Plagiarism around the world

I've just realized that I didn't get the promised ENAI posts done in June. I'll see if I can scratch something together. In the meantime, a few plagiarism links I've got saved in tabs:

• Plagiarism in work of departing Dean Dymph van den Boom
  The University of Amsterdam reported in June 2019 that an interim dean's public address and parts of her thesis have been found to have been plagiarized. 
• Kenyatta University Revokes Lecturers PhD For Cheating
  A recent PhD grantee who was lecturing at Kenyatta University was found to have plagiarized the thesis of a Nigerian don. It appears that the don himself discovered the plagiarism. 
• The Neue Zürcher Zeitung reports (in German) that the Serbian Minister of Finance is charged with plagiarism in his dissertation granted by the University of Belgrade. The university was reluctant to deal with the situation, but the plagiarism is apparently so clear that students have been protesting, insisting that the university take up a proper investigation and publish the secret report. The university has reluctantly agreed to a November 4, 2019 date of publication. The minister himself, the NZZ wryly notes, doesn't seem to care. He participated in the Berlin Marathon last week, putting down his name as "Dr. Mali".
• "Inspiration" or plagiarism? Journal du Geek reports (in French). Apparently, a French comedian is using copyright to take down video reports on what some say is plagiarism, but he insists is just inspiration or "the spirit of the times". 

I gave a talk at the Leibniz Institute's PhD Network Day in Potsdam last week and spoke with a great bunch of PhDs about power hierarchies and academic misconduct. Two students from the Research Center Borstel told me that the institution has really gotten proactive about good academic conduct after the scandals there (see 1 - 2 - 3). They have orientation for new PhDs on good academic conduct, and insist on half-yearly reviews. They have a published plan, but I can only find it in German, their web site doesn't properly redirect to the translated pages.

Update: Just as I finished, another one dropped in by way of ENAI (European Network of Academic Integrity): Mr. Rinat Maratovich Iskakov has published a documentation that demonstrates that the dissertation of the Vice Minister of Education and Science of Kazakhstan is plagiarized The analysis is published on a Google Docs document. The first half of the document is the original and the second half is in English, translated by Ali Tahmazov. Apparently, the Polish plagiarism detection software StrikePlagiarism was used:

Анализ проверки диссертационной работы Жакыповой Ф.Н. на соискание ученой степени доктора экономических наук проведено с помощью системы StrikePlagiarism компании Plagiat.pl

Various Links

I must have about a dozen tabs open with things I want to post, but no time to comment. So here goes, a May Day collection:

• Nature reported back in February 2018 about researchers in South Korea helping their children or underage relatives to get into university by adding them as co-authors to their papers. 
• Prishtina Insight published a detailed article in February 2018 in English about a VroniPlag Wiki case (Ama) involving a professor from Kosovo who had studied in Bremen.  
• The Guardian reports in April 2018 a massive increase in cheating at university. I do assume that this is due to better reporting, not necessarily an increase in cheating per se. 
• The court case that was filed by Lm (a VroniPlag Wiki case) against the University of Hanover has finally finished with a judgement that the university was within its rights to rescind the doctorate (in German). Another judgement (in German) in another case of a German university rescinding a doctorate for plagiarism (Aeh) also found the university to be within their rights. One would think that with the dozen or so judgements in favor of the universities, people would think twice about filing suit.
• Retraction Watch published an interview with Ana Marušić about "Corrected and Republished Articles".
• In February 2018, a judge in Croatia sued the national ethics panel after it found him to have plagiarizen in his doctoral thesis from 2013, according to Science.
• The Belgian de Standaard published an article in March 2018 (in Dutch) about the Louven university being forced to retract publications that had seen a bit too much of Photoshop 
• The World Conference on Research Integrity 2019 will be held in Hong Kong.  
• A blog article in French at Rédaction Médicale et Scientifique writes about a couple of French cases of academic misconduct and another article there is about salami slicing.

Things leftover in tabs from 2016

Happy New Year!

I seem to have collected quite a number of interesting stories that are hanging around in my browser tabs. Let me just document some of them here.

• Serays Maouche reports in December 2016 in Mediapart in France about a plagiarism case that involves a person who is professor at the École Centrale Paris and a director at the Atomic Energy Commission. It involves plagiarism in a number of texts, among them a biography of Einstein. The institutions involved have nothing to say on the matters. Ms. Maouche closes with the question "Comment sanctionner des étudiants pour plagiat, si on accepte cette fraude académique pour des directeurs et des académiciens ?" (How can we sanction students for plagiarim when this academic misconduct is accepted by the administrations and academics?)
• It was reported be the Guardian in November that the results of one portion of the ACT exam, one used by US-American universities to determine admission for foreign students, has been invalidated for Asia-Pacific students. No details were available. 
• In Spain, el diario reported on November 21 and  November 23 about a plagiarism case involving the rector of a Spanish university. The Google translate version is not very clear, so I don't want to try and summarize it here, just give the links. 
• In October the Chinese Global Times wrote about a report in the "Southern Weekly" about Chinese scientists and medical practioners paying journals to publish ghostwritten articles so that they can obtain promotions. Springer has since retracted 64 publications and BioMed Central 43 for faking peer reviews. 
• Radio Free Asia reported on September 21, 2016 that students in Laos had to retake college entrance exams after more than 100 students obtained a perfect score on the social sciences part of the exam. Students are angry, as they will again have to incur traveling expenses in order to retake the exam.
• Donald McCabe, a prolific researcher from Rutgers Business School who focused on determining how prevalent academic misconduct is amongst pupils and students worldwide and on the use of academic honor codes to prevent misconduct, passed away at age 72 on Sept. 17, 2016. I was lucky to get to meet Don in 2012 when he gave a talk at our university and we drove together down to Bielefeld for a conference. He will be sorely missed.
• The Moscow Times reported on September 8, 2016 that Russian education officials  "have reportedly developed draft legislation that would make it possible to revoke a person's academic doctorate only after a copyright ruling by a court has come into effect. " Although copyright and plagiarism or other forms of academic misconduct have little to do with each other, this is apparently in response to the documentation work of Dissernet, who have documented plagiarism in hundreds of dissertations, among them many submitted by politicians to Russian universities. 
• There was a flurry of publications about paper mills and the problem of contract cheating, that is, students paying someone else to do their work for them. In the UK the Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education published a report on contract cheating in August. The chief operations officer at an essay mill then wrote a defense of his industry for the Times Higher Education which sparked quite a debate. Tricia Bertram Gallant, also writing in the THE, called on universities to fight contract cheating by openly discussing the topic with students. October 19 was declared the "International Day of Action Against Contract Cheating" and a number of institutions worldwide participated. 
• The Age reported in October about an inside job at the University of Melbourne in Australia where grades on a manually graded exam was changed after grading with a red pen by someone who had access to the exam papers. The university was unable to determine who was responsible for the change.
• Joanna Williams reported in June in the Times Higer Education about a survey on research misconduct in the UK.
• In July 2016 the USA issued a patent (US9389852) to Indian researchers on a method for determining "plagiarism" in program code from Design Patterns. That Design Patterns were explicitly meant to be copied appears to have escaped the Patent Office. 
• The blog iPensatori analyzed how Google Scholar gets filled up with junk.
• The Office of Research Integrity has put up some infographics on their site about research integrity. They also have a guide on avoiding self-plagiarism.
• And while I am on the subject, the 5th World Conference on Research Integrity will be held from May 28-31, 2017, in Amsterdam (I am on the program committee). The conference proceedings from the previous conference is available here. There will also be the 3rd International Conference Plagiarism In Europe and Beyond from May 24-25 in Brno, Czech Republic.  And no, there are no direct flights Brno-Amsterdam.
• On March 18, 2016 the German DFG announced sanctions against an unnamed researcher who will be barred from applying for financing for three years.

The Phantom Degree

The French Minister of Higher Education and Research, Geneviève Fioraso, turns out only to have an English degree and not one in English and Business, as Mediapart (paywall), Le Monde, and  Le Figaro report.

According to Fioraso, somehow "Who's Who in France" mixed up her degrees, and made a double degree in English and in Business out of an English degree with an "option" on Business (screenshot of the entry). She is taking steps to correct this information, she says. Who's Who in France advertises that they verify the degrees from the grand écoles, which does make sense as the Wikipedia entries are free to read, so it would be quite interesting to see how this information came to be in their databases. One must pay 6 € in order to view the entry, however, so I'll stick with the screenshot above.

The government was quick to assure the general public that the minister was chosen for all the great things she has done and not on the basis of a specific degree. Yes, we've heard that before in Germany, in connection with plagiarism cases.

French journalism school executive suspended during plagiarism investigation

The Guardian reports that Agnès Chauveau, an executive from a journalism school in Paris, has been suspended for plagiarizing in columns that she published for the French-language web site Le Huffington Post.

The columns in question have been updated with a notice that the references have now been fixed:

Mise à jour: Ce billet est la reprise d'une chronique faite et lue chaque dimanche sur France Culture. Certaines références manquaient dès la version orale. Elles ont été ajoutées ici dès que ces erreurs ont été signalées afin que les citations et les sources apparaissent plus clairement.

The Institute of Political Sciences has launched an inquiry and suspended her during the inquiry.

Chauveau is said to have lifted material from various online and printed publications for her weekly radio show, then re-used the texts for her online column. Chauveau is quoted as having said that she had “forgotten to cite certain papers, but never on purpose”, and insisted: “I’ve rectified this each time there’s been a problem.” According to the Guardian, she is quoted as not having had the time "to cite all of her sources on the radio.”

In French media, there are articles in Liberation (with the quotations in French: «J’oublie de citer certains papiers mais ce n’est jamais volontaire et je rectifierai chaque fois que ça pose problème.» Elle a aussi expliqué qu’elle n’avait «pas le temps de citer à l’antenne toutes [ses] sources».) and Le Monde. 

News links

I have some plagiarism news links floating around that need recording:

• The Moscow Times have an interesting article about Dissernet, the Russian group of researchers documenting plagiarism in dissertations of politicians and academics in Russia.
• According to Le Figaro and Liberation, the vice-president of the University of Grenoble in France, Dominique Rigaux,  has been accused of plagiarism and has left her post. The documentation of the plagiarism was done by Michelle Bergadaà, a French-speaking plagiarism researcher from the Swiss University of Geneva. 
• VroniPlag Wiki has currently documented plagiarism in 23 doctoral dissertations in medicine from the University of Münster and 14 from the renowned Charité institution in Berlin. There are a number of theses accepted in forensic medicine that borrow heavily from earlier theses submitted to the same committee and under the direction of the same advisor:
  
  
  
  Both the University of Münster and the Charité have stated that they have begun investigations. But since there are still numerous cases (not only in medicine) from both institutions that are still open one or two years later, this may take some time to clear up. 

Short news

I again have a pile of important links that need documenting...

• Nature reports on a system developed by French computer scientist Cyril Labbé that can be used to detect published papers that were generated by SciGen. IEEE and Springer had to admit that they had published not one, not two but at least 120 papers that were utter nonsense! And some of them appear to have co-authors who are not aware of their co-authorship. Labbé had previously demonstrated that one could set up a fake scientist with fake papers with an h-index of 94, essentially proving that the index is not reliable. I think Springer and IEEE have a lot more papers that need close examination and then withdrawal on account of plagiarism.
• Flurfunk Dresden has a nice summary with links (in German) to the case of Nina Haferkamp. Stefan Weber had published documentation of plagiarism in her doctoral dissertation. The University of Duisburg-Essen has now, after long deliberation, decided that even though there is scientific misconduct in the thesis, since a "scientific kernel" is there, she gets to keep her doctorate. This raises some troubling questions. Weber has apparently been threatened with legal action, although documenting plagiarism in a thesis or paper is a time-honored method of scientific discourse, often referred to as a book or paper review. And if one can plagiarize away in the "unimportant" parts of a paper or dissertation, does that mean everyone can now plagiarize to their hearts content, as long as there is some little kernel of truth inside? The University of Duisburg-Essen does not tell us as readers how we can differentiate this kernel from the plagiarism-chaff that surrounds it.
• VroniPlag Wiki has published case #62, #63, #64, and #65, from the University of Münster (again), University of Kiel (again), the National University of Ireland in Maynooth, and the Free University of Berlin (again). The map is getting quite thick with pins.
• The Russian Education Minister is apparently unhappy with the work of Dissernet, a group of scientists in Russia who have investigated plagiarism in over 350 dissertations of, among others, politicians. Minister Dmitry Livanov is quoted as saying “People not versed in this topic will get the idea that all academics are cheats and liars. It’s a severe reputational problem for Russian science.” If the shoe fits....

Plagiarism Information in French

In researching the previous article I stumbled upon the web site of Michelle Bergadaà, professor at the University of Geneva: Responsable (Plagiat et Fraude Schientifique: La Perspective Académique). She has published widely in French over the past ten years about plagiarism, and issues an occasional newsletter in French.

I find her discussion of a typology of plagiarists (the manipulator, the cobbler, the cheater, and the fraudster) quite interesting:

http://responsable.unige.ch/top/nos-analyses/les-d%C3%A9linquants-du-savoir.html

 

 

She has conducted a number of investigations, asking students and professors about the plagiarism problem and has gathered a lot of material in French on the site. She is also publishing about what I call mock conferences.

So if your French is up to speed (or you can decrypt what Google Translate thinks the text says), give the site a good look!

French Rabbi steps down in plagiarism scandal

France has been shaken by its own plagiarism scandal. Jean-Noël Darde has been documenting it on his blog Archéologie du "Copier-Coller" since March and the case has now reached the European press.

The German FAZ reported in an article on April 8, 2013 entitled Elitendämmerung (I won't link to the FAZ as they supported the Leistungsschutzrecht) that the Chief Rabbi in Paris, Gilles Bernheim, was embroiled in a strange plagiarism scandal. His work „Quarante Méditations Juives“ was found to be a plagiarism of, among others, Jean-François Lyotard and Elie Wiesel. Bernheim then accused Lyotard of having plagiarized from *him*, which Darde made clear was not the case.

So Bernheim changed his story. His ghostwriter (bizarrely called "Negro", or Nègre littéraire, black writer) was the plagiarist and did this to hurt him.

The taz took over the story on April 11 and noted that even though many of his books and official biographies had him listed as having a habilitation (second doctorate) in philosophy, he didn't actually have one. Spiegel Online spins it further, quoting Bernheim as saying that he never corrected this when people used the title, as he didn't want to disappoint his admirers.

The most curious plagiarism is his most often cited work, Mariage homosexuel, homoparentalité et adoption : ce que l’on oublie souvent de dire, lambasting homosexual marriage, parenting and adoption. Pope Benedict XVI seems to have quoted from it, but the true source is – a Catholic priest.

Although Bernheim had insisted a few days ago that he would not think of stepping down, he resigned on April 11, 2013 and is now "on leave", according to Spiegel Online.

Spiegel Online had also just recently (Feb. 18, 2013) published an interview with literature professor Hélène Maurel-Indart who noted that France is a paradise for plagiarists. She runs the web site Le Plagiat.

Update:
Jean-Noël Darde sent around two links to French articles about the case,
L'EXPRESS and Rue 89.

French Academics Circulate Petition

French academics have started a petition against plagiarism in research. The petition is available online at http://archeologie-copier-coller.com/?p=8723. This is a translation by Google Translate prettied up by me:

Refuse to condone plagiarism in research
A few days before the conclusion of the Audience on Higher Education and Research, the undersigned scholars and researchers consider it their duty to remind that the university must ensure the legitimacy of the degrees it issues. In particular, it must ensure that plagiarism in dissertations, theses, and scientific publications can not discredit the quality of training offered and the French research.As such, the scientific and academic communities must work together against all forms of plagiarism. They must not only work to prevent plagiarism but also in each case see to it that appropriate penalties are meted out. The responsibility of universities or research organizations must be engaged when plagiarism, fraud and attempted fraud are not certified subject such sanctions. The obligation to sanction weighs on all higher education institutions and research organizations.A number of cases analyzed by our colleague Jean-Noel Darts (Lecturer in Information Science and Communication at the University Paris 8 Saint-Denis) are documented in the Archaeology Blog Copy and Paste and point to the failure of ethics in  serious academic research and in issuing diplomas has been committed by the university, as well as doctoral students and by faculty members, without the measures required having been taken to date. A commission of inquiry with all guarantees of impartiality should verify the authenticity of the documents presented on this blog. The articles which are posted online appear to establish a particularly overwhelming picture.The University of Paris 8 is not the only one concerned by the phenomenon of plagiarism, far from it. Such situations require special attention, at the risk of letting it corrupt part of the academic and scientific research. If confirmed, this university or elsewhere, that plagiarism has occurred, and knowingly in violation of academic ethics, only the imposition of appropriate sanctions would end these intolerable practices that hinder the smooth functioning research, both from the point of view of its actors evaluation of the scientific quality of university productions.Safeguarding the freedom of research and academic freedom depends on the quality of degrees, publications and productions. Leave these records state could aggravate a situation that tends to suggest that the French University in persistent ignorance of the extent of the plagiarism, waived defend a level of excellence necessary to take its place in the European and international levels.
***
If you subscribe to this text and want to make your signature, specify your email address and your qualities bottom of that page, under the heading comment.

A French Puzzle

An anonymous correspondent dropped this link into my box this morning: Imposture à l'Université ?

Google Translate lets me know that this is a bit of a French puzzle. Professor Imad Saleh of the University of Paris 8, lists as an important paper in a CV:

Meziani Rachid et Saleh Imad (2011), « Towards a collaborative business
process management methodolgy [sic] », ICMCS ’09, IEEE, 6-8 April 2011
Maroc, 8 pages (article indexé).

That is, a paper from the 2009 conference ICMCS sponsored by IEEE in 2011. Okay, that might be a typographical error. The ICMCS'11 did take place in Morocco, but from 7-9 Apr 2011. Okay, off-by-one is normal for computer scientists.

The article posts a link to that paper. And it posts a link to a paper written by Rachid Meziani and Rodrigo Magalhães from the Center for Organizational Design and Engineering in Lisbon, Portugal in 2009: Proposals for an Agile Business Process Management Methodology.

Shall we compare the abstracts with the VroniPlag Wiki SIM_TEXT comparison tool?

(You can click on the picture for a larger view)

Needless to say, the article continues pretty much word for word, table by table, picture by picture.

Saleh is professor and the director of PARAGRAPHE, an interdisciplinary research laboratory attached to the doctoral School (N°224) Cognition, Langage and Interaction (CLI) of the University of Paris 8. There is no Meziani listed there or at the web site of the University of Paris 8. There is a Rodrigo Magalhães to be found in Kuwait, and he does BPO, but there is not a complete bibliography listed there.

So the French Puzzle is: why are these two papers identical? What happened to Meziani and Magalhães? There has been a case submitted to the French Council on Universities. It is interesting to note that Saleh is a member of that council. 

And if I may add a question myself - why do we continue to prize conference publications in computer science? We can't tell the mock conferences from the substantial ones, and plagiarism seems to be rampant because the peer-review systems is dead for conferences.

French conference on plagiarism

If my translation machines are correct, this article picked up by my bot reports on a conference that was held in October 2011 in France on the topic of plagiarism. The conference proceedings have been published as Le plagiat de la recherche scientifique. Half of the contributions from researchers from France, Switzerland, Belgium, and Brazil are apparently about how to define and characterize plagiarism and the other half are about detecting plagiarism and administering sanctions.

If anyone reads French and wants to review the book, I'll be glad to grant guest blogging privileges.