it turns out there is actually a term for one of the strategies VroniPlag Wiki uses for finding potential plagiarism sources in doctoral dissertations: Bibliography forensics. Olu identified 164 linguistic features of text and then boiled these down to 32 that he applied to a corpus he has with 250 student papers and 75 papers known to have been written by ghostwriters. They were split into 500 word chunks and then the question asked: can it be predicted when a paper is written by a student and when it is written by a ghostwriter? Of course, he can't do this 100 % correctly, but he did boil it down to 8 significant components that I was not quick enough to write down but which he kindly has <a href="https://outliar.blog/2021/03/02/detecting-contract-cheating/" target="_blank">blogged about.</a></li><li>David Ison (with Greer Murphy and Alexis Ramsey-Tobienne) offered a workship about "Assessing Academic Integrity from a Faculty Perspective." They were asking for advice on aspects of the <a href="https://www.academicintegrity.org/survey/" target="_blank">ICAI McCabe Survey 2.0</a> which is going live soon. This is an attempt to get more current data on academic integrity issues. Don McCabe did many surveys in the past on academic integrity, he passed away in 2016 so I am glad they are continuing this work at ICAI. <br /></li><li>I thought there was a W(h)ine Bar this evening, but it is tomorrow, so I had my wine while addressing my overflowing email inbox. <br /></li></ul><p><b>2 March 2021</b><br /></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>I started the day off attending the Canadian Consortium Meeting. Since my mother was Canadian, I am officially Canadian as well and wanted to hear their perspective on academic integrity. Wow! There are four regional networks of academic integrity officers and researchers that have formed. They tend to be rather informal, exchanging war stories and best practices, and usually meeting up during the ICAI meetings. What struck me was that when presenting, the speakers would first state the indigeneous peoples upon whose lands their university resides, a so-called <a href="https://www.caut.ca/content/guide-acknowledging-first-peoples-traditional-territory G" target="_blank">land acknowledgement</a>. What a respectful way to make it clear that we realize that the lands used to belong to others, and to keep their memories alive!</li><li>David Rettinger & co held a keynote panel on the validation of the McCabe Survey 2.0. They have really gone to lengths to focus on getting the wording of the questions to be unambiguous, and to make them translatable so that this instrument can be offered in many different languages. This will enable a good comparison between countries, I really look forward to the results. I will certainly try to convince my university to a) join ICAI and b) use the survey.</li><li>Cath Ellis, Kane Murdoch and Mark Ricksen organized a session on contract cheating detection. They get a prize for dedication to the cause for being online at 4 am local time in order to present their work. They first noted that people don't tend to report contract cheating suspicions, because they think it is difficult to prove anything. They listed some of the whack-a-mole things universities do, such as blocking essay mill sites, trying to outlaw such businesses, making 2D barcode stickers with a link to the academic integrity site to stick over the stickers of the companies in the bathrooms, etc. I learned about a company called Chegg that has apparently become very popular during the pandemic. For about 15 $ a month students have access to many questions and answers, often linked to a textbook. I tried it by idling typing in the textbook I use for my class: And there they were, answers to pretty much all of the questions the textbook asks!<br />They noted some hints one can use to look for contract cheating: students using processes not taught in class, multiple similar wrong answers, sudden improvement in a student's work, alternative labeling or notation that differs from in-class notation, or identical idiosyncratic answers. What shocked me was that students also upload photos of exam questions, the answers are often back within 6-10 minutes!</li><li>So I went to the next session on Chegg with Kelly Ahuna and Loretta Frankovitch. They noted that Chegg does work with faculty to take down intellectual property and to let the universities know if students were using the site to cheat. The company will share with the university what it knows: Name, email, and IP-address of the person posing the question with a time-stamp; name, email, and IP-address of people who viewed the answers; link to the page, etc. etc. My European privacy antennae were bleeping like crazy! </li><li>Rick Robinson and Jason Openo spoke aber how reporting academic integrity violations impacts faculty relationships and in particular how this affects faculty on an emotional level.</li><li>Tonight was the W(h)ine Bar, so I poured a glass and chatted with some very nice folks! <br /></li></ul><p><b>3 March 2021</b><br /></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>Jen Simonds, Mariko L. Carson, Amy Mobley, Sharon Spencer, Wendy Williams-Sumpter, and Jillian Orfeo held a keynote panel on implementing a new academic integrity policy. I realize that American, Canadian, Australian, and UK institutions are <b>miles</b> ahead of many European institutions that I am familiar with in having already developed academic integrity policy and are now *improving* their policies! They have offices with many people who work in academic integrity, cultivating good academic practice in students and faculty alike. We have a lot to learn.</li><li>I wanted to know more about this Chegg thing, so I attended Tricia Bertram Gallant and Marilyn Derby's session on "Expanding the Conversation about Chegg". They point out that these sites offer something we don't at university: 24/7 help. Professors and tutors are not available at 3 am (well, most aren't) when the student pulling an all-nighter needs a quick answer to a question. And once you are in, you find more and more easy answers. They had some ideas for dealing with the rapid turn-around on Chegg like splitting an exam into two parts time-wise, or even not letting students go back to previous questions. I do find this pedagogically questionable, however. I don't want to stress students, I want to find out how much, if anything, they learned in my course. Tricia has started a discusson on 24/7 help on the <a href="https://live-academicintegrity.pantheonsite.io/blog/a-brief-thought/" target="_blank">ICAI Blog.</a> <br /></li><li>Jennifer Lawrence and Kylie Day from the University of New England in Australia organized a session about "Walking the Line Between Academic Integrity and Privacy with Online Exams." I was very interested in this topic, as I just don't see why we should have the power to make students show us their rooms in a 360° pan, let us listen in to what they are doing and record a video of them for the full time of the exam. Since they are primarily an online university, they say that the students know that this will be the way the exams are proctored when they join the school. And since their students are all over the world, they feel they need this. There is a proctor paid for at the company they use who is responsible for watching 8-10 students and jumping in when the monitorings system detects "suspicious behavior" or something. This is such a "1984" scenario that they are getting students used to, I find it highly unethical even if it is useful to the university. I find it troubling how easily the students seem to accept this proctoring online (according to the presenters). </li><li>Bob Ives spoke on "Applying the Hofstede Model of National Culture to Academic Integrity". Hofstede defined six cultural dimensions: Power Distance, Individidualism, Masculinity, Uncertainty Avoidance, Long-Term Orientation, Indulgence. If you want to see how different countries are seen on this scale, there's a <a href="https://www.hofstede-insights.com/country-comparison/" target="_blank">web site</a> for it. He looked at which dimensions could predict whether students are open to using paper mills, asking other students for help, or asking friends/family for help. I came in late, so I didn't catch how large his data collection was or how he sampled the data. </li><li>And then there was another networking session, mostly discussing: Chegg!<br /></li></ul><p> </p><p><b>4 March 2021</b></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>I started off the day attending the COIN discussion about technology in online instruction. I was completely shocked to understand how deeply US institutions distrust their students! They call it "being fair", but they want to use text-matching software on *everything* a student does, including what they contribute to a discussion board! And many permit the students to test a draft of their papers before they submit. That goes strongly against my understanding of what an education is about! We should be trusting our students, seeing them as beginners that we need to train - and to respect! Making people worry about "accidently" plagiarizing instead of teaching them how to write scientifically seems problematic to me. </li><li>The keynote was on Stories of Resilience and Academic Integrity during the Pandemic, with a number of participants on the panel. Students Hiranniya Yogaratnarajah and Dennis Tzavaras gave a great perspective from the studnets' point of view! Hiranniya said that students realized that professors where humans too with kids and cats and what-not. They also organized a discussion with professors about academic integrity when <b>they</b> attended college! That must have been fun. Dennis noted that he and his fellow students are so grateful to the professors for making emergency remote instruction possible despite the pandemic. The important thing for everyone is to learn to ask for help if you need it. <br />I asked about what we need to do more of, what to do less of? They answered that many students want to know how to say no to friends when they ask for help in cheating. They noted that so many students are scared to talk to their professors for some reason. We need to open up that channel of communication and include students in the academic integrity conversation. </li><li> Fiona O'Riordan and Gillian Lake from Dublin City University spoke about an academic integrity awareness compaign organized across their university. Their slides are publicly available at <a href="http://bit.ly/ICAI-4March2021">http://bit.ly/ICAI-4March2021</a>.</li><li>Zachary Dixon spoke about "Triangulating Academic Misconduct Online," digital mutations of classic misconduct. Advantages of digital misconduct: digital analysis methods can be applied. They have a system, CourseVillain, that crawls online coursework sites to find university contect and to auto-populate a "copyright infringement" forms! It's still half web application, half desktop application so it is not ready for prime time. But it is doable! They analysed how many artefacts could be found for a number of classes and found a significant amout of artefacts available onine. </li><li>Even though I know the journal and all of the people on the editorial board, I attended the session on "Publishing Your Academic Integrity Research: Advice From the Editorial
Board of the <a href="https://edintegrity.biomedcentral.com/" target="_blank">International Journal for Educational Integrity</a>": Tomáš Foltýnek, Zeenath Khan, Thomas Lancaster, Ann Rogerson, and Sarah Elaine Eaton. I posed the nasty question of why they are with SpringerNature and charging 800 € APC. The authors are paid for by their institutions, the peer reviewers, the editorial board. SpringerNature has its corporate offices in Berlin, but sits in Luxemburg for tax purposes and thus only pays a minimum tax on its earnings. None of that tax feeds back into the institutions that pay us. Scholarly publishing is broken and needs fixed, fast. I realize that one single journal can't fix the problem, but I find it important to point out this problem.</li><li>I <b>had</b> to attend Muberra Sahin, Abigail Pfeiffer, Carissa Pittsenberger, and Jessi Bullock's session on "Identifying Authenticity Issues in Student Papers Using a Plagiarism Checker" of course! They broke out into 4 sub sessions, I joined Muberra Sahin who showed us how they deal with paraphrased papers that are not directly findable with the system they use at their university. They hand-color (!) similar text, so I showed them the <a href="https://people.f4.htw-berlin.de/~weberwu/simtexter/app.html" target="_blank">similarity checker</a> that a student of mine made that might make their life easier. </li></ul>And then the conference was over - I met some new people, learned a lot of new stuff, had some great discussions: Thanks to the organizers for getting such a great virtual conference off the ground!Debora Weber-Wulffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16036864220530629908noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9091218950079982154.post-10532982130913245072021-03-01T14:18:00.004+01:002021-03-01T14:18:42.456+01:00Cleaning up my browser tabs<p>The second Corona semester has now come to an end and I seem to have about 200 tabs open in various browsers. Some of the tabs concern interesting plagiarism and academic integrity questions, so here's just a brief list:</p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>The Minister for Education and Science in the Ukraine was being <a href="https://www.ukrinform.de/rubric-other_news/3056479-regierung-untersucht-plagiatsvorwurfe-gegen-geschaftsfuhrenden-bildungsminister-schmygal.html ">investigated for plagiarism</a> (German) in his doctoral disseration as of July 2020. He is apparently also the rector of the university of technology in Tschernihi.</li><li>The <a href="https://headt.eu/">HEADT Centre</a> at Humboldt University, Berlin has a <a href="https://researcheracademy.elsevier.com/publication-process/ethics">series of recorded seminars</a> on plagiarism, image manipulation, authorship, and content ownership, sponsored by Elsevier. </li><li>An arXiv preprint "<a href="https://arxiv.org/abs/1905.03322">Forms of Plagiarism in Digital Mathematical Libraries</a>" of a conference presentation at the Intelligent Computer Mathematics - 12th International Conference, CICM 2019, Prague, Czech Republic, July 8-12, 2019</li><li>Michael V. Dougherty published a book in 2020 on "<a href="https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007%2F978-3-030-46711-1">Disguised Academic Plagiarism - A Typology and Case Studies for Researcher and Editors</a>". (Conflict of interest: I reviewed this book for Springer)</li><li>There was quite a spat over the diploma thesis and dissertation of an Austrian minister who stepped down over the incident. This led to many publications around the topic, for example one about <a href="https://apps.derstandard.de/privacywall/story/2000123342219/die-titel-industrie">degree mills</a> at <i>Der Standard</i> (in German).</li><li><span>Simone Belli (Spain), Cristian López Raventós (Mexico), and Teresa Guarda (Ecuador)</span> published a paper "Plagiarism Detection in the Classroom: Honesty and Trust Through the Urkund and Turnitin Software" in the <a href="https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007%2F978-3-030-40690-5_63">Proceedings of ICITS 2020</a>. Of course, I find it very problematic to be using the numbers returned by Turnitin and Urkund as the basis of judging anything. The numbers are meaningless and do NOT give a percentage of plagiarism but an indication of text similarity. They are NOT the same thing. They write: "Thanks to these programs, teachers have a powerful tool to assess the level of honesty of students. [...] Thanks to this tool, the teacher can easily justify a bad grade that shows the percentage of plagiarism in the work presented by the student. At the same time, it saves time spent reviewing a text that is not evaluable due to its illegitimate origin." This is wrong on so many levels, I will be talking about this on March 24, 2020, at the <a href="https://cri-conf.org/">conference</a> sponsered by the Office of Research Integrity. <br /></li><li>My university, HTW Berlin, now has <a href="https://www.htw-berlin.de/forschung/forschungsprofil/leitlinien-fuer-die-forschung/">ethical guidelines for research</a>! (in German)</li><li>A court in Berlin has <a href="https://www.faz.net/aktuell/karriere-hochschule/student-aus-berlin-wegen-plagiaten-exmatrikuliert-17212373.html">decided</a> that a Berlin university was correct in exmatriculating a student for plagiarism. Berlin universities have a policy of "two strikes and you are out", if a student is found plagiarizing twice, they are exmatriculated. In this case, the student was found to be plagiarizing once in his Bachelor's program and once in his Master's program. He felt that he should be "allowed" on plagiarism in each program, the university insisted that the programs are consecutive, and thus he is out. Need I mention that the student was studying .... ethics and philosophy?<br /></li></ul>Debora Weber-Wulffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16036864220530629908noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9091218950079982154.post-61777992585602211012021-01-10T15:35:00.004+01:002021-01-11T17:13:37.960+01:00Austrian Minister Resigns in Plagiarism Scandal<p>The Austrian Minister of Labor, Family and Youth, Christine Aschbacher, resigned January 9, 2021 in the wake of a plagiarism scandal.</p><p>There was already much talk about problems in her Master's Thesis (<a href="http://plagiatsgutachten.com"><i></i></a><i><a href="https://plagiatsgutachten.com/blog/aschbacher-muesste-magister-und-phd-grad-verlieren/">plagiatsgutachten</a>.com</i>, in German). It was then found that her freshly minted (2020) doctoral dissertation contained not only the kind of nonsense a machine translation is capable of producing, but also contained a <a href="https://plagiatsgutachten.com/blog/dissertation-aschbacher/" target="_blank">good bit of plagiarism</a>. The Austrian press had a field day on January 9, <i>Krone</i>, <i>Kurier</i>, and <i>Der Standard</i> each had big articles in print, which apparently led to her stepping down.<br /></p><p>The online versions of the various media report about her resignation: <a href="https://www.oe24.at/newsfeed/aschbacher-tritt-nach-plagiatsaffaere-zurueck/460520252" target="_blank"><i>Oe24</i></a>, <a href="https://kurier.at/politik/inland/aschbacher-ruecktritt-slowakische-uni-will-dissertation-pruefen/401151264" target="_blank"><i>Kurier</i></a>, <a href="https://orf.at/stories/3196723/" target="_blank"><i>ORF</i></a>, <a href="https://www.derstandard.de/story/2000123168900/arbeitsministerin-aschbacher-tritt-nach-plagiatsvorwuerfen-zurueck" target="_blank"><i>Der Standard</i></a>. The <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jan/09/austrian-minister-resigns-amid-plagiarism-scandal" target="_blank"><i>Guardian</i></a> has also reported on it in English. The minister denies having plagiarized, stating that she did the work "<i>nach bestem Wissen und Gewissen</i>" (using my best knowledge and conscience), a statement previously made by the German Family Minister Franziska Giffey during the plagiarism scandal surrounding <a href="https://vroniplag.wikia.org/de/wiki/Dcl" target="_blank">her doctoral thesis</a>, that is still brewing in Berlin.<br /></p><p>Aschbacher's dissertation was not submitted to an Austrian university, as one might expect, but to the Technical University Bratislava (<i>Slovenská technická univerzita</i>), in nearby Slovakia.</p><p>Why Slovakia? Well, first of all, they accept not only theses in Slovakian, but also in English and German. Then there was a small matter of an Austrian company "helping" people obtain doctoral dissertations in Slovakia (see the series of articles in the blog CausaSchavan from 2016, <i>Hütchenspiele:</i> <a href="https://causaschavan.wordpress.com/2016/03/07/huetchenspiele-teil-1-vorspiel-an-der-leine/" target="_blank">1</a> - <a href="https://causaschavan.wordpress.com/2016/03/11/huetchenspiele-teil-2-allgemeines-guatemala/" target="_blank">2</a> - <a href="https://causaschavan.wordpress.com/2016/04/04/huetchenspiele-teil-3-sturm-und-drang-in-bratislava/" target="_blank">3</a> - <a href="https://causaschavan.wordpress.com/2016/04/11/huetchenspiele-teil-4-intermezzo-auf-koh-sonstwo/" target="_blank">4 </a>- <a href="https://causaschavan.wordpress.com/2016/05/26/huetchenspiele-teil-5-arbeitsversion/" target="_blank">5</a> - <a href="https://causaschavan.wordpress.com/2016/11/01/huetchenspiele-teil-6-besonderer-einsatz/" target="_blank">6</a> - <a href="https://causaschavan.wordpress.com/2017/03/07/huetchenspiele-teil-7-ab-in-die-grube/" target="_blank">7</a>, in German). And of course the important detail that a doctoral degree granted in Slovakia can't be rescinded. Ever. No matter what. That has apparently changed from January 1, 2021.</p><p><a href="https://vroniplag.wikia.org/de/wiki/Analyse:Bratislava_Diskussion" target="_blank">VroniPlag Wiki had a look</a> at a few doctoral dissertations from Bratislava universities in 2016, 2018, and 2020 and found quite a bit of plagiarism lurking there, including another member of the 100 % Club, <a href="https://vroniplag.wikia.org/de/wiki/Jul" target="_blank">Jul</a>. </p><p>According to <i>Der Standard</i>, the doctoral thesis of Aschbacher was examined by the Slovakian state plagiarism detection system and it only found 1.5 % plagiarism. <i>Turnitin</i>, according to Stefan Weber, the author of <i>Plagiatsgutachten</i>, <a href="https://plagiatsgutachten.com/blog/dissertation-aschbacher/" target="_blank">returned 21 %</a>. But since software cannot detect translation plagiarism, one just cannot measure the "amount" of plagiarism in a document. It is only possible to find text that matches text stored in the databases the software is able to access.<br /></p><p>If you understand German (well, Austrian German), you might find the "reading" of a passage from the dissertation by <span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-1qd0xha r-ad9z0x r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0"><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-1qd0xha r-ad9z0x r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0">Hons </span>Petutschnig </span>amusing: <a href="https://twitter.com/PetutschnigHons/status/1347934502664986625">https://twitter.com/PetutschnigHons/status/1347934502664986625</a>. </p><p><b>Update</b>: My mistake, I mixed up the Slovenian system and the Slovak system. I have corrected the text, the test can be found here
(Foltýnek, T., Dlabolová, D., Anohina-Naumeca, A. <i>et al.</i> <a href="https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s41239-020-00192-4" target="_blank">Testing of support tools for plagiarism detection</a> <i>Int J Educ Technol High Educ</i> <b>17, </b>46 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1186/s41239-020-00192-4). <br /></p><p><br /></p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p>Debora Weber-Wulffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16036864220530629908noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9091218950079982154.post-6433083153634648072020-10-13T19:25:00.000+02:002020-10-13T19:25:11.358+02:00Plagiarism Detection Software: Publication, Mergers, News<p>Finally found some time for a post!</p><p>First off: The <a href="http://www.academicintegrity.eu/wp/wg-testing/" target="_blank">TeSToP working group</a> (of which I am a participant) at the <a href="http://www.academicintegrity.eu/wp/" target="_blank">European Network for Academic Integrity</a> has finally published its test of support tools for plagiarism detection. It looks at the results from various angles such as effectiveness on various European languages, one source or multi-source plagiarism, and amount of rewriting done.<br /></p><blockquote><p>Foltýnek, T., Dlabolová, D., Anohina-Naumeca, A. <i>et al.</i> Testing of support tools for plagiarism detection.
<i>Int J Educ Technol High Educ</i> <b>17, </b>46 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1186/s41239-020-00192-4<br /><br /><b>Abstract</b>:<br />There is a general belief that software must be able to easily do things
that humans find difficult. Since finding sources for plagiarism in a
text is not an easy task, there is a wide-spread expectation that it
must be simple for software to determine if a text is plagiarized or
not. Software cannot determine plagiarism, but it can work as a support
tool for identifying some text similarity that may constitute
plagiarism. But how well do the various systems work? This paper reports
on a collaborative test of 15 web-based text-matching systems that can
be used when plagiarism is suspected. It was conducted by researchers
from seven countries using test material in eight different languages,
evaluating the effectiveness of the systems on single-source and
multi-source documents. A usability examination was also performed. The
sobering results show that although some systems can indeed help
identify some plagiarized content, they clearly do not find all
plagiarism and at times also identify non-plagiarized material as
problematic.</p></blockquote><p>So just a few months later these two press releases show up:</p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li><a href="https://www.turnitin.com/press/the-turnitin-family-expands" target="_blank">Turnitin announced</a> in June 2020 that they have purchased the company Unicheck. Both systems participated in the TeSToP test. </li><li>Urkund and PlagScan, two more systems that were in the TeSToP test, <a href="https://ouriginal.com/our-story/" target="_blank">announced a merger</a> in September 2020: They will now be known as Ouriginal, and will be combining the plagiarism detection results of Urkund with the author metrics of PlagScan. </li></ul><p>These four systems just happened to be the best ones in combined coverage and usability, although none of the systems are perfect, averaging 2.5 ± 0.3 on a scale of 0 to 5. We plan on retesting in 3 years, so it will be very interesting to see how these combined systems fare then. <br /><br />In other news, the proceedings of the "Plagiarism Across Europe and Beyond 2020" (PAEB2020) that ended up being held online instead of Dubai is now ready and available for <a href="http://academicintegrity.eu/conference/paeb2020-conference-proceedings-abstract-booklet/">download</a>. <a href="http://academicintegrity.eu/conference/enai-conference-2021/" target="_blank">PAEB2021</a> will be held in Vienna, September 22-24, 2021, COVID-19 permitting. <br /></p><p>And in very sad news, academic integrity researcher Tracey Bretag from Australia passed away in October 2020. Jonathan Bailey has written an excellent obituary on his blog <a href="https://www.plagiarismtoday.com/2020/10/08/remembering-dr-tracey-bretag/" target="_blank"><i>Plagiarism Today</i></a>. I am glad that I was able to meet her many times and experience her great ideas and energy. It was a pleasure to contribute to her <a href="https://www.springer.com/gp/book/9789812870971" target="_blank"><i>Handbook of Academic Integrity</i></a>. She will be sorely missed. <br /></p>Debora Weber-Wulffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16036864220530629908noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9091218950079982154.post-39325179008836448982020-06-27T13:22:00.000+02:002020-06-27T13:22:21.405+02:00New Brazilian Minister - of Education - sported a false doctorateBrazilian and Argentine press is awash with reports on Bolsonaro's new Minister of Education, Carlos Decotelli da Silva ([<a href="https://gauchazh.clicrbs.com.br/geral/noticia/2020/06/reitor-diz-que-ministro-da-educacao-nao-tem-doutorado-em-rosario-ckbwwqu1x009j01jfsq9n8dig.html">1</a>] - [<a href="https://www.conclusion.com.ar/politica/el-rector-de-la-unr-desmintio-a-bolsonaro-por-un-doctorado-incompleto-de-su-ministro/06/2020/">2</a>] - [<a href="https://piaui.folha.uol.com.br/lupa/2020/06/26/decotelli-curriculo-reitor/">3</a>] - [<a href="https://www.lanacion.com.ar/el-mundo/el-ministro-educacion-bolsonaro-doctorado-fantasma-universidad-nid2386679">4</a>] for just a few). It seems that the CV that Bolsonaro <a href="https://twitter.com/jairbolsonaro/status/1276221599897845760">presented to the press</a> rather exaggerated in at least one item: the doctorate.<br />
<br />
Bolsonaro stated that "Professor" Decotelli held a doctorate from the Argentine University of Rosario. The rector of the University of Rosario, Franco Bartolacci, <a href="https://twitter.com/fbartolacci/status/1276563236834467841">tweeted</a> that he wanted to make it clear that Decotelli did <b>not</b> have a doctorate from <span class="tlid-translation translation" lang="en"><span class="" title="">@<a href="https://twitter.com/unroficial">unroficial</a>. According to <a href="https://gauchazh.clicrbs.com.br/geral/noticia/2020/06/reitor-diz-que-ministro-da-educacao-nao-tem-doutorado-em-rosario-ckbwwqu1x009j01jfsq9n8dig.html">Folhapress</a>, the thesis that was presented by Decotelli was assessed negatively by the dissertation committee. </span></span><br />
<br />
<span class="tlid-translation translation" lang="en"><span class="" title="">Decotelli then said that he did <b>begin</b> a doctorate program, but didn't actually finish. He has now corrected this portion of his CV. </span></span><br />
<span class="tlid-translation translation" lang="en"><span class="" title=""><br /></span></span>
<span class="tlid-translation translation" lang="en"><span class="" title="">Minister of Education. </span></span><br />
<br />Debora Weber-Wulffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16036864220530629908noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9091218950079982154.post-16185218608486089452020-03-30T22:10:00.001+02:002020-03-30T22:10:21.459+02:00Bored? How about documenting plagiarism?So you are all stuck at home with the Corona virus and have already binge-watched 15 series. How about contributing to cleaning up the academic world? Not all of us have the biomedical chops to debunk a supposed cure, like Elisabeth Bik writing in her <i>Science Integrity Digest</i>: <a href="https://scienceintegritydigest.com/2020/03/24/thoughts-on-the-gautret-et-al-paper-about-hydroxychloroquine-and-azithromycin-treatment-of-covid-19-infections/">Thoughts on the Gautret et al. paper about Hydroxychloroquine and Azithromycin treatment of COVID-19 infections.</a><br />
<br />
How about some plagiarism documentation? The German platform <a href="https://vroniplag.wikia.org/de/wiki/%C3%9Cbersicht">VroniPlag Wiki</a> that I have been working with since 2011 has so many <a href="https://vroniplag.wikia.org/de/wiki/Analyse:Home">unfinished cases</a> and I know, the platform tends to be in German. The most recent documentation is in English: A recent dissertation (2017) from the Humboldt University of Berlin, <a href="https://vroniplag.wikia.org/de/wiki/Ids">Ids</a>. From the <a href="https://vroniplag.wikia.org/de/wiki/Ids/Bericht/Summary">executive summary</a>:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
The investigation has documented extensive plagiarism in the thesis.
Over 90% of the pages of the main text contain plagiarized passages.
Over two-thirds of the main text is taken almost verbatim from other
sources, generally without any or the proper reference. The passages are
taken from around 100 mostly online sources. Among these sources are
the Wikipedia, a doctoral dissertation available online, a master's
thesis, some organizational home pages, many open access publications,
and various online religious reference works. The published PDF of the
dissertation contains many copy-and-paste artefacts such as numerous
hidden (embedded) web links that are also found as visible links in the
source material. In conclusion, the dissertation could be categorized as
an outright collage of easily obtained and quite diverse sources.
</blockquote>
Drop in to the <a href="https://webchat.freenode.net/#vroniplag">weekly chat</a> Mondays at 21:00 MESZ (UTC +2), we'll be glad to help you get started. No specialized knowledge necessary, we'll be glad to show you the ropes, and there are plenty of English-language cases still unfinished. <br />
<br />
Debora Weber-Wulffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16036864220530629908noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9091218950079982154.post-33115036513883944392020-02-24T21:32:00.000+01:002020-02-24T21:32:03.381+01:00Testing of Support Tools for Plagiarism DetectionIt's out! Our pre-print about testing support tools for plagiarism detection, often mistakenly called plagiarism-detection tools. The European Network of Academic Integrity Working Group <a href="http://www.academicintegrity.eu/wp/wg-testing/">TeSToP</a> worked in 2018 and 2019 to test 15 software systems in eight different languages. Of course, everything has changed since then, the software people let us know, but whatever: here's the pre-print, we have submitted to a journal.<br />
<br />
<span class="arxivid"><a href="https://arxiv.org/abs/2002.04279">arXiv:2002.04279</a> [cs.DL]</span><br /><span class="arxivid"></span><br />
<h4 class="title mathjax">
Testing of Support Tools for Plagiarism Detection</h4>
<div class="authors">
<a href="https://arxiv.org/search/cs?searchtype=author&query=Folt%C3%BDnek%2C+T">Tomáš Foltýnek</a>, <a href="https://arxiv.org/search/cs?searchtype=author&query=Dlabolov%C3%A1%2C+D">Dita Dlabolová</a>, <a href="https://arxiv.org/search/cs?searchtype=author&query=Anohina-Naumeca%2C+A">Alla Anohina-Naumeca</a>, <a href="https://arxiv.org/search/cs?searchtype=author&query=Raz%C4%B1%2C+S">Salim Razı</a>, <a href="https://arxiv.org/search/cs?searchtype=author&query=Kravjar%2C+J">Július Kravjar</a>, <a href="https://arxiv.org/search/cs?searchtype=author&query=Kamzola%2C+L">Laima Kamzola</a>, <a href="https://arxiv.org/search/cs?searchtype=author&query=Guerrero-Dib%2C+J">Jean Guerrero-Dib</a>, <a href="https://arxiv.org/search/cs?searchtype=author&query=%C3%87elik%2C+%C3%96">Özgür Çelik</a>, <a href="https://arxiv.org/search/cs?searchtype=author&query=Weber-Wulff%2C+D">Debora Weber-Wulff</a></div>
<div class="authors">
</div>
<div class="authors">
There is a general belief that software must be able to easily do things that
humans find difficult. Since finding sources for plagiarism in a text is not an
easy task, there is a wide-spread expectation that it must be simple for
software to determine if a text is plagiarized or not. Software cannot
determine plagiarism, but it can work as a support tool for identifying some
text similarity that may constitute plagiarism. But how well do the various
systems work? This paper reports on a collaborative test of 15 web-based
text-matching systems that can be used when plagiarism is suspected. It was
conducted by researchers from seven countries using test material in eight
different languages, evaluating the effectiveness of the systems on
single-source and multi-source documents. A usability examination was also
performed. The sobering results show that although some systems can indeed help
identify some plagiarized content, they clearly do not find all plagiarism and
at times also identify non-plagiarized material as problematic.
</div>
Debora Weber-Wulffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16036864220530629908noreply@blogger.com0