Plagiarism scandal at the University of St. Gallen

The Neue Züricher Zeitung (NZZ) started the ball rolling on October 9, 2022 (p. 23) with an article in the printed newspaper about plagiarism accusations concerning a business school professor at the prestigious University of St. Gallen (HSG). A Titularprofessor (that is, a person who has sucessfully submitted their habilitation—the second doctorate—, but without tenure and often without a salary) was accused of plagiarism in his dissertation that had been submitted to the TU Darmstadt in Germany. The NZZ had requested that Stefan Weber investigate the thesis, he later published some of his findings on his blog, Plagiatsgutachten. The TU Darmstadt has been deliberating since February 2022 about the case. 

The professor, currently in charge of an institute at the HSG, had faced similar charges about his habilitation submitted to the HSG. Students had found the text similarity and informed the university back in August 2021, but an investigative committee did not find academic misconduct. 

Early in December 2022 more issues turned up. The professor lists over 400 publications to his name, but as the St. Galler Tagblatt/Appenzeller Zeitung reported on December 5, 2022 (p. 21), quite a number of the publications that have the professor as first author are acutally theses by HSG students. The AZ contacted a number of these students for comments. One noted that he found it strange that the professor was so insistant on publishing his master's thesis, and was irritated that the professor's name was on it, although it was completely the student's own thesis. 

The AZ manged to obtain a dozen theses that they could compare with the professor's publications. Indeed, they were practically the same. 

According to the ethical codex of the HSG, this is not permissible. Students are not to be ghostwriters for professors. Interviewed professors from the HSG who did not want to be named, noted that this might be typical, as the number of publications is used as an indicator of researcher quality, but that it was a very questionable practice. The professor was unavailable for comment.

On December 7 the St. Galler Tagblatt interviewed some students on p. 18 and quoted the rector as saying the similarity between the dissertation and the habilitation of the professor was not as extensive as the lawyer who was representing the students had stated in August 2021. He also stated that the external examiners had found no plagiarism at all. 

And of course, by now all the rest of the media in Switzerland was banging on about the story.

On December 9, the St. Galler Tagblatt included not only a front-page article, but also a large report on p. 22 and two letters-to-the-editor on p. 33. They had interviewed Stefan Weber, and the rector of the HSG had published an article on its home page in the form of an interview. The rector noted that they had looked at the habiliation and even used Turnitin, but of course since it was a cumulative habiliation there was much similarity found to the original papers. 

On December 10 the rector was interviewed by the St. Galler Tagblatt and admitted that he had himself not even looked at the habilitation, and tried to excuse not having contacted the students who got the ball rolling because he didn't know who the students were. But he now wanted to speak to Weber. A lawyer for the students later noted that their names of the students where of course known, something the rector later had to concede was correct, as letters existed showing that the names were, indeed known. The lawyer noted that the case would have to be investigated even if the names were not known.

Things get really wild on December 12: Another professor at the HSG who had advised the first professor during his habilitation and had himself done his first and second doctorate in Darmstadt, wrote a threatening letter to students of the HSG. The letter, appearing to speak for the university, threatened the students. They must stop talking to the press or they will face civil and criminal lawsuits. Of course, this letter made it to the newspaper and it now appears to be an all-reporters-on-deck case. The St. Galler Tagblatt dug up an IT consultancy company that lists both professors as members of the board. Both have published papers together, including ones that were part of the habilitation at the HSG, meaning that the one professor should not have been the advisor for the habilitation of the other, as he can be considered to be biased. The NZZ dug up another company that appears to have diverted funds from the HSG into the company's account.   

The university held a public meeting on December 12 with students, staff, and administrators. The students are angry, because when their work is found to have plagiarism in it, they are harshly punished. The rector makes it clear that the university will not try to keep people from speaking to the press. He promised to make progress on clearing up all the issues as fast as possible, but warns that it won't be before Christmas. 

I can barely keep up with all the news. The NZZ published a summary of the situation today, December 14, including references to all sorts of scandals the HSG has had in the past years: copy&paste in reports about theses, fudged expenses, professors having to step down from company boards because of scandals there, market manipulations, and an instructor convicted for economic crimes. We'll see how this spins out!

Austrian Minister Resigns in Plagiarism Scandal

The Austrian Minister of Labor, Family and Youth, Christine Aschbacher, resigned January 9, 2021 in the wake of a plagiarism scandal.

There was already much talk about problems in her Master's Thesis (plagiatsgutachten.com, in German). It was then found that her freshly minted (2020) doctoral dissertation contained not only the kind of nonsense a machine translation is capable of producing, but also contained a good bit of plagiarism. The Austrian press had a field day on January 9, Krone, Kurier, and Der Standard each had big articles in print, which apparently led to her stepping down.

The online versions of the various media report about her resignation: Oe24, Kurier, ORF, Der Standard. The Guardian has also reported on it in English. The minister denies having plagiarized, stating that she did the work "nach bestem Wissen und Gewissen" (using my best knowledge and conscience), a statement previously made by the German Family Minister Franziska Giffey during the plagiarism scandal surrounding her doctoral thesis, that is still brewing in Berlin.

Aschbacher's dissertation was not submitted to an Austrian university, as one might expect, but to the Technical University Bratislava (Slovenská technická univerzita), in nearby Slovakia.

Why Slovakia? Well, first of all, they accept not only theses in Slovakian, but also in English and German. Then there was a small matter of an Austrian company "helping" people obtain doctoral dissertations in Slovakia (see the series of articles in the blog CausaSchavan from 2016, Hütchenspiele: 1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5 - 6 - 7, in German). And of course the important detail that a doctoral degree granted in Slovakia can't be rescinded. Ever. No matter what. That has apparently changed from January 1, 2021.

VroniPlag Wiki had a look at a few doctoral dissertations from Bratislava universities in 2016, 2018, and 2020 and found quite a bit of plagiarism lurking there, including another member of the 100 % Club, Jul. 

According to Der Standard, the doctoral thesis of Aschbacher was examined by the Slovakian state plagiarism detection system and it only found 1.5 % plagiarism. Turnitin, according to Stefan Weber, the author of Plagiatsgutachten, returned 21 %. But since software cannot detect translation plagiarism, one just cannot measure the "amount" of plagiarism in a document. It is only possible to find text that matches text stored in the databases the software is able to access.

If you understand German (well, Austrian German), you might find the "reading" of a passage from the dissertation by Hons Petutschnig amusing: https://twitter.com/PetutschnigHons/status/1347934502664986625.

Update: My mistake, I mixed up the Slovenian system and the Slovak system. I have corrected the text, the test can be found here (Foltýnek, T., Dlabolová, D., Anohina-Naumeca, A. et al.  Testing of support tools for plagiarism detection  Int J Educ Technol High Educ 17, 46 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1186/s41239-020-00192-4). 

 

 

 

Bored? How about documenting plagiarism?

So you are all stuck at home with the Corona virus and have already binge-watched 15 series. How about contributing to cleaning up the academic world? Not all of us have the biomedical chops to debunk a supposed cure, like Elisabeth Bik writing in her Science Integrity Digest: Thoughts on the Gautret et al. paper about Hydroxychloroquine and Azithromycin treatment of COVID-19 infections.

How about some plagiarism documentation? The German platform VroniPlag Wiki that I have been working with since 2011 has so many unfinished cases and I know, the platform tends to be in German. The most recent documentation is in English: A recent dissertation (2017) from the Humboldt University of Berlin, Ids. From the executive summary:

The investigation has documented extensive plagiarism in the thesis. Over 90% of the pages of the main text contain plagiarized passages. Over two-thirds of the main text is taken almost verbatim from other sources, generally without any or the proper reference. The passages are taken from around 100 mostly online sources. Among these sources are the Wikipedia, a doctoral dissertation available online, a master's thesis, some organizational home pages, many open access publications, and various online religious reference works. The published PDF of the dissertation contains many copy-and-paste artefacts such as numerous hidden (embedded) web links that are also found as visible links in the source material. In conclusion, the dissertation could be categorized as an outright collage of easily obtained and quite diverse sources.

Drop in to the weekly chat Mondays at 21:00 MESZ (UTC +2), we'll be glad to help you get started. No specialized knowledge necessary, we'll be glad to show you the ropes, and there are plenty of English-language cases still unfinished.

Vice-Chancellor of the University of Zimbabwe arrested for conferring doctorate on former first lady

The vice-chancellor of the University of Zimbabwe has apparently been arrested on charges of conferring a doctoral degree without approval by the university council, according to Times Live. The Zimbabwe Anti-Corruption Commission has accused him of conferring a doctorate on Grace Mugabe, the wife of the former president of Zimbabwe, although no one in the sociology department had seen a research proposal‚ read any progress reports, or learned of the outcome of any research, the Times Live writes. The Zimbabwean Standard had expressed surprise in 2014 that she was awarded a PhD in sociology just three years after obtaining a bachelor's degree in Chinese Language by distance from the People’s University of China. Her husband was at that time also the chancellor of the University of Zimbabwe. The state-owned Herald lauded her work while the UK Guardian was quite critical.

The degree was conferred in 2014, the thesis, “The Changing Social Structures and Functions of the Family: The Case of Children’s Homes in Zimbabwe”, was apparently not available online until January 2018. According to NewsdzeZimbabwe, the thesis was published under her maiden name (Grace Ntombizodwa Marufu) on the UZ web site. Indeed, there is an entry on the library page of the UZ for Ntombizodwa G. Marufu, but no link to a PDF. Google finds a link, but the server does not respond. However, the table of contents can be found in a number of places, and the thesis itself appears to have been deposited at scribd in January 2018.

Update: The Zimbabwe Independent calls the thesis a fraud.

"Social Commentator Maxwell Saungweme described Grace’s PhD as the biggest academic fraud of the century.
“It’s not a PhD thesis but a mere compilation of plagiarised text and quotations from grey literature, newspaper articles, television and radio programmes. It does not contribute original ideas to knowledge. It also cites prominently very old sources such as 1978 and 1985 works. A lot of scientific reviews have been done to this literature, and academic work must cite recent scientific journals and books,” Saungweme said. [...] Political analyst Pedzisai Ruhanya, commenting on social media, criticised Grace’s PhD thesis and questioned why there are citations from the years 2016 and 2017 yet, scandalously, Grace graduated in 2014."

I can't find any citations from 2016 or 2017 in the version I found online, however. Interesting is Chapter 5 (p. 153): "Grace Mugabe Children’s Home was singled out as a model." This is a home the author runs herself. She does mention this a few pages later (p. 155): "I carried out this study when I was owner and founder of Grace Mugabe Children’s Home."

Where there is smoke, there is fire

The researchers at VroniPlag Wiki have grown tired of documenting plagiarism in medical dissertations, especially as some universities don't see a problem with theses such as ones that have nine pages (out of 61) completely copied from the Wikipedia without reference. They call it a cultural difference, they say that the focus is on the data. I have a different opinion on that. If an author was that careless and naive in one place (and it turned out that over half of the pages in that thesis have text overlap), how can we be sure that the data was carefully measured and recorded?

The most recent VroniPlag Wiki case is another example of "where there is smoke, there is fire," showing that just finding one instance of extensive plagiarism may indicate that there is more.

The LMU Munich has an open access thesis repository, so some German-language theses in different fields from that repository were compared with the German-language Wikipedia. The thesis at the top of the list was interesting, as it had a long sequence of characters identical to just one article in the Wikipedia, although it was not a large percent of the entire thesis. Googling phrases from the thesis quickly turned up many more sources (currently 24, three of them other Wikipedia pages) for text that was often used entirely verbatim and without reference. The documentation was published last week on VroniPlag Wiki and the university informed. 

Dissertation #151 (Xg) was submitted to the Faculty of Psychology and Pedagogy at the LMU Munich in 2009 and is about the intercultural understanding of art. If you look closely at the bar code generated from the manual documentation you can see three large patches of bright red that indicate that more than 75% of the page has been taken from a source without proper attribution.

The Xg Barcode (Report in German)

1. The first largish red band, pages 64–71, was taken verbatim from the German-language Wikipedia article on art.
2. The next large red band, pages 75–93, was taken verbatim from a doctoral dissertation submitted to the University of Heidelberg in 2006 about a Chinese painter.
3. The largest rest band, pages 113–157, was taken from a Diplom-Thesis (approx. a Master's thesis) that was submitted in 1999 to the University of Tübingen and published in 2004 on a pedagogical concept for intercultural education using art. 

VroniPlag Wiki has documented many such doctorates in the past, so this alone would hardly be newsworthy, were it not for a strange paragraph in the Promotionsordnung, the rules governing doctorates at this faculty at the LMU Munich, that have been in place since 2005:

§ 16 (Nichtvollzug der Promotion und Entzug des Doktorgrades)
"(1) Hat der Kandidat bei einer Promotionsleistung getäuscht und wird dies erst nach Erteilung des Bescheids gemäß § 12 Abs. 3 bekannt, so kann nachträglich die Doktorprüfung für nicht bestanden erklärt werden.
[...]
(3) [...] Eine Entscheidung nach Abs. 1 und 2 ist nur innerhalb einer Frist von fünf Jahren nach Erteilung des Bescheids gemäß § 12 Abs. 3 möglich." 

Translation: A doctorate can only be rescinded within five years of it being awarded.

That means that the LMU Munich has a statute of limitations on one type of academic misconduct. If it turns out that someone cheated, but it's been more than 5 years, they get lucky. They can keep their doctorate.

Xg's doctorate was awarded 6 years ago, so she can breathe easy. Of course, she might still be open to civil suits brought by the authors from which she copied on the basis of copyright law.

A law professor at the LMU Munich, Volker Rieble, published a treatise in German last year about acquiring a doctorate by sitting tight (Plagiatverjährung. Zur Ersitzung des Doktorgrades). He asks what is more important: Peace and quiet on the dissertation front with less time-consuming investigations of previously examined work, or the defense of academic standards? He pleads for the latter. The blog Erbloggtes had a long discussion about Rieble's article at the time, otherwise there has not (yet) been much reaction to his article. Things move slowly at German universities. But I think that it is time for some serious action about plagiarism at all levels: students, graduate students, researchers. Defining it away will not make it go away.

A Patchwork Thesis

In 2008, a graduate of a German Fachhochschule (University of Applied Sciences, abbreviated FH) submitted a dissertation to the Tomáš-Baťa-Universität in Zlín, in the Czech Republic, a good 800 km from his place of residence. At that time he was in his mid-40s and had been working as a public official for the past 18 years.

One may wonder why a mid-career public official would go so far afield to obtain a dissertation, when there are excellent universities near his hometown. In Germany at that time, a Diplom from a Fachhochschule was not sufficient to be admitted for doctoral work. Often extra coursework would be required, or even a Diplom or Master's at a university had to be completed before beginning work on a doctorate.

Today, the Diplom is no longer offered, but instead Master's degrees from both universities and FHs are acceptable for beginning work on a doctorate at a university. Then as now, however, doctorates earned in other EU countries can be used back home, so there is quite some interest in obtaining degrees outside of Germany.

Zlín offers a four-year doctoral program in Management and Economics that charges 1,600 €/year in tuition that requires submission of a written dissertation that is generally published online in the Zlín Digital Library.  One of these dissertations, the one submitted by the German public servant, is a 100-page dissertation that is now documented as case #140 on the VroniPlag Wiki site.

The "barcode" representation for the manual VroniPlag Wiki documentation for the case looks quite like a bit like a patchwork quilt. This barcode is often misunderstood as being the result of a software-based plagiarism investigation. Nothing could be further from the truth: All discovery and documentation is done manually with the help of small software tools for various tasks, and all documentation is reviewed by a second researcher.

The bar code uses five different colors:

• white is for pages that have not yet been investigated, or for which nothing has yet been found;
• bright red is for pages that contain text parallels on over 75 % of the lines of text on a page. The line counting is not automatic, but must be done and reviewed by two researchers;
• dark red is for pages that have text parallels on between 50 and 75 % of the lines;
• black is used for pages that have text parallels, but that make up 50 % or less of the page;
• blue is used for pages that are excluded from consideration. These are normally the title pages, the table of contents, the literature list and any appendices.

For this dissertation, there are some additional blue bands: Towards the end of the thesis there is a list of abbreviations and one of figures and tables that are sandwiched in between pages of content.

[Msc 2008]

The two blue bands after the first few pages are quite interesting. The first one, extending from page 13 to page 21, is taken verbatim from the Catechism of the Catholic Church. The second one, running from page 26 to page 33, is verbatim from a European commission document. Discounting these pages, as each one has a brief reference given when the copy begins, there is only a total of 65 pages of content in this dissertation.

The patchwork continues when looking at the individual pages, as there are also problems on many of those pages. For example, extensive swatches of text are taken verbatim from seven Wikipedia articles without reference. The pages 23–25, which deal with some topics in German history, are lifted entirely from the Wikipedia with only minor adjustments.








Ten fragments are taken from a journal article that appeared in the Academy of Management Review. There are occasional references to the article given in the text, but it is not made clear that the pages 56–63 are almost entirely from this article, and taken verbatim. Page 58 includes an interesting copy & paste error: the printed version of the article has a footnote from the previous page continued at the bottom of the left-hand column. In the dissertation, this text can be found sandwiched-in  between the text from the left-hand column and the text from the right-hand one. The sentences thus make no sense whatsoever.



On page 72, the Daimler-Benz sustainability report is copied with the "we" pronouns changed to "they" or "their" or "Daimler".

Pages 77–79 are taken verbatim from a discussion paper for the European Sustainable Development Network Conference 2008. A copy & paste error on page 79 caused quotations marks from the original to be reproduced as | or —.

Whenever the writing shifts from proper English sentences to word-for-word literal translations from German, the thesis becomes quite unreadable. I quote from page 50:

Germany applies in 2001 above a surface of 357,020 sq. kms, the population around catches 82,330,000 million people (2000: 82,260,000). Of it 40,326,000 persons (49.1%) were gainfully employed in 2000. In 2001 there were 2.4% of the employed persons in the agriculture, forestry and fishery, 22.0 % in the producing trade without the building trade, 6.7 % in the building trade, 25.4 % in trade, guest's trade and traffic, 15.2% in the area of financing, renting and services for companies and 28.3% in the sector of public and private service providers (cf. "Germany in figures" in 2002). While trying to explain how many of these persons have been employed in small and middle companies or to define the boundary between them and large companies in Germany one pushes fast to his borders, because there are not enough actual statistical facts offered from the Statistical Federal Office¹⁶. Merely on data delivered by the Institute Of Middle Class Research¹⁷

[Note: The institution referred to in the last sentence is the Institut für Mittelstandsforschung in the original. It actually researches small and medium-sized enterprises, not the middle class.]

The University of Zlín publishes the reviews by the thesis examiners online, a commendable gesture. Two excerpts are documented in the Findings section on the VroniPlag Wiki:

• Review 1 (17.11.2008): "Author considers that CSR [Corporate Social Responsibility] is suitable way how to change current managerial thinking which describe from different point of views, e. g. historical progress in religious aspect."
• Review 2 (17.11.2008): "The dissertation is written very cultivate, digest at the high academic level."

I beg to differ. I don't find this patchwork of other people's words to be either at a high academic level or acceptable scholarship. Above all, it is a mystery to me that people are not aware that when they publish their works in a digital library that they are available world-wide for discussion. Does no one read the theses critically before publication?

The University of Zlín has been informed of the situation and has been sent this report containing all the documentation produced manually by VroniPlag Wiki about the dissertation. The university promptly acknowledged the receipt of the documentation by email. Many other universities, sadly, don't manage to do even that.

Belgrade Mayor plagiarizes doctorate

A new plagiarism scandal has erupted in Serbian politics. The scandal around the dissertation of the Minister of the Interior, Nebojša Stefanović, is still in full swing. Now the dissertation of the Mayor of Belgrade, Sinisa Mali, entitled “Creating Value Through the Process of Restructuring and Privatization – Theoretical Concepts and Experiences of Serbia” and submitted in 2013 to the University of Belgrade’s Faculty of Organizational Sciences has been documented to be heavily plagiarized.

Raša Karapandža, Professor of finance at the European Business School in Wiesbaden, Germany, documented the plagiarism in English on the Serbian site Peščanik in early July.

Karapandža has put together an interactive graphical representation of the thesis with every page of Mali's thesis linked to the iThenticate report on the plagiarism found on that page. Even considering all the caveats about the use of plagiarism detection software, quite a number of sources, including the Wikipedia, have been identified. Karapandža calls on Mali to step down from office, quoting the petition sent to German chancellor Merkel when the plagiarism was found in the dissertation of the German Minister of Defense, Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg:

If the protection of ideas is no longer important in our society, then we will gamble our future away.

Dissertation mining

The past few weeks have certainly been quite stressful for the medical school of the University of Münster in Germany. VroniPlag Wiki began reporting on plagiarism in 21 dissertations to date that were submitted to the school in the years 2004 – 2011. The findings even include a chain of three plagiarized dissertations: Gt (2010) is a plagiarism of Ckr (2009) on 100% of the pages. The Ckr thesis contains plagiarism on 94% of the pages, including Gb (2008), which in turn is a plagiarism of a thesis submitted 2007. All four theses were prepared with the same doctoral advisor. Another cluster of five theses that repeat material from each other, with another advisor, has been documented (Tmm/40 pages/47%; Aeh/15 pages/86%; Clm/27 pages/62%; Clg/21 pages/80%; Amh/21 pages/52%).  In addition to the plagiarism, evidence of data falsification has also been found in some of the theses.

How were these theses identified? And why were so many found in such a short time?

It was a rather simple application of data mining techniques to dissertations that are available as open access digital publications from university libraries. Medical dissertations were chosen, as there are a large number of them available and they often deal with similar topics. Many theses in the past 10 years are available as open access publications from the university libraries. The theses are also often painfully short, sometimes even consisting of just one publication by a research group that one of the authors submitted as their dissertation.

Volker Rieble, a German law professor, discussed open access repositories in his 2010 book Das Wissenschaftsplagiat: Vom Versagen eines Systems (p. 52ff). The book has unfortunately been taken off the market, as one of the persons named as a plagiarist won a lawsuit filed against Rieble. He argues that open access repositories, especially ones operated by universities, should be taking measures to make sure that their authors are not being plagiarized if their texts are being openly offered. He feels that this publicly available material is a simple invitation to plagiarize. Of course, he does recognize that open access could help discover plagiarism, but he pointed out that no one was taking any action against copyists.

Well, now someone has. The work of VroniPlag Wiki in the past three years has shown that there is extensive plagiarism in dissertations and other academic texts throughout Germany, in all fields, and done in many different ways. The cases in Münster were discovered using a collusion identification method applied to open access dissertations.

While reading an early version of my book, one of the VroniPlag Wiki researchers stumbled over the section on collusion. What exactly was that? Collusion is when two or more students cooperate in producing materials in situations in which they were expected to work alone. For example, two students write a program together and each turns it in as their own work. Or five students in a very large course cooperate to write a paper together and then each turns in his or her own slightly modified version. Students hope that the teachers will not be reading carefully (or not at all?) and thus will not identify the "work-saving" efforts. It is not necessary for the participants to knowingly participate in the collusion. If author A re-uses text from author B without B being aware of the situation, this would also be considered collusion.

The researcher noted that he could imagine students doing such a thing, but no doctoral candidate would be so careless as to do something like that, would they, especially when they plan on publishing online? Would people collaborate on a dissertation, each submitting their own copy, or each writing half of the dissertation, or would someone copy another dissertation from the same school or even the same professor? Unimaginable. But there was a precedent.

There was a case of collusion discovered at the medical school in Münster in 2011 that was identified by a Wikipedia author who stumbled upon two practically identical dissertations that were submitted three years apart – to the same examiners ([1] submitted in 2009 and since withdrawn, is a copy of [2] from 2006). This was found just after Germany was rocked by the Minister of Defense, Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg, stepping down after his dissertation was found to be extensively plagiarized.  The dean of the medical school in Münster emphasized then in a press release that plagiarism in a dissertation was an absolute singularity. He also noted that they would be looking into punishing the advisor, perhaps by barring him from taking on doctoral students in the future.

Would it be possible to check whether it is indeed true that such a plagiarism is a singularity? After all, many theses are, indeed, available online. All a dishonest author would need to do would be to download one or more theses, touch them up, and submit them. Since they are apparently not read closely (or why is such a thesis acceptable in Münster? The formatting from PDF page 14 is so erratic as to make the text unreadable) this might seem a good strategy for someone who is trying to get that "Dr." with as little effort as possible.

Intra-University Clusters
The first step in identifying collusion within a university department is to obtain a good number of theses from a university and then check each one against all the others from the same school. A list of the dissertation-granting medical schools in Germany was quickly found online. An attempt was made to download medical theses for a selection of these schools, including Münster.

As is usual for data mining applications, the most time-consuming part of the exercise is getting the data ready for work. The university libraries' offerings of digital publications are of quite varying quality. Some offer wonderfully clean metadata with URLs to the entire thesis; others have chaotic catalogs, upload the same dissertation more than once under different names, or for some reason split a thesis into chapters. The names of the files are quite amusing, as they appear to be named by the candidates themselves: "copyshop-fassung.pdf" [copyshop version], "dissertation_finish.pdf", or just "doktor.pdf". Most are called "dissertation.pdf" or "doktorarbeit.pdf".

Since the main piece of software compares each thesis with all the others, the number of comparisons grows quadratically with the number of texts examined. Comparing only a few dissertations with each other only takes minutes, but as the number of dissertations examined increases, the time quickly grows to days or even months.

The results of the comparisons are not an automatic plagiarism determination: only identical text sequences are identified. Each and every suspicious pair of theses needs to be investigated manually. Often, both authors identified their thesis as joint work or the text is a direct quote, so this is not a plagiarism. Or both had a copy of the same questionnaire in the appendix and a very similar literature list that is responsible for the text similarity. Or two copies of the thesis were uploaded to the library database under different names. But occasionally, there is no such explanation for the numerous and at times extensive swaths of identical text. And so, researchers with VroniPlag Wiki began to document the theses – manually.

Manual documentation of plagiarism involves locating the text overlap positions, recording the overlap, and having a second researcher sign off on the documentation. Once a potential source for a thesis has been located, the text comparison tool SIM_TEXT that researchers at VroniPlag Wiki implemented so that it can run locally in the browser can be used to identify the positions of the text overlap. These are documented as fragments, recording the page and line numbers, and documenting the portion of text similarity in both the source and the potential plagiarism.

The result lists from the comparisons can be sorted by amount of text overlap, so that one can work down from the most extensive ones. Investigating Münster, quite a number of theses turned up that were able to be rapidly documented, as the theses were quite short and the text copying was often page-wise.

The University of Münster has set up an investigative committee that includes external experts for what the press speaker has termed a "conflagration" (Flächenbrand). The committee is to convene in July. The dean is quoted in the press as being extremely irritated by the number of cases documented, the head of the medical association of Westfalen-Lippe is quoted in the same article as stating that since it is expensive to train doctors and they are urgently needed, it would be a "waste of labor" to demand that medical students spend two to three years working on a dissertation. I respectfully request, then, that medical students just quit producing sham dissertations. They should be awarded an "M.D." upon finishing their studies and let those interested in furthering science and academics invest their labors in producing dissertations that are original work.

Die Ausbildung zum Mediziner ist teuer. Mediziner werden dringend gebraucht. Da sei es eine "Vergeudung von Arbeitskraft", wenn von einem Studenten verlangt würde, zwei, drei Jahre an einer Doktorarbeit zu arbeiten – wie in anderen Fächern üblich.

Münster - Münstersche Zeitung - Lesen Sie mehr auf:
http://www.muensterschezeitung.de/staedte/muenster/48143-M%FCnster~/Kammerpraesident-ueber-Plagiate-in-der-Medizin-Mogel-Aerzte-muessen-nicht-mit-Strafen-rechnen;art993,2384095#plx1248430946

Die Ausbildung zum Mediziner ist teuer. Mediziner werden dringend gebraucht. Da sei es eine "Vergeudung von Arbeitskraft", wenn von einem Studenten verlangt würde, zwei, drei Jahre an einer Doktorarbeit zu arbeiten – wie in anderen Fächern üblich.

Münster - Münstersche Zeitung - Lesen Sie mehr auf:
http://www.muensterschezeitung.de/staedte/muenster/48143-M%FCnster~/Kammerpraesident-ueber-Plagiate-in-der-Medizin-Mogel-Aerzte-muessen-nicht-mit-Strafen-rechnen;art993,2384095#plx89862196

There is also an interesting collection of statistics on dissertations in Münster put together by a VroniPlag Wiki researcher in an attempt to try and understand what may have caused this extreme cluster of plagiarism. What one sees here, though, is that the number of dissertations submitted has declined, as has the number of online publications.

Münster is not the only university that has been shown to have accepted massive plagiarisms. A thesis from the Charité in Berlin was recently posted (Ali) that has more than 75% plagiarism on all (100%) of the pages. It is also evident that data was falsified in this thesis, as the numbers of patients interviewed are different from the older thesis, but the percentages given are the same ones in the older thesis, not for the numbers published in the thesis itself. When Spiegel-Online questioned the doctoral advisor about the thesis, he could only vaguely remember it. The Charité is currently investigating.

Inter-University Clusters
After investigating theses from just one university, clusters from two or more different universities can be combined in order to see whether there has been any "borrowing" of text between the universities. This is an extremely time-consuming process, but it turns up fascinating results. Two theses have been found that are around three-quarters identical that were handed in within a few weeks of each other to two different universities under different advisors. If this was joint work, it is not mentioned in either thesis. There are quite a number of theses that are patchwork quilts of text from different universities. There is a 30-page thesis submitted to Mainz (Tz), of which over half of the pages are from a thesis submitted seven years prior to Gießen.

There are so many text identities that have been found, it would take an enormous effort to document them all. But it has been shown that it is possible, using a rather simple (if time-consuming) method, to detect collusion plagiarism. Universities that publish epubs should at least make sure that they are not re-publishing material before they put a text out in public. After checking against their own text collection, perhaps a test against a selection of other university libraries is worth the investment of time. And at the risk of sounding like a broken record: the examiners should actually read the theses and perhaps keep better track of their students and the topics they pose.

The next blog article will be quite technical and explain the methodology used to find these collusion plagiarisms.

P.S. While finishing up writing this blog post today, medical dissertation #22 from Münster was posted, Aaf. The 48% of the 31 pages that have text overlap appear to be taken from a thesis submitted one year previously. The text has been disguised by substituting synonyms and re-wording sentences. This makes it difficult for software to identify the thesis as a possible plagiarism, although there are some longish portions that are taken verbatim. Page 13 shows a problem that appears when plagiarized text is rephrased: the original author writes that S. aureus appears to increase the mortality rate. That word was left out of the reworded text in Aaf, making it appear to be a known fact.

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....

No "real" name, no answer

The pseudonymous researcher Robert Schmidt continues to work on a documentation of irregularities in the dissertation of Norbert Lammert, the parliamentary president of Germany. He has now encountered additional interesting indications of copying. On page 32 of the dissertation a reference is given to Eldersveld, p. 408f. One source, Mühleisen, attributes a different statement to Eldersveld from the same page. However, there is no mention of the contents Lammert's statement refers to on the page given, but there are other pages that are close to Mühleisen (p. 16, p. 19).

Such things happen: two numbers get switched, a 1 is mistaken for a 4 or a 7 because one's notes were taken in terrible handwriting, off-by-one. However, when another writer makes the exact same mistake, it is curious. When there are more identical errors in bibliographic data, such as wrong names or titles as found, for example, on page 52, some serious questions arise. However, the president of the University of Bochum decided that there is no case here, end of the discussion.

Robert Schmidt forwarded a copy of a letter to me that he sent to the Minster of Innovation, Science, and Research in North Rhein-Westphalia. In that letter he analyzed the legal basis for dealing with plagiarism cases in doctorates that have already been granted and came to the conclusion that in Bochum, as at most other universities, it is the job of the individual schools or departments (Fakultäten) to decide what to do. The ombud for good scientific practice is primarily installed as a place for whistleblowers from the inside to point out cases of academic misconduct. The ombud can forward other cases to the dean in question, but the granting and rescinding of degrees is solely the job of the affected Fakultät. In Bochum, however, the rectorate of the university decided not to open a case after an initial investigation by the ombud. The Fakultät was not consulted. He requested that the ministry, as the supervisory body for the university, look into the question.

It is, perhaps, "only" a procedural question. But if the university gives itself rules, why does it not follow them?

The answer came, surprisingly fast:

Ich bitte um Verständnis, dass ich zu Anschreiben von Personen, die sich
offensichtlich unter Verschleierung Ihrer Identität an das Ministerium wenden, in der Sache keine Stellung nehme.

(I ask for your understanding that I cannot comment on letters addressed to the ministry from persons who have obviously cloaked your [typical misspelling, "their" is probably intended -- dww] identity.)

Obviously? I did not realize that it was necessary to send a copy of one's identity card along with a letter questioning whether proper procedures were followed. I think the ministry needs to read Robert K. Merton. It does not matter what the position is of someone who states a truth or asks a question. Professor or student, laboratory assistant or janitor, Nobel prize winner or academic without a job: What counts is the CONTENT of the statement or question.

I also fail to see that "Robert Schmidt" is an obvious cloak. Honeybee123 is perhaps clearer as a name that is probably not on an ID card, but there are numerous Robert Schmidts who were born with that name or who changed to that name upon marriage. I suppose it is a welcome dodge for avoiding answering uncomfortable questions, but what if that was, indeed, his name?

(Updated with a few minor corrections and a few links)

Dr. Z fights corruption and plagiarism in Russia

[I'm posting some oldish news that need documenting -- dww]
The German daily newspaper Die Welt published an article by Julia Smirnova on August 23, 2013 about "Dr. Z.", a scientist who is fighting corruption and plagiarism in Russia. A Swedish blogger reported on one of his revelations in February 2013, giving Russia today from February 22 as his source, but unfortunately no links to such an article can be found.

Andrej Zajakin, according to Smirnova, is a physicist who has lived in Spain for the past six years, doing research at the University of Santiago de Compostela. Using the pseudonym "Dr. Z.", he has been publishing extensive documentation of corruption in Russia. In February the Russian blogger Aleksej Navalnyj revealed that the politician Vladimir Pechtin had lied to voters by stating that he did not own foreign property when he actually owned a house in Florida. Pechtin was forced to step down. Navalnyj gave Zajakin as his source.

Zajakin is one of the persons behind Dissernet, a site that documents corruption and plagiarism in dissertations. The site is in Russian, but is said by Smirnova to have documented plagiarism in over 100 dissertation, including Russian politicians such as Pavel Astachov (children's rights commissioner), Olga Batalina (member of parliament), Vladimir Burmatov (member of parliament), Vladimir Gruzdev (governor of Tula Oblast), and Oleg Kowalyov (governor of Ryazan Oblast). The plagiarism documentations are linked from the page http://www.dissernet.org/expertise/ and use a similar type of documentation as is found at the German VroniPlag Wiki:

Plagiarism documentation at http://www.dissernet.org/expertise/kozlovaa2005.htm

The German online portal Spiegel online also published an interview (in German) with Andrej Rostovzev, one of the Dissernet scientists, in April 2013, in which he explains that this site is not organized as a wiki, but only permits vetted individuals to contribute to the effort. I don't speak Russian, but I would be happy to offer guest blogging privileges to anyone who would like to report on the progress being made by this group.

Guest commentary: Plagiarism Probabilities

[I have offered guest commentary privileges to anyone interested in posting longer pieces than the comments section will accept. This is the first such comment. -- dww ]

Plagiarism Probabilities
by Gerhard Hindemith

In response to the Copy, Shake, & Paste article  "Automatic plagiarism accusation?" on the documentation of plagiarism in the dissertation of Frank-Walter Steinmeier I would like to make the following comments:

There is an intermediate version of the computer-generated report available online: http://web.archive.org/web/20131012050153/http://www.profnet.de/dokumente/2013/8048r.pdf. The latest update, including most Vroniplag Wiki finds, can be found here: http://www.profnet.de/dokumente/2013/8048r.pdf

Surely the author of the report would claim that most commentators criticizing it did not understand it correctly. The report claims for each fragment a plagiarism probability (Einzelplagiatswahrscheinlichkeit), and if that is low, say 1%, the claim of the report is not that the documented fragment constitutes in fact plagiarism, but rather that it will be plagiarism only in one of 100 comparable cases. Having that in mind, one should disregard those "low probability fragments" for most purposes (and it is not quite clear, why they are included in a report aimed for the public in the first place). The system then goes on and calculates an overall plagiarism probability (Gesamtplagiatswahrscheinlichkeit), which supposedly (none of this is explained in the report unfortunately) then is the probability that the entire thesis should be considered plagiarism. With this understanding, the report makes sort of sense conceptually -- but that doesn't really help much. I think the report should never have been published, even if these clarifications are understood. Here are my reasons:

1. If the outcome of this report really is only a plagiarism probability below 100% (it was around 60% in the beginning), publishing it seems quite unethical, because at that point there was a 2/5 chance that the dissertation was perfectly OK (if we believe the system ... see further down, whether that is a good idea).
    
2. The professor made confusing claims with respect to how these probabilities should be interpreted. Here for instance: http://www.n24.de/n24/Nachrichten/Politik/d/3599146/-wir-finden-noch-mehr-bei-frank-walter-steinmeier-.html he claims that in Steinmeier's thesis 400 passages are not OK, that in fact Steinmeier has forgotten the quotation marks in 400 instances. ("Und bei Herrn Steinmeier kam eben heraus, dass 400 Textstellen nicht in Ordnung waren. Konkret heißt das: Er hat bei 400 Stellen die Anführungszeichen vergessen."). Now, this is much more than the claim that the system has found certain (low) probabilities for plagiarism. It seems that the professor is swinging back and forth between quite bold claims (400 instances of forgotten quotation marks) that attract attention and cautious remarks about the correct interpretation of the findings (the system only finds "plagiarism indicators", often with low probability attached, not certain plagiarism), when challenged with concrete examples.
    
3. As I said, conceptually I can imagine that the probability set-up could make sense, but in practice the details matter a lot. Not only for the technically minded insider, but also for the reader trying to make sense of such a report and the so prominently placed probabilities. The following questions would need to be explained in order to ensure one can interpret the findings of the report:
   
   3a) What is the definition of "plagiarism" for a single fragment? Is every small citation mistake considered plagiarism, or only more severe cases of verbatim copied text of a certain length? Is self-plagiarism included? One needs to know this to understand what a plagiarism probability of say 20% actually means.
   
   3b) Equally, one would need to know what the definition of "plagiarism" for the entire dissertation would be. This could be as severe as "at least one citation error in the entire thesis" or as forgiving as "the plagiarism is so severe that even a medical dissertation in Germany would be rescinded". Without this definition, the overall probability figure is meaningless.
   
   3c) Important for the interpretation of the probabilities would also be an explanation, how these probabilities are conditional on the choice of potentially plagiarized sources, whether they are independent of text length and with what suitable confidence intervals comes their estimation.
    
4. I have very strong doubts that the probability calculator has been developed on a methodologically sound basis. But maybe I am wrong. In order to check this, the following questions would have to be answered:
   
   4a) How has the probability calculator on fragment basis been built? Given that surely an automatic system cannot be taught to detect plagiarism directly, it would pick up certain factors that point towards plagiarism (like identical text and the length of it, lack of quotation marks, lack of reference, etc.) and estimate the plagiarism probability on the basis of those factors. The question is then: on the basis of what pool of text fragments with known plagiarism status has the tool been calibrated? Surely this pool would have to be fairly diverse, covering different plagiarism types, citation styles, and subject areas, and hence would have to be quite large, to achieve a certain statistical validity of the calibration results? How has been assured that this pool includes a representative proportion of fragments that are not considered plagiarism? What is the discriminatory power of the resulting probability calculator?
   
   4b) According to which logic have the fragment level plagiarism probabilities been combined to form the overall plagiarism probability? How has the overall probability been calibrated, on the basis of what pool of dissertations with known plagiarism status? How has the fragment-to-fragment correlation been accounted for that surely is induced by a consistent writing style throughout the thesis? (e.g. if in the whole thesis italics mark quotations (or a different text size/color for that matter), this might not be picked up by the system and the plagiarism probability on fragment level would be consistently over-estimated.) What is the discriminatory power of the overall probability calculator?
   
   4c) In the case of the Schavan thesis, a similar report has been generated, apparently following the same methodology: see here: http://www.profnet.de/dokumente/2013/11357profnet.pdf. This report gives an overall plagiarism probability of 100%. How can an automatic system reach absolute certainty, particularly for a dissertation where the passages of verbatim copied text are very limited? This 100% value makes me suspect that the system has in fact never been calibrated, and the probabilities given have no empirical basis, but are rather heuristic constructs that somewhat point in the right direction? If this was the case, one would have to ask, why such probabilities have been calculated in the first place, with apparent high precision up to a single percentage point?

I leave it at that. If there are reasonable answers to all these questions, I would be amazed, and the probability calculator would constitute a very interesting diagnosis tool and certainly an advance scientifically (the author of the report should then definitely publish his research). But given the complexities of plagiarism detection (as opposed to text parallel detection), I suspect the discriminatory power of an empirically built tool would be disappointingly low and its calibration extremely involved and costly. I don't believe the report about Steinmeier's thesis is generated by such a tool because the provided documentation (close to none) gives me no reason to believe it was but rather several indications that it most likely was not.

Automatic plagiarism accusation?

In October 2013 Germany saw another dissertation plagiarism case involving a politician.  Frank-Walter Steinmeier, former Foreign Minister and the leader of the opposition in the previous parliament, submitted a thesis in 1991 to the law faculty of the University of Gießen. Entitled Bürger ohne Obdach, Citizens without Shelter, the 395-page thesis deals with the legal aspects of homelessness. The weekly magazine Focus reported in an article (not linked here because Focus participates in the consortium claiming intellectual property on links and snippets) on Sept. 29, 2013 that a marketing professor who has been trying to sell his software system for detecting plagiarism for many years had found extensive plagiarism in the dissertation, and that Steinmeier had called the accusation absurd.

The daily newspaper taz soon dug out the news that Focus had paid the marketing professor to investigate the theses of politicians, supposedly without targeting a specific individual. Focus had also asked a law professor to evaluate the accusation. He had stated that most of the passages were unproblematic, for example a seven-word name of a book listed in a footnote, but that there were three portions that were more extensive. The report was published online, 279 rather incomprehensible pages worth of text in tiny print, colored text, and some so-called "total plagiarism probability scores". The press immediately whipped itself into a frenzy, presumably because they believed that a computer program would be much more accurate at finding plagiarism than people. After all, the software reported numbers on every page! But since no one quite understood what the numbers actually meant, extensive discussion ensued.

A number of blog commentators and online media picked the report apart (among them Spiegel Online, Causaschavan, Archivalia, Erbloggtes, HajoFunke). The marketing professor was interviewed many times, giving conflicting statements: In Deutschlandfunk he stated that he had examined the report before publishing it; in an interview with Main-Netz he is reported as having said

 [...] bei der Überprüfung durch unsere Software gab das System bei Steinmeiers Arbeit einfach »Rot« an und verschickte einen automatisch generierten Prüfbericht an die Universität.
(our system checked Steinmeier's thesis and it registered "red" and sent an automatically generated report to the university)

If the statement that the report was automatically sent is true, it demonstrates quite vividly the grave danger that the use of plagiarism detection software without understanding the report can cause. While false negatives are bothersome – a plagiarized text is not flagged – a false positive can potentially be devastating for the author of the text, as an accusation of plagiarism will still hang in the air, even if it later turns out that the accusation cannot be substantiated.

Perhaps this case demonstrates the problem with automatic accusations made solely on the basis some number generated by a software system. The algorithms by which the number was derived is usually not published and thus unverifiable. The numbers in general do not mean anything until they have been checked – every single one – by an experienced teacher or researcher to determine if the result is at all meaningful. As I have said repeatedly: A software system cannot determine plagiarism, only a human can. 

A software system can, however, find indications that there might be plagiarism, although it would be helpful if not so many irrelevant "hits" were to be reported. VroniPlag Wiki began documenting the three more extensive text parallels in Steinmeier's thesis that were reported by the system and soon found more plagiarism from these sources, as well as additional sources that were not listed in the automatic report. When the extent of the text copying was determined to be severe enough, the case was published online as VroniPlag Wiki case #57. Many of the fragments documented are so-called "pawn sacrifices", the source is given, but no indication is made that a copy or near copy of the source text was used.

Does this vindicate the computer-generated report? (The automatic report produced by the marketing professor appears to be constantly updated as new sources are found by VroniPlag Wiki, the original version is unfortunately no longer available online.)  Hardly. If there is plagiarism in a thesis, a software that reports plagiarism on every page will, of course, be right in a way, even if most of the flagged pages are false positives.

Thus, if plagiarism detection software is used by an institution, no accusation should be made until the report has been checked in detail by a person who understands what the results actually mean. Schools that define "plagiarism" to mean any report by a plagiarism detection software that is above a specified threshold should re-think their policy. Any sort of automatic plagiarism accusation should not be tolerated.

Update: For guest commentary on the mathematics of the plagiarism probabilities, see the next article.

German Medical Dissertations

There have been discussions about the quality of German medical dissertations going back for centuries.  Medical practitioners are quick to note that medicine is a completely different field from, say, German literature, and thus the theses are vastly different. In particular, they often don't bother about the words, it is only the numbers, the experiments, that are important. Thus, a thesis that has plagiarism on three-quarters of the pages (mainly from the habilitation of the doctoral advisor) is considered to be fine.

At many universities it is considered a medical dissertation if the work is published in an international journal. I briefly noted in 2012 one thesis that was only four pages and which was published together with the advisor in the journal, but accepted as a thesis for the student, a practice which I find questionable. If it is the student's work, the advisor should not be on the journal paper; if the advisor participated in the research and writing, then it is not a dissertation. This should be quite clear, and is also stated in the 1998 guidelines for good scientific practice of the DFG.

There is currently a minor public discussion about another such dissertation from the University of Würzburg. The doctoral student, who submitted in 1985, is the husband of a Bavarian politician, thus the apparent interest in the case. Interestingly, the German National Library (DNB) lists the ten-page dissertation clearly as being the same as a journal article that had two authors, the advisor and the student. Soon after the local press started reporting on the case being a self-plagiarism (for example, the Nürnberger Zeitung) the university issued a statement confirming that they were investigating the case, and then a day later stating that according to the rules that were valid in 1985, it was perfectly okay to submit a dissertation like this. (A discussion about the supposed plagiarism can be found on the VroniPlag Wiki forum.)

I looked up the dissertation this afternoon in the library: "Histochemical and biochemical studies in the kidney of female rats after castration and treatment with sex hormones" (published in 1985 in the Zeitschrift für mikroskopisch-anatomische Forschung, accepted as a dissertation 1986)  and found some very similar papers-accepted-as-dissertations listed in the paper and then in the DNB:

• Peptidasen in der Niere männlicher Ratten nach Kastration und Testosteronsubstitution (published in 1984, accepted as a dissertation 1985) 
• Proteinmuster im Harn von Ratten nach Kastration und Substitution mit Geschlechtshormonen  (published in 1984, accepted as a dissertation 1986)
• Renale Peptidasen und Proteinurie nach Langzeitbehandlung kastrierter Ratten mit Geschlechtshormonen  (published in 1984, accepted as a dissertation 1986) 
• Peptidasenaktivitäten in der Niere männlicher Ratten nach Kastration und Substitution mit Geschlechtshormonen (published in 1984, no mention of co-authorship of doctoral advisor in the national library, although listed in the bibliography of the first dissertation as co-authorship in the same journal)
• Ditto Cathepsin-B-Aktivitäten in der Niere von Ratten nach Kastration und Behandlung mit Geschlechtshormonen (published in 1985 with no co-authorship mention in the national library, but listed with co-authorship in the bibliography of the first dissertation mentioned). 

Now the dissertation itself consists of

• Abstract: 1 page
• Introduction: 1/2 page
• Materials and Methods: 1 1/2 pages
• Results: 5 pages, of which 1 1/2 are pictures
• Statistics: 1 page
• Discussion: 1 1/2 pages
• Literature: 1/2 page

For a journal article - this is a great structure. The journal was published from 1924-1990 and is indexed in MEDLINE. But is this a doctoral dissertation? And why is the doctoral advisor listed on the journal?

Some friends started looking for more of these dissertations, there are scores of them:

• A three-page publication with seven authors that was sufficient for one of the authors to receive a doctorate in medicine from the TH Aachen in 2012.
• A three-page publication with the advisor that was sufficient for a doctorate in Münster in 2006 - with a lovely typo: "Erectile dysfunction (ED) represents a highly prevalent social problem; approximately 5–20% of the general mail population suffer from moderate-to-severe ED."
• Six pages, four authors, one dissertation in Hamburg in 2005.
• Nine pages, seven authors, one dissertation in Hamburg in 2001. 
• ...

Isn't it time to move on to an "MD" for medical doctors and get rid of the "Dr. med."?

If at first you don't succeed....

VroniPlag Wiki case #42, is fascinating. It seems that this law thesis was submitted to the Humboldt University in Berlin in 2000.  There was so much plagiarism to be found that the submitter was strongly encouraged to withdraw the thesis, which he apparently did.

The next year, a new version of the thesis was submitted to the University of Innsbruck in Austria (after all, they do speak German there, too). There it was accepted without question. VroniPlag Wiki has currently documented plagiarism on over 20 % of the pages. One of the major sources is the standard textbook on English law. The other is a thesis on a very similar topic from 1969. Many of the argumentation chains used strangely do not address any of the law commentary or court decisions that took place since then, which is odd for a dissertation prepared at the turn of the century.

The author, as is usual, insists that he used footnotes. Of course he did, but it is not made clear that the entire argumentation was lifted with slight changes from the sources. The University of Innsbruck announced that it was looking into legal aspects regarding the Austrian blogger who called attention to the work published on VroniPlag Wiki, not the author of the dissertation, who is currently employed as a professor in Germany.

At least the Austrian press is jumping on this. It seems that cases are only promptly addressed when the glaring light of the press is shown into the dark cellars of academia. There is an interesting parallel to the year 1794 (!) in the Kaiserlicher Priviligierter Reichsanzeiger:

"Man macht oft sehr unwürdige Leute zu Doctoren und Licentiaten, besonders in den Rechten und in der Medicin. Die Facultisten, welche von dieser Schöpfung aus Nichts einige Einnahmen haben, entschuldigen sich damit, wenn man ihnen darüber Vorwürfe machen will; daß, wenn sie auch den unwissenden Candidaten hätten abweisen wollen, derselbe noch einige 30 andere Facultäten in Deutschland würde angetroffen haben, von welchen sich gewiß einige daraus würden eine Ehre und Freude gemacht haben, den Herrn Candidaten zu krönen"
(Often, quite dishonorable persons are made doctors and licentiates, especially in law and medicine. The faculties, that have income from this creation out of nothing, excuse themselves when faced with accusations with that statement that if they would send the candidates away, they would find another 30 faculties in Germany of which some would be pleased and honored to crown these candidates. [translation dww])

Kaiserlich privilegirter Reichs-Anzeiger, 2 Januar 1794, S. 8

Update: Translation, typos, link to source added

Düsseldorf University to open formal revocation investigation

After an almost six-hour-long meeting behind closed doors, the Faculty of Arts and Humanities of the University of Düsseldorf voted to open formal revocation proceedings on the dissertation of Annette Schavan, the current German Minister of Education and Research, as noted in a press release issued this evening. Since so many people are interested in this topic world-wide, I am translating it to English here:

In May 2012 a public allegation was raised that the doctoral thesis of Prof. Dr. Schavan contained plagiarism.  If we as a faculty find substantial evidence of  scientific misconduct, we must pursue it vigorously --  regardless of the person involved or their social position. There is no legal statute of limitations on such cases.

The Faculty of Arts and Humanities must then determine if the doctorate was correctly granted at the time it was granted.

As part of the process, the doctoral committee of the Faculty of Arts and Humanities conducted a preliminary investigation. They examined Schavan's written thesis and obtained a statement from her on the situation.

Based on the recommendation of the doctoral committee, I [the dean, Bruno Bleckmann] presented the question to the Faculty Board at today's meeting as to whether or not we should proceed with a formal revocation investigation.

The Faculty Board discussed all of the issues raised during the preliminary investigation in detail today. They voted by secret ballot with 14 votes in favor and one abstention to open a formal revocation investigation. 

In the coming weeks, the members of the Faculty Board will intensively deal with the documents prepared by the doctoral committee and the statement from the person in question. The next meeting of the Faculty Board is set for February 5, at which time the continuation of the revocation investigation will be on the agenda. 

I want to emphasize that the process is still open-ended at this point.

For this reason I ask for your understanding that this statement, which details the current status and procedures, is all the information that I can provide at the present time.

Medical Triple Header

It was a busy Friday afternoon on the VroniPlag Wiki site. Even though there are still fragments still awaiting a second opinion, three German medical dissertations were named on the home page:

• #31: http://de.vroniplag.wikia.com/wiki/Ch, clocking in with just 60 pages, already has 53 % of those pages documented with text parallels. Eleven of those pages contain more than 75 %. The thesis was submitted to the medical department of the University of Freiburg/Breisgau in 2009, defended in 2010, and published in 2011. 
• #32: http://de.vroniplag.wikia.com/wiki/Raw, is a veterinary thesis submitted to the  Tiermedizinische Hochschule Hannover in 2007, "only" has text parallels on 28 % of the pages, but there are some complete pages that are copied (Page 13 and Page 33) as well as extensive copying from the Wikipedia and a number of other dissertations submitted in veterinary medicine both at the Hannover school as well as other schools.   
• #33: http://de.vroniplag.wikia.com/wiki/Qf, is a medical thesis submitted to the University of Tübingen in 2001. There are text parallels on  21 % of the pages, and it seems that this thesis was also the basis of some of the plagiarism in Case #32. Most of the text parallels found to date in this thesis are from older dissertations published in the year 2000.

Should we bother documenting plagiarism in medical theses? The discussion rages on behind the scenes. A medical doctorate is just not the same level of work as a doctorate in other fields. I think the German universities need to switch to a more honest M.D. degree that they award (so they can still call themselves "Doktor"), but to quit the pretense of doing research. It appears that fragments of text, much like DNA or RNA, splits apart and recombines with other texts, with a few different numbers thrown in here or there. 

I've written to the universities in question, but I'm not holding my breath. There is a lot of feet-dragging going on in investigating the accusations of plagiarism.

Frankfurt School of Management rescinds doctorate

The Frankfurt School of Management, a private institution of higher learning in Germany that confers doctoral degrees, has announced that they have rescinded the doctorate from a candidate, the first degree awarded at this school, who had plagiarized on 94 of the 380 pages of his thesis, as well as many other problems with the thesis. The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung reported on the case, but the article is behind a paywall.

How to find Plagiarism in Dissertations

Germany is awash in another wave of discussions about plagiarism. This time it is the Minister of Education and Research, Annette Schavan. The story about plagiarism in her dissertation broke in May, and the University of Düsseldorf has been examining the case since. Today, October 17, the committee is meeting to decide on the results, but the documentation that they prepared was leaked to the press this past weekend, and the press has been in a frenzy.

And I have laryngitis and can't talk. I have journalists pleading with me to explain how the "magic" VroniPlag Wiki software works. The problem is, there is no magic software. The method used to find plagiarism in dissertations (or any other written work) is called "research". Just normal research.

But since so many people need to know how this is done, here's a crib sheet with 10 easy steps:

1. Obtain the thesis. If you are just trying to find the dissertation of a particular person who did their doctoral work in Germany, give the German National Library a try. Type in the name and see what it comes up with. Then use the catalog of your local library (often called an OPAC, online public access catalog) or a union catalog to try and locate a copy. Most German states have a union catalog, in Berlin it is the KOBV.  If there is none in your locality, you can obtain a library card and then have the thesis sent to you using inter-library loan.
2. Read the thesis. There is no royal road. The so-called plagiarism detection software can turn up the odd reference, but only if the sources are online. The best bet is to start reading it, and look for shifts in writing style, or places where the writing turns Spiegel-esque, or for sudden useless details, or misspellings, or just wrong content.
3. Google. I've given up on other search machines. Just belly up to the search bar and type in three to five words from a sentence or paragraph and see what turns up. If you get a lead through Google Books, use step 1 to obtain a copy of the book. If you get lucky and the first paragraph is taken from the FAZ or the NZZ -- paydirt! Don't just try one paragraph, take a few from different parts of the book. 
4. Follow the footnotes. University teachers do this when teaching their students how to footnote, and it scares the daylights out of students when they see that the professor found out that they were just making up the footnotes. Does the reference exist? Is the thing being said found on that page? Is the whole paragraph taken from the reference with the quotation marks "forgotten"? Does the chapter in the dissertation continue on after the footnote without a further reference? Is this paragraph perhaps just a translation of the reference? 
5. Browse the bibliography. What is the most recent source used? Is it five years older than the dissertation? In some fields, this would sound an alarm. Is there some strange or obscure literature listed? Obtain it! Do you need journal articles? Germany had a wonderful listing of the holdings of all libraries nationwide, the Zeitschriftendatenbank. It will tell you where they can be found, and many can even be delivered to your email account as a pdf for a few Euros. Many libraries also subscribe to digital libraries that can be used when sitting at the library. A walk would do you good, anyway, so get over there and have a look.
6. Digitize. If you have already found a source plagiarized in a dissertation, the chance is that there is more. Have a good look at each, and now digitize the relevant portions. Use a book scanner in the library to get a high-quality scan of the pages as a PDF. You lay the book flat under the camera, press a button, turn the page, press a button, until you are done. Experienced scanners can do over 100 200 pages per hour. Now use an optical character recognition (OCR) software on the PDF. There are free ones like Google's Tesseract or professional versions such as the one built into Adobe's Acrobat or OmniPage or Abbyy Fine Reader.
7. Compare. This is one if the few software systems the VroniPlag Wiki people use. It is a text comparison tool that is based on the free algorithm of Dick Grune. The tool marks identical passages in two documents that it is comparing. Put the dissertation in one side, the source in the other, and press "Texte vergleichen!". Don't forget to make a screen shot if the results turn out colorful.
8. Document. If you find anything, document it exactly. Page and line numbers from the dissertation, URL or page and line numbers from the source, and a copy of each. A two-column side-by-side has proved easy to understand when showing the results to others.
9. Need help? If you have already found some nasty text parallels, drop in at the VroniPlag Wiki chat (https://web.libera.chat/ on channel #vroniplag) or use the drop if you want to be discreet. You might be able to interest someone in working on the case. But remember, they are all volunteers. Or you can continue on yourself, and then inform the ombud for good scientific practice at the university in question.
10. Publish. If you feel that it is necessary to publish your results, you can either choose a wiki, such as the GuttenPlag Wiki or the VroniPlag Wiki, which makes it easier for others to help you with the documentation, or you can publish on a blog, like the SchavanPlag blog, which gives you complete control of what is published. Or you can print up a book, like Marion Soreth did in 1990 when she documented the dissertation of her colleague Elisabeth Ströker. 

All clear? If I've missed anything, please add in the comments!

Update: A correspondent noted that when you scan once you actually get two pages. And that an experienced person can do 200-400 pages an hour. I'll stick with the lowest number.
Update 2: A student of mine improved the comparison tool. It is available as similarity-texter free of charge online.  It runs in your browser. If you find something colored, just click on it - and the identical text on the other side will align with it. This makes examining large files very easy, and it is also easy to prepare a PDF with the passages marked using the tool.