Fraudulent PhDs in Romania

The Times Higher Education web site has an article published July 27, 2017 about Emilia Sercan's work documenting plagiarism in Romanian doctorates. I had the privilege of meeting her at the Brno conference on plagiarism. She used to be able to obtain the doctorates via the national library, now there are restrictions on access. She has recently published a book (apparently in Romanian) on the Romanian "doctorate factories."

Short links

Here are some diverse and interesting links from the world of academic misconduct:

• Research misconduct in Australia: The article in Mark Israel's Blog "The Conversation" lists a number of cases of research misconduct that have been made public in Australia, including a recent one at the University of Queensland.
  "Bruce Murdoch and Caroline Barwood resigned from the University of Queensland in 2013 after a whistleblower claimed that they had not undertaken an experiment on Parkinson’s, despite reporting results in various journals. [...] The university failed to find any evidence that the experiment had been conducted. Instead, it discovered duplicate publication, statistical error and misattribution of authorship."
• The new president of the German "Federation of Expellees" organization, (Bund der Vertriebenen), Bernd Fabritius, is originally from Romania (he belongs to the German minority there) and did his doctorate in Hermannstadt/Sibiu and in Tübingen. A fascinating 54-page documentation of text parallels and other problems with this thesis was published recently online.
  
  
  The text was photographed using pens to mark the text and then boxes and explaining text were added to the pictures. A discussion of the documentation (in German) can be found in the Blog Erbloggtes.
• The Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences in Germany considered awarding former Minister of Education Annette Schavan (who was found to have plagiarized in her dissertation) the Leibniz medal which is given in honor of outstanding service for the promotion of the goals of the Academy („zur Ehrung besonderer Verdienste um die Förderung der Aufgaben der Akademie“). Apparently, though, there was no unanimous vote, and the discussion leaked its way into the newspapers. There is also more biting commentary on the research group "Zitat und Paraphrase" (quotation and paraphrase) in the Causa Schavan blog ([1] - [2], in German)
• Dr. med. plagiat: The German newspaper Handelsblatt has an extensive report on the plagiarism scandal in medicine at the University of Freiburg, the University of Münster and the Charité. 
• There is a call for papers out (abstract submission deadline: November 16, 2014) for an international conference on plagiarism at the Mendel University in Brno, Czech Republic 10 - 12 June 2015 "PLAGIARISM ACROSS EUROPE AND BEYOND" (http://plagiarism.cz/ Disclosure: I am on the program committee).
  
• I found an IFQ report (in German) from 2006 on the history of doctorates in Germany with some interesting statistics on the prevalence of doctorates in various fields.
• It seems that Elsevier has been charging 30$ for copies of book chapters that consist only of one page containing the wording "This page intentionally left blank". A tongue-in-cheek systematic review has been published, and indeed, if one googles "This page is intentionally left blank" together with "site:http://www.sciencedirect.com" there are 55 hits across a wide spectrum of fields. Apparently, the automatic publishing system has trouble with blank pages, or else the blank pages were not caught during the rigorous peer review.
• Widely off topic: There is even a Lego figurine for a university graduate in a cap & gown.

Junk Journal "Metalurgia International"

Spiegel Online, Laborwelt, and Retraction Watch have reported on a fake article that Serbian academics Dragan Z. Đuirić, Boris Delilbašić, and Stevica Radisic published in the Romanian junk journal Metalurgia International. The journal is indexed on Thomson Reuters ISI Web of Knowledge, lending an air of professionality to the publication that it does not deserve.

The paper, entitled "Evaluation of Transformative Hermeneutic Heuristics for Processing Random Data", and published in Vol. 18, Nr. 6 (2013) on pp. 98–102 is a scream to read. It is available online at scribd, including lovely photos of the researchers wearing false wigs and mustaches. Start at the back with the reference section: long dead researchers with current publications, the Disney character Goofy (known as Silja in Serbian) publishing in a children's comic book, B. Sagdiyev (better known as the fictitious Kazakh journalist Borat) publishing with A. S. Hole,  and of course a paper by A. Sokal.

The article is quite forthcoming in explaining its goal, which is to show how many of their fellow Serbian researchers publish nonsense in such journals in order to puff up their CVs:

Following the usual and by now well-spread practice in many academic circles of producing insignificant research papers of great importance to pseudo science, our research aims at identifying “ground truth” for undecidability, and, however, this research is principled. Rather that rely on the overly-reasoned, wide-spread use of scientific apparatus, without consideration of randomness, we invent the following architecture.

There are so many hints such as "Error! Reference source not found", bizarre diagrams, chaotically formatted references that would have been noticed by a referee, if indeed anyone had read it. But there was no peer-review. According to Spiegel Online, paying 140 € for the main author and 75 € for each additional author results in speedy publication, and a certificate of publication for submitting at one's own university. This issue has 70 publications with between 2 and 4 authors, so the journal publisher would have income of 20.000 €. Even paying someone to put together the PDF and the server charges, this is pretty good income for a journal published every month. 

There is a long list of supposed editors

The journal editor, Gheorghe V. Lepădatu, gives his affiliation as Vice-Rector of Dimitrie Cantemir Christian University Bucharest, although he uses a Yahoo address. This private university has been involved in some accreditation scuffles recently. The journal web site is currently "under construction", but the trusty Internet Archive has many snapshots of the web site. The ISI inclusion is most prominent on the page, the HTML is pure 90s, awash with colors, fonts, and blinking things.

The system of evaluating the quality of a journal or a researcher with quantitative methods is broken and has been broken for some time. There are many people out to make money out of the need that people have for international publications, and the price is right. What will it take to make organizations realize this? Our trust in scientific publications is rapidly deteriorating, as they become more and more a business enterprise and less and less true research.

Humanities Plagiarism in Romania

Andrew Galloway, Professor at Cornell University in the USA, wrote an article entitled "The Culture of Plagiarized Dissertations in Romania: A Call for Inquiry in the Humanities—and Beyond?" for integru, the Romanian plagiarism documentation site, about a case that he investigated. A Romanian lecturer (who has since resigned) heavily plagiarized a 40-year-old dissertation. Galloway comments:

Asked about what “outcome” I could imagine for this case, therefore, I could only reply that the most productive outcome I could think of would be a searching investigation of the structure of advising, funding, mentoring, assessing, critiquing, and defending doctoral or any academic work at the institution in question.

Indeed, a "searching investigation" is what is needed at many universities, it seems to me, and not even more attempts to silence the whistleblowers. 

More details on Plagiarism in Hungary, Romania

The Times Higher Education web site has a long article by Paul Jump, "A plague of plagiarism at the heart of politics" with many details on cases of plagiarism in Hungary and Romania.

Romanian Education Minister Found to have Plagiarized

The second Romanian politician to be found having plagiarized is Ecaterina Andronescu, the Minster of -- yup -- Education. A Romanian documentation site, http://integru.org/6, has published a documentation in English about a conference paper that Andronescu co-authored with Aurelia Cristina Nechifor in 2003. Andronescu lists the paper in her official CV.

The paper is said to plagiarize three other works and to falsify data. It was published while Andronescu was Minster of Research and Dean of the Faculty of Industrial Chemistry at the Polytechnic University in Bucharest.

Andronescu had declared earlier this week that the plagiarism found in the dissertation of the head of state, Victor Ponta, did not lead to her rescinding his doctorate because at the time that he wrote the dissertation -- also 2003 -- it was okay to write like that, according to the German daily newspaper FAZ.  Romanian intellectuals are loudly protesting this, stating correctly that proper citation techniques was not invented in 2003 but has been around for quite some time.

The Integru.org platform is run by an anonymous group of intellectuals in Romania and documents plagiarism and scientific misconduct. It is not run like the VroniPlag Wiki in Germany, but is a closed system documenting the cases and then including the opinions of foreign researchers from the field on each individual case. This case is the sixth case that they have published.

Next politician accused of plagiarism: Romanian PM

Nature reports that there has been a substantial accusation of plagiarism in the dissertation of the Prime Minister Victor Ponta. Just recently, the Minister of Education had to resign about a month ago because his dissertation was a plagiarism. Do scroll down to the update — the press office of the Romanian government set a misspelled nastygram to Nature, that they have published in all it's glory, accusing Nature of playing politics.

According to Nature, the Ethics Council that is still working on preparing a report on the plagiarism in the dissertation of the Minister of Education was sacked a few days ago.

Here is a link to the plagiarism documentation: http://media.tvrinfo.ro/other/201206/oglinda-vp-2003-teza_94614100.pdf (in Romanian, but the copying is clear if these are indeed true copies of both thesis and sources).

Update 2012-07-03: Found an Austrian article on the topic "Von Guttenberg zu Ponta". Apparently Ponta had told El Pais that he would step down if his thesis was found to be plagiarized, and the committee did indeed determine that, but the committee was expanded from 21 to 45 people, so the legality of the determination is currently being disputed. Personally, I find all this legal maneuvering quite distasteful. This is a scientific problem - politics only needs to determine if it wants to keep a plagiarist on board, but the determination of plagiarism should be solidly in the hands of the university.

Romanian Education and Research Minister steps down because of plagiarism

One can hardly keep up anymore...

The Sunday Times reported that Ioan Meng, the new Romanian minister for Education and Research was accused of plagiarism in several of his papers. On May 16 the Neue Züricher Zeitung reported that he stepped down as minister after only one week in office.

Scientists in Japan, Taiwan and Israel noted numerous plagiarized passagen in his publications. Mang feels that this is just an attack from the opposition party. A German professor has also found text passages from his works in publications of Meng.

Update: Nature has a good article and notes that Romania has passed an anti-plagiarism law, introduced a National Ethics in Research council and determined that academics caught plagiarizing would lose their jobs. Interestingly enough, one of the plagiarisms was of a paper that the original author had withdrawn because he had discovered a flaw in the argument.