Christmas Links

I seem to be getting more and more links I can't adequately deal with, but which I don't want to withhold from readers. So here is some Christmas reading:

• The "Neurosceptic" blog of Discover Magazine has a piece about The Strange Case of “Publication Integrity and Ethics” which details a number of integrity and ethics questions around the supposed new journal.
• The Times Higher Education has a piece on post-publication peer-review that describes more of the chilling consequences that occur when lawyers meddle with scientific inquiry. Physics professor Philip Moriarty is quoted with: “If you are publicly funded and you put your research into the public domain but no one can criticise you for it without facing legal proceedings, that seems to me to be a very badly damaged system.” Exactly.
• Retraction Watch obtained a $400.000 grant to set up a retractions database! This is great news, I hope that the database can be used to calculate a Retraction Index, that is, how many retractions per article published a journal has, and perhaps how long did it take for the retractions to take place after the initial information of the journal.
• Bernd Kramer recently published a book in German about obtaining a doctorate in Germany without doing the work ("Der schnellste Weg zum Doktortitel. Warum selbst recherchieren, warum selbst schreiben, wenn's auch anders geht?"). The cover is a horrible stock photo, but the book makes quite interesting reading. Kramer gave an interview in Deutschlandradio in November 2014 about it.
• Reports of fake peer reviews are increasing. Vox has an article about 110 papers retracted in the past two years on account of faking peer reviews. Retraction Watch reported on SAGE publishers retracting 60 papers from just one journal for this reason. The Minister of Education in Taiwan, Wei-ling Chiang, had been added to some of these papers as a co-author (he says without his knowledge). He stepped down because of the scandal in July 2014, according to IEEE Spectrum. 
• Taipeh Times reported in August of 2013 that Andrew Yang, the former Taiwanese Minister of National Defense was forced to resign in a plagiarism scandal a few days after taking office. He had published a book in 2007 that friends had ghostwritten for him. They had, however, plagiarized large parts of the book.
• The University of Nevada in Las Vegas fired an English professor for "serial plagiarism." The student newspaper, The Rebel Yell, also reports on the case.
• End of November 2014 the Vice Chancellor of Delhi University in India was jailed and released on account of plagiarism.
• There is a nasty case of plagiarism reported from early 2014 at the Chicago State University. The dissertation of the Senior Vice President and Provost of the university was being investigated, and the university confirmed to press that they were doing so. She sued the university for violating privacy laws, stating that she did not plagiarize [1]. There exist documentations of plagiarism in her dissertation in a blog ([2] - [3] - [4] - [5] - [6]). Despite the documentation, the University of Illinois, Chicago has ruled that her dissertation is not a plagiarism ([7]). The Chicago Tribune had three plagiarism experts (Tricia Bertram Gallant, Teddi Fishman, and Daniel Wueste look at the thesis ([8]). All three find the thesis problematic. The question is, are the students to be held to a different standard than the person who is enforcing that academic standard? A thorny question.

Diverse links

Here are some links that need documenting:

• Journal Accepts Paper Reading “Get Me Off Your F[...] Mailing List”
  Not only was the paper plagiarized and still had the names of the original authors, it should have been abundantly clear that this was not an academic paper worthy of publication. That did not stop the International Journal of Advanced Computer Technology (already listed on Jeffrey Beale's list of predatory publishers) from accepting this paper found "excellent" by the peer reviewers that was to be published soon after receipt of the handling fee of $ 150...
• Spears: How my fake science paper earned me a shot at an editor's job
  Same song, second verse. Who cares who you are or if you are a plagiarist, just send the review as soon as possible, okay? And would you like to be an editor?
• A case of plagiarism by a professor of philosophy at the University of Tehran, Iran is widely discussed.  
• In Spain, a politician was found to have plagiarized in his dissertation ( [Levante EMV 1 - 2 ] - [Valencia Plaza])  as well as a professor [abc.es].
• A high-ranking Swiss public official in the Bundesamt für Kultur, now retired, pretended to have a doctorate for over 30 years. The Tagesanzeiger wonders if, since he was the person deciding which institutions would get money, no one cared.
• Back in October there was a bit of kerfluffle at the LMU in Munich, Germany, about an applicant for a professorship said to have plagiarized his application lecture. 
• Retraction Watch found this gem of a journal: "Article which was reviewed & approved by EB member with lowest plagiarism will only be allow to published." Seems rather similar to a Springer journal recently encountered: "The Protein Journal will reject without consideration any submission that has a similarity score of 45% or more."
• And finally, another highlight from Retraction Watch about a professor plagiarizing from his grad students in Canada. The professor defends his actions by publicly insulting the grad student.

There will be more, I'm afraid, to come. 

A visit to the Academy

The Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities invited me to speak this past week at a non-public meeting about plagiarism detection software for the working group Zitat und Paraphrase (Quotation and Paraphrase). I was a bit leery of speaking there, as some of the members of the group have publicly demonstrated a quite problematic interpretation of plagiarism as far as it concerned the dissertation of one particular person (see [1] - [2] - [3] for detailed online articles in German about this particular case, and a recent German essay [4] that compares this plagiarism case with one from the early 90s).

Since I do enjoy a good discussion, I agreed to speak. Unfortunately, the meeting was not open to the public, so I am only able to repeat the points of my presentation here, not the ensuing discussion. As it turned out, there were not many members of the group there, and none of the vociferous members I had been expecting.

I first made it exceedingly clear that VroniPlag Wiki is not a machine or software of any sort, but an academic community in which I take part. After discussing Teddi Fishman's definition of plagiarism, which I would extend to include "without properly attributing the work" in point 3 and removing point 5 entirely, I gave a few examples of some of the different forms of plagiarism. These were followed by screenshots of a few plagiarism detection systems that have complicated reports or report essentially meaningless numbers.

One important point that is often overlooked when using such systems is that they all suffer from both false positives as well as false negatives: This is an inherent problem with attempting to determine plagiarism using software. Quotations are difficult to detect reliably, especially if they are only indented; literature references should of course be similar to references used in other papers; and some systems begin to mark anything longer than 6 or 7 words as text similarity. All of these can be the source of a false positive, in addition to simple programming errors, which I have also seen. The other side of the coin is the false negatives, and they are quite simple to understand: If the software does not have access to a source, it will not be able to determine that it is indeed a source. Translated text, for example, is next to impossible to identify with software, as well as non-digitized content.

I then discussed the small, general tools that can be used to manually detect and document plagiarism. After a few examples of documented plagiarism from historic cases and from current cases at VroniPlag Wiki, I closed by asking some ethical questions that I include in my forthcoming chapter on plagiarism detection software for the "Handbook of Academic Integrity":

• Is it necessary to find all the plagiarism in a text?
• Is it ethical for a university to use plagiarism detection software?
• Is it ethical for a university to use plagiarism detection software as a formative device?
• Is it ethical for a university to offer plagiarism detection software for teachers to use?
• Is it ethical for a university to offer plagiarism detection software for researchers to use?

We had a good discussion afterwards – unfortunately, there was no time to linger on and talk further over a cup of coffee. I do hope that those who were present can serve as multiplicators, explaining to their peers that there is no magic silver bullet software for finding plagiarism, just a number of useful tools, large and small, that all incur a cost of time and effort to use.

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[1] Causa Schavan (n.d.) Articles about "Zitat und Paraphrase." [Blog]. Retrieved December 1, 2014, from https://causaschavan.wordpress.com/?s=Zitat+und+Paraphrase
[2] Erbloggtes. (n.d.) Articles about "Zitat und Paraphrase." [Blog]. Retrieved December 1, 2014, from https://erbloggtes.wordpress.com/?s=Zitat+und+Paraphrase
[3] Dannemann, G. (2013, March 3). Die Ex-Ministerin und ihre Unterstützer: Schavanzentrisches Weltbild. Retrieved December 1, 2014, from http://www.tagesspiegel.de/wissen/die-ex-ministerin-und-ihre-unterstuetzer-schavanzentrisches-weltbild/7863836.html
[4] Ebert, T. (2014). Sag mir, wie hältst Du es mit dem Plagiat? Von Elisabeth Ströker zu Annette Schavan. Merkur, 68(12), 1070–1080.