Schavan steps down

German chancellor Merkel has now accepted the resignation of a second cabinet member as the result of plagiarism scandals. Both gave a press conference at 14.00 on February 9, 2013 announcing the resignation of Schavan and announcing Prof. Dr. Johanna Wanka as the new minister of education.

Schavan pointed out that she is not stepping down on account of plagiarism, as she is still convinced that she did not plagiarize, but because she is suing a university as a private person. She quotes a German politician: First my office, then the party, then me.

This, of course, does not solve the plagiarism problem in Germany. I hope that universities now get serious about the problem.

The German Dissertation Factory

The daily newspaper Main Post reports on the current state of investigations into the German "dissertation factory" at the medical faculty of the University of Würzburg. The university is doing its best, the article says, to dig out under the investigation of 20 dissertations, of which four are found to be plagiarized.

In 2009 the prosecutor's office investigated claims that a Würzburg medical professor who had had over 200 students write their dissertations with him was selling titles. Or rather, he was accepting loans to fund his research. He was fined for taking bribes. In May 2011 an anonymous dossier turned up with many names and dates - but there was no way to prove that money had been exchanged here for titles, so the case was officially closed, the professor is now retired. The person who arranged for the prospective doctoral students to be accepted and took a 1000 € fee for this was, however, fined.

The university was somewhat skittish about the situation and started an investigation into the matter. 20 of the theses were of a very questionable nature - I have seen some of the theses, for example one by a dentist writing a short dissertation (27 pages) in the field of the history of medicine by transcribing fifteenth century texts about the pharmaceutical use of some flowers. Not analyzing anything, not translating, just transcribing. The university has determined that four of the theses are plagiarisms to boot, and has decided to rescind the doctorates. The persons in question are, as seems usual in Germany, taking the university to court in the hopes of keeping their titles because the university has made some procedural error.

When the newspaper tried to contact one of the dentists involved a lawyer answered forbidding any reporting that might point to his client - who is apparently a friend of a former governor of a German state.

I wish the university a strong case in court - and hope that they set up procedures for not accepting theses like this ever again.

Update: Just including a link to an in-depth article at Zeit online about this case from 2012.

Heidelberg happy with 75% plagiarism

The Frankfurter Rundschau reports in a short notice that the University of Heidelberg Medical School has decided that a medical dissertation that has plagiarism on over 75% of the pages (and most of the plagiarism is from the habilitation of the doctoral advisor) is perfectly all right. Oh, it is not good scientific practice, but the doctorate will not be rescinded and the grade will not be lowered.

This bizarre decision led to further investigations at this university that has been deemed an "Excellent" school in Germany. One of the VroniPlag researchers dug up the document explaining how the theses are evaluated in Heidelberg in the medical school. Failure is not an option. If you just hand in something, it is considered passing. I find this shocking

Another VroniPlag researcher has suggested that the medical schools just have their students hand in an Excel sheet and a lab book instead of suggesting that they actually wrote complete sentences, since in fact they appear to just take a textual stencil and plug in their values.

The German Wissenschaftsrat already noted in 2004 that medical dissertations are not really dissertations as they are in other faculties. I find it scandalous that this obvious plagiarism does not have consequences - and there are a number of strange things around the thesis itself, for example that it was handed in in 2002, but not defended until 2006. The university replies, when questioned, that this is all in the realm of personal privacy and they won't answer questions.

How do I explain to my students that they are not allowed to copy text without attribution, but that it is just fine for a medical student to do so?

It is time for a serious renovation at German medical schools - time to move to an M.D. for general doctors and reserve a Dr. med. for those who can do real research.

I just had a look at the statistics for 2010. 3,6 % of the student population in Germany studies medicine. 28 % of the dissertations are in medicine. A whopping 49% (867 out of 1755) of the habilitations done in Germany in 2010 were in medicine. This raises a lot of questions - the number of habilitations compared to the number of dissertations would be about commensurate with the rate of students in medicine. If we take out all the medical dissertations and add in the medical habilitations, we would have 4,5% medical theses. So it seems that indeed, a dissertation in medicine is just a Master's degree and the habilitation should be considered the doctorate. A very strange state of affairs. 

Open cases of plagiarism in Germany

Note: this list has moved to the page Scorecard, and is linked from the homepage. It will no longer be updated here.

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The VroniPlag platform has currently documented 22 23 cases of plagiarism in dissertations or habilitations since the zu Guttenberg case was documented on the GuttenPlagWiki. The first few cases - especially ones involving politicians in the wake of the zu Guttenberg case - were dealt with promptly:

Thesis, Link	Name, University	Documentation public	Current status
KTzG 2009	Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg (University of Bayreuth)	2011-02-16	After 2 weeks: doctorate rescinded
VS 2009	Veronika Saß (University of Constance)	2011-03-28	After 6 weeks: doctorate rescinded
MCP 2007	Matthias Pröfrock (University of Tübingen)	2011-04-04	After 12 weeks: doctorate rescinded
SKM 2001	Silvana Koch-Mehrin (University of Heidelberg)	2011-04-10	After 10 weeks: doctorate rescinded
GC 2000	Georgios Chatzimarkakis (University of Bonn)	2011-05-15	After 10 weeks: doctorate rescinded
BDS 2008	Bijan Djir-Sarai (University of Cologne)	2011-06-01	After 40 weeks doctorate rescinded
UB 2011	Uwe Brinkmann (University of Hamburg)	2011-06-08	After 6 weeks: doctorate rescinded
MM 1987	Margarita Mathiopoulos (University of Bonn)	2011-06-14	23 years after the first investigation on accused plagiarism  and 10 months after the publication on VroniPlag: doctorate rescinded
SH 2003	Siegfried Haller (University of Halle-Wittenberg)	2011-07-24	After 9 months: doctorate rescinded
JG 2009	Dr. Jürgen Goldschmidt (Technical University of Berlin)	2011-07-30	Still open
CS 2008	Prof. Dr. Cornelia Eva Scott (University of Krakau, Poland)	2011-08-08	University of Cracow annonces plagiarism found on Jan 12, 2012, refers case to a central authority
AH 1998	Dr. Arne Heller (University of Hamburg)	2011-08-28	Still open
MW 2009	Dr. Martin Winkels (University of Bonn)	2011-09-05	Still open
DV 2005	Dr. Daniel Volk (University of Würzburg)	2011-09-19	Still open
UT 2003	PD Dr. Ulf Teichgräber (Charité Berlin)	2011-10-12	Still open
PES 2004	Prof. Dr. Patrick Ernst Sensburg (Fernuniversität Hagen)	2011-10-18	After 8 weeks the university determines this to be "no case".
DD 1999	Prof. Dr. Detlev Dähnert (BTU Cottbus)	2011-11-01	Still open
NK 2006	Dr. Nalan Kayhan (University of Heidelberg)	2011-11-17	Still open
AWB 1997	Prof. Dr. Andreas Wolfgang Bonz (University of Heidelberg)	2011-12-21	Still open
MH 2007	Dr. Michael Heun (Frankfurt School of Finance and Management)	2012-02-16	Still open
LM 1999	Prof. Dr. Loukas A. Mistelis (University of Hanover)	2012-03-12	Still open
AOS 2008	Dr. Asso Omer Saiwani (TU Berlin)	2012-03-26	Still open
AHG 2006	Dr. Arne Herting (University of Bochum)	2012-04-10	Still open
NM 2007	Prof. Dr. Nasrullah Memon (University of Aalborg, Denmark)	2012-04-18	Still open

But since June, the universities have fallen asleep, it seems. I have written letters asking about the status of the investigations. In general, they are not expecting results before Christmas.

Gerhard Fröhlich from the University of Linz put it so nicely:

Self control mechanisms are a myth in science to avoid any serious external control. I have studied all fraud affairs precisely and in almost every case anonymous allegations coupled with mass media outrage – in most recent years with an interim period of outrage on the internet – were necessary before the institutions themselves agreed to take action.

It seems that the moment the outrage dies down, the speed of investigation slows to a crawl.

Updates:

• 2011-12-21: Another case from the medical faculty of the University Heidelberg added; the University of Bonn is said to be prepared to rescind the doctorate of Margarita Mathiopoulos 
• 2011-12-22: The Fernuniversität Hagen determines the case of Patrick Sensburg to be too weak to do anything about. The dean of the faculty announces on radio that the documentation is "malicious". The reader is encouraged to read the documentation linked above for themselves. The expert opinions on which this decision was based remain under cover. 
• 2012-01-27: The University of Cracow had determined that there is plagiarism in the Scott dissertation and has referred the case to a central authority.  The decision by the University of Bonn on Mathiopolous, expected for February 12, is delayed to April 18 by an extension appeal filed by her lawyers. 
• 2012-02-16:  Case 19, from the private Frankfurt School of Finance and Management, is added to the home page.
• 2012-03-05: University of Cologne rescinded the doctorate of German member of Parliament Bijan Dijr-Sarai
• 2012-03-12: Case 20, a dissertation in law from the University of Hanover, is added to the home page. 
• 2012-03-21: A decision is expected by the University of Halle on April 18. 
• 2012-03-26: Case 21, a dissertation from the same doctoral advisor at the TU Berlin as Jürgen Goldschmidt, is posted on the home page. Many texts appear to have been copied and the names of the country under investigation, Iraq, exchanged for the country name in the original work. 
• 2012-04-10: Case 22, a medical dissertation from the University of Bochum, is posted on the home page. 
• 2012-04-18: The University of Bonn rescinded the doctorate of Margarita Mathiopoulos and the University of Halle-Wittenberg rescinded the doctorate of Siegfried Haller. Case 23, submitted in English to the University of Alborg, Denmark, by Nasrullah Memon, is added to the list.  

DFG: Good scientific practice

The DFG, the German federal research financing board, held a conference on good scientific practice on Nov. 29, 2011 in Berlin. I was not asked to talk, but was permitted to attend the closed conference.

The first session was about the current state of quality assurance at the large extra-university research institutions. Since universities are financed by the state governments in Germany, the federal government can't give them money directly. The solution has been to move the research out to research institutions, but that has the problem of them not being doctorate granting institutions. So they keep close ties with universities, often offering the universities money if they will award a professorship to a deserving department head so that he (rarely she) can be proposing doctoral candidates to the dissertation board. The professors are then usually then "loaned back" to the research institution.

One interesting link I noted was to a talk that Max Weber gave in 1922 on science as a profession (Wissenschaft als Beruf). But most of what they were talking about seemed to be great ideas that are not really anchored in reality. Each of the sessions had a long time for discussions, and the 200 people in attendance were not shy about asking questions or giving statement.

I found one statement to be very fitting - the woman asked why we were being so concerned with the "bad children", the plagiarizing or falsifying doctoral students. Shouldn't we be looking more closely at the "bad parents", the doctoral advisors? I fully agree with this! I was also pleased that persons other than myself called for a national board such as the ORI in the USA. It was a bit sobering to hear people such as the rector of a large southern university state that he regularly uses so-called plagiarism detection software even though he knows that it doesn't work, but as a deterrent, because the students think that it does find plagiarism. 

The second session was about the current situation in Germany for securing good scientific practice. A bit of history was explained, for example, how the Hermann/Brach case led the DFG to formulate their rules for good scientific practice. Wolfgang Löwer, the Ombud for good scientific practice at the DFG gave an interesting talk on hierarchies vs. independence of the researchers. He mentioned a case that was mentioned in the press a few days later about a curious case of a doctoral student being accused of plagiarism, because she reused texts that she herself had written under a pseudonym for her advisor.

Diethelm Klippel from the University of Bayreuth summed up the conference that was held there a few days ago (I hope to report on that soon as well), and then Christopher Baum from the medical university in Hanover gave a good overview of the problems associated with whistleblowing.

The third session was entitled "Promotion - Quo vadis?" and was more or less a round of back-patting.

The symposium closed with a very interesting podium discussion, and a number of politicians showed up for this. The DFG filmed the discussion and has it available online. I feel that it is a consequence of the work invested in GuttenPlag and VroniPlag that this podium - with the vice president of the Hochschulrektorenkonferenz (Klaus Dicke), the president of the DFG (Matthias Kleiner), and the chair of the Wissenschaftsrat (Wolfgang Marquardt), the journalist who broke the zu Guttenberg story (Tanjev Schultz) and the doctoral student (Tobias Bunde) who initiated the signatory list - actually took place.

There were lots of good discussions during the breaks - I hope that something comes of this and not that people feel that they've done enough now. There is plenty more to do. I insist that we need Beratung, Transparenz and Kontrolle, (advice, transparency, and control) and that that needs to be in a federal, independent entity. We'll see how it goes in the new year.