Romanian Education Minister Found to have Plagiarized

The second Romanian politician to be found having plagiarized is Ecaterina Andronescu, the Minster of -- yup -- Education. A Romanian documentation site, http://integru.org/6, has published a documentation in English about a conference paper that Andronescu co-authored with Aurelia Cristina Nechifor in 2003. Andronescu lists the paper in her official CV.

The paper is said to plagiarize three other works and to falsify data. It was published while Andronescu was Minster of Research and Dean of the Faculty of Industrial Chemistry at the Polytechnic University in Bucharest.

Andronescu had declared earlier this week that the plagiarism found in the dissertation of the head of state, Victor Ponta, did not lead to her rescinding his doctorate because at the time that he wrote the dissertation -- also 2003 -- it was okay to write like that, according to the German daily newspaper FAZ.  Romanian intellectuals are loudly protesting this, stating correctly that proper citation techniques was not invented in 2003 but has been around for quite some time.

The Integru.org platform is run by an anonymous group of intellectuals in Romania and documents plagiarism and scientific misconduct. It is not run like the VroniPlag Wiki in Germany, but is a closed system documenting the cases and then including the opinions of foreign researchers from the field on each individual case. This case is the sixth case that they have published.