News from around the world

Again, just a few links to interesting topics from around the world.

• There has been a case of a Belgian sociologist at the KU Leuven festering since 2017, according to Google Translate's version of a Dutch Wikipedia article. He has apparently re-published papers of other researchers and published work of co-workers that was not yet published. According to an article in De Standaard from 23 April 2019, he resigned his position as head of the "Center for Political Science" in 2018, but remains a full professor at the university.
• The Finnish National Board on Research Integrity (TENK) has finally investigated cases of academic misconduct, mostly plagiarism, in 27 master't theses from universities of applied sciences, according to YLE, the Finnish broadcasting body. Most of them contained clear plagiarism. Dr. Erja Moore (author of the blog "Plagiointitutkija" in Finnish) chose the theses more or less at random from the open access thesis repository, investigated them, prepared documentation, and informed the universities in question of the problems. TENK Secretary General Sanna Kaisa Spoof has stated that the situation is serious and worrying. Dr. Moore will be presenting her results at the ENAI (European Network for Academic Integrity) "Plagiarism Across Europe and Beyond" Conference in Vilnius, Lithuania, June 19-21, 2019.
• VroniPlag Wiki just published a documentation (in German) of text parallels found in the doctoral dissertation of the current German Federal Minister for Family Affairs, Senior Citizens, Women and Youth, Franziska Giffey. The press has been reporting on this since they "discovered" the work-in-progress in February 2019.

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.

Plagiointitutkija

I am very happy to introduce you to another plagiarism researcher (and that is what  Plagiointitutkija means in Finnish), Erja Moore. She is a sociologist and principle lecturer at the North Karelia University of Applied Sciences.

She has been blogging about plagiarism in Finnish since 2008, and she also has a portal about plagiarism in Finnish, similar to my own in German. Apparently, education officials in Finland have decided that plagiarism is a non-problem. She was also at the conference in 2008 in England on plagiarism that I also attended (but we somehow didn't meet up there) and presented a paper on the situation in Finland  (in English).

She has also just blogged about my blog, I'm afraid that I don't understand more than the my name, the word for English (Englanniksi) and the word for German (Saksan). But I am very happy that more and more people are reporting on plagiarism online!