Tuesday, May 15, 2018

Plagiarism allegations in Finland

According to the Helsinki Times, there is a plagiarism scandal surrounding Laura Huhtasaari, a politician (the deputy chairperson of the Finns Party) who ran an unsuccessful campaign to become president of Finland in January 2018. The public broadcasting network YLE published a report on May 9, 2018 about plagiarism in her Master's thesis that includes some documentation (in Finnish). Two external examiners looked at the thesis on behalf of YLE and both commented on the plagiarism, according to the Helsinki Times. They quote Huhtasaari as stating that she was only following instructions given on how to write a thesis, and that she feels that this is a witch-hunt against her personally that is going on.

According to what I gather from the Google translation of the YLE article, the rector has stated after a previous investigation in January that they will not be withdrawing the degree, as only about 10 % of the literature part of her thesis was plagiarized.  YLE has investigated further and found 30 % of the thesis to be affected. This demonstrates once again, that one can never state a "percentage" of a thesis that is affected: there can always be more, because a source has not yet been found. And any software-based investigation can also contain false positives, inflating a value. 

YLE notes that the plagiarism accusations first appeared in the blog of a liberal Finnish politician, Tuomas Tiainen, in January 2018.



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