This is a guest post by one of the members of the Russian plagiarism documentation group Dissernet.
Fake Academic Degrees in Russia
By Andrei Rostovtsev
dissernet@gmail.com
The practice
of awarding fake academic degrees to politicians, businessmen, doctors in
clinics, professors in universities, and teachers in schools, that is, to all
those who wish to use their new academic titles to step onto a faster career
route, is widely accepted in Russia. The academic titles are awarded throughout
the country. This business is based on the production of falsified
dissertations. In early 2013 a group of five scientists and journalists
established a social network called “Dissernet”. The Dissernet is a volunteer-effort
free association aimed at making fraud and trickery in the awarding of academic
titles transparent and well-known to the public. By 2016, Dissernet activists
have identified more than 5000 plagiarized and falsified dissertations. In
falsified dissertations not only is the text copied, but also the numerical
data in it are assigned to a different year or region (in economics, law, and
sociology), or to a different disease and treatment (in medicine), see discussion
below. Over 1000 cases of such dissertations are documented on the website of
the Dissernet (
www.dissernet.org). Statistical data collected by the Dissernet yield
a number of conclusions discussed below.
First of
all, there is an important difference between the ways scientific writings are plagiarized
in Russia and in the Western counties. In the West, the plagiarism is often associated
with an intentional incorporation of other people’s texts or ideas in one’s own
scientific research. That is probably why the ‘western style’ can involve many intricate
small-scale mosaic plagiarisms intentionally placed in the original text. Yet
in Russia, most often Dissernet deals with authors who have never done research
and might have never even seen their dissertation texts at all. Such
‘dissertations’ are usually nothing else but a mere compilation of other
people’s texts glued one paragraph after another in a haphazard way, something
Weber-Wulff calls “shake & paste” [1].
In extreme
cases the new text is just an older dissertation with a title page changed to
reflect the new candidate. Sometimes the new candidate changes the subject of
his or her ‘research’ too—usually by contextually substituting some terms throughout
the whole text. For example, one notorious ‘scholar’ transformed a dissertation
about the confectionary industry into a dissertation about the beef-and-dairy
industry by substituting ‘dark chocolate’ with ‘homegrown beef,’ ‘white
chocolate’ with ‘imported beef,’ and ‘nut chocolate’ with ‘bone-in beef ’ (see
http://www.dissernet.org/expertise/igoshin.htm and
http://cook.livejournal.com/202638.html,
in Russian). In the
meantime, all the data, tables, pictures, and spelling remained unchanged.
Sometimes such authors also ‘update’ the dating of the statistics they refer
to, thus making their ‘research’ seem to have been done more recently.
Detection of thousands of fraudulent dissertations by the Dissernet is mainly the result
of a unique technology used. In Russia, along with the dissertation a so-called
avtoreferat must be made publically
available before the Ph.D. defense. The
avtoreferat
consists of a shortened dissertation content (usually 20–30 pages) and the main
research results. Importantly, the texts of the
avtoreferats are indexed by public search engines (such as Google
or Yandex). The dissertation itself is not usually indexed, however. But if the
dissertation contains large fragments of plagiarized text, as described above,
its
avtoreferat would also have text
coinciding with earlier works. The specific Dissernet software is able to pick
up the
avtoreferats one by one and takes
advantage of the search engines indices to look for textual coincidences within
the whole publicly available corpus of Russian digitized texts, including texts
of other
avtoreferats. This program
runs 24 hours a day and 7 days a week. Thus a few hundred thousand dissertations
have been automatically checked. Furthermore, Dissernet takes advantage of the
common practice of a chain-like fraudulent dissertation production. As soon as
a rampant plagiarism is detected in one dissertation, it is very likely to be detected
as well in other dissertations defended by the same dissertation council or
with the same supervisor. This happens because the producers of fake
dissertations in Russia work in a conveyor-belt mode using very limited sets of
scientific texts as sources. By focusing on practically totally plagiarized
texts, the Dissernet deals only with a small tip of scientific fraud in Russia.
But even so, in problematic fields such as economics and law, about 3 % of
dissertations contain large-scale plagiarism. In pedagogy this fraction is a
bit higher, but still below 6 %.
Such large-scale
dissertation fraud in Russia is a result of corruption that has paralyzed the
whole system of awarding academic degrees: from dissertation councils
established by the leading universities, where the PhDs are awarded, through
the
Higher Attestation Commission—the agency which coordinates and
validates the awarding of academic degrees—and finally, what is also very important,
to editorial boards of scientific journals, where scientific papers of the prospective
doctoral candidates have to be published prior the defense. It is obvious that
if no real research is done, then no relevant scientific papers could be published
by such research. Clear affiliations of Russian scientific journals with the fake
dissertation industry run by universities (more exactly, certain dissertation
councils) have also been traced by the Dissernet. Those three cornerstones (dissertation councils, the Higher Attestation
Commission, and journal editorial boards) are the necessary working parts of
the mechanism running the conveyor belts of the academic fraud in Russia. Very
often the same persons serve in these three cornerstone bodies at the same
time.
 |
| Figure
1. Statistics on false dissertations broken down by scientific fields.
(Dissernet data)
|
Figure 1
shows statistics of fraudulent candidate (Ph.D.) degrees awarded in different
scientific fields based on the present Dissernet data (
n=5215). As one can see, the most problematic areas are economics,
pedagogy, and law. These same areas are the most problematic ones in the everyday
(non-academic) life of Russians as well. In my view, this correlation is not
accidental. The academic community naturally erects a barrier in the way of fake
sciences and mythifications, which could otherwise define a climate for the
life of whole society. In the areas, where the academic community is strong
enough to resist the fraudulent practice of awarding fake academic degrees, the
entire non-academic society is not driven by the false ideas. In addition, according
to SCOPUS, the proportion of fake dissertations in each scientific field is
inversely proportional to Russia’s international input in these disciplines [2].
 |
Figure
2. Geographic location of the major
universities producing fake dissertations.
Relative contributions into the
total productivity for Moscow
and St.-Petersburg are given in percentages.
|
Figure 2
presents the geographic locations of universities that award the fake degrees according
the present Dissernet statistics. Obviously, Moscow and Saint Petersburg play
the most important role as they are among the largest cities. Other cities and
towns fall behind. The scale of falsifications in the Caucasus region is
relatively large but on the whole, their share in national statistics isn’t
that high. This means the phenomenon of scientific fraud in Russia is not a marginal
one. It is not localized somewhere on the outskirts of the country. Today it
plays a role of an institution that is well integrated into the contemporary
Russian state. Why do we qualify this phenomenon as institutional rather than a
subject to free market?
Several
recent laws and decrees protect owners of falsified academic degrees. The most
important one (see
http://www.rg.ru/2013/10/01/stepen-site-dok.html
and
http://www.saveras.ru/archives/6450) makes it impossible to strip a
person of an academic degree if its defense took place before 2011. The
authorities are quite reluctant to revoke the fake academic degrees, even if
the defense has happened after 2011. The reactions from those accused of
plagiarism by Dissernet varies from ignoring it, through calling it nonsense
and accusations that it is politically motivated, to accusing Dissernet members
of unprofessionalism and arguing that only appropriate dissertation councils have
the right to assess the quality of dissertations (E. Denisova-Schmidt, personal
communication). This point of view is broadly supported by state-owned mass
media. Still, as of today, the Dissernet has managed to convince dissertation
councils to revoke about one hundred fake academic degrees.
Last but
not least, Dissernet investigations are relevant not only for an assessment of
the Russian fraudulent academic world. Most importantly, the Dissernet provides
a unique view on the deterioration of some institution’s reputations in Russia.
In order to illustrate this point, several reference groups may be considered:
members of the Russian Academy of Science (RAS), directors of Moscow’s primary
and secondary schools, chancellors of Russian universities, regional governors,
and members of the State Duma. Members of each group are selected if they have
been awarded an academic degree during the last 15 years. Dissernet did not
detect any falsified dissertation by the RAS members. Of 141 dissertations
defended by directors of Moscow’s primary and secondary schools, 23 satisfied
the Dissernet criteria for largely plagiarized texts. This amounts to 16 %—a
rate which is more than three times higher than the probability of finding
large-scale plagiarism in a random pedagogical dissertation.
 |
| Figure 3. Breakdown of fake dissertations by occupation:
a reputation crisis.
|
This
implies a silent mechanism at work selecting and supporting those who are prone
to falsifications. The next group is chancellors of Russian universities, which
has shown an even higher fraction of 21 %. Of that, one third of such
universities are in Moscow. The proportion of politicians representing regional
governors and members of the State Duma is even higher, reaching 41 % for the
latter. In short, Dissernet performs a sort of a litmus test, identifying those
dissertations prone to fraud and trickery, depending on the circumstances, and demonstrates
the reputation crisis in Russia. This is illustrated in Figure 3. Why are the authorities,
which are charged with larger responsibilities, subject to this stronger negative
selection? This question will have to be
answered by sociologists rather than Dissernet.
Despite aggressive
state politics directed at the Dissernet, this public initiative has gained a
good reputation and respect in Russian society in general, as evidenced by
several awards and the fact that the name itself has become a meme.
[1] Weber-Wulff, D. (2014). False Feathers: A
Perspective on Academic Plagiarism. Heidelberg, Berlin: Springer.
[2] Rostovtsev, A. (2015). Some Observations on the Subject of Dissertation Fraud in Russia. HERB: Higher Education in Russia and Beyond, 3(5), 17–18. Available at https://herb.hse.ru/data/2015/09/22/1075563638/HERB_05_view.pdf
Posts
