French journalism school executive suspended during plagiarism investigation

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

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

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

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

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

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

Swiss Journalist Reported Plagiarism, Had Home Searched

This is a long and complicated case that has been brewing in the French-language part of Switzerland about a case of plagiarism at the University in Neuchâtel that was reported on in Le Matin by the journalist Ludovic Rocchi. The university eventually suspended the professor in question, and he in turn accused Rocchi of libel and slander because he published about the plagiarism before the internal investigations were finished.

The police searched Rocchi's house in 2012, looking for proof (Le Matin, Persönlich.com, NZZ), and confiscating papers and computers belonging to his wife, as well as hunting him down on a business trip and taking his laptop. This is apparently the first time such a thing has happened in Switzerland, according to Le Matin. Rocchi sued the government for illegal search and seizure (Le Matin, NZZ). The government felt that he had published illegally, as one is innocent until proven guilty, which is strange as in a plagiarism case one can easily document plagiarism and source, and plagiarism is not a crime in a legal sense, but academic misconduct.

In April 2013 Rocchi published a detailed description of the copying in Le Matin, including interesting changes to texts that were about Canada or the Netherlands in the original and suddenly were about Switzerland. In May Rocchi detailed some problems in the professor's CV. It seems he listed positions at a university in Quebec that he didn't actually have. The Quebec university had previously asked him to remove these, and he promised to do so, but never actually did, according to Rocchi's report. 

It was eventually determined that the plagiarism was "partially given" (NZZ, Le Matin, 20 minutes) and that the mobbing within the department ran deep. This seems to be a rather common problem, as seen in the Zürich case this blog reported on recently.

Rocci won his court case (NZZ, telepolis) but the government is appealing to the Swiss Supreme Court.

A Journalistic Quicky on Plagiarism

Time and again I get exasperated with journalists who are only out for a quick sensation instead of actually researching a question. Last Friday a journalist wrote me an email at 3 in the morning asking me to help him answer a question from a student. They are starting a new "service", answering real questions. The question was: How can I find out if I have plagiarized in my term paper? He wanted a very short answer, 4-5 lines, and it could be as "perky" (flott) as possible.

I was traveling, giving a workshop on plagiarism detection for professors and leaving for a week of vacation in the morning. Since this is not a question that can be answered in 4-5 lines, I just didn't reply.

So what was the result? I was contacted today by a friend with a question about a software system that I had "recommended" in some article. Checking my alert service I found the article and was aghast -- the software in question was one that came in last in my 2010 test of so-called plagiarism detection software. The entire article turns the results of my tests upside down.

I suppose it is because I am a computer scientist and I test software that journalists expect that I "recommend" the top-rated software, tell people what to buy and where the magic button is for quickly and painlessly finding plagiarism. In fact, there is no recommended software, the category at the top is "partially useful". It says at the top of the page:

Our recommendation: Only use these systems when suspicions of plagiarism arise that cannot be found with 3-5 words in a search machine. The focus should be on teaching students about plagiarism and how to avoid it instead of investing time in using software. Most of the work involved later is in preparing a plagiarism case and dealing with the plagiator, and for this good documentation is needed. Very few systems provide good documentation.

The journalist banged together three statements, the first and the last attributed to me and the second one not directly including my name, but people have read it as being from me. He writes (numbering by me):

(1) Die Berliner Medieninformatikerin Debora Weber-Wulff hat vor Kurzem verschiedene Softwares getestet. Sieger war das kostenpflichtige Programm turnitin, das mittlerweile an über 80 deutschen Universitäten und Forschungseinrichtungen genutzt wird. Sie können es möglicherweise über Ihre Hochschule kostenlos nutzen.
(2) Eine brauchbare kostenfreie Alternative ist Viper.
(3) Kurze Texte können Sie außerdem gratis bei PlagAware kontrollieren lassen, das in Weber-Wulffs Analyse ebenfalls solide abgeschnitten hat.

 ad (1): "vor Kurzem" means recently. Um, my last test was 2010, published in 2011. We are currently retesting the software, hoping to publish the results in September. These tests take a lot of time to conduct. "Sieger" means the winner. There were no winners. There were 5 systems that were given the grade of C-, as they did not even manage to reach 70 % of the points in the test. None of these can be considered winners, but they can be used as tools if one has a suspicion of plagiarism. They have far too many false negatives and false positives for general use, and all five are on about the same level. And the idea of letting students use them (for free even!) to run their papers through until they come out clean gives me shudders down the spine. The students will resort to swapping word orders and using unfitting synonyms until the numbers (which will differ for the same text from system to system and even in some cases from test to test) reach an acceptable level. There must be someone with experience in reading and interpreting the reports to go over this together with the students if it is to be a meaningful learning experience.

ad (2): Oh dear. I suppose the journalist was looking for a free system, as opposed to the expensive ones. I have no idea what terms he googled to find this system, but he didn't read this on my results page. Technically, he doesn't say that I find the system useful ("brauchbar"), this is his own judgement. But sandwiched in between two references to my work, people misread it as me recommending it. Nothing could be further from the truth. The street address is the same for the company offering the plagiarism detection service and for a paper mill / essay writing service. Their respective telephone numbers differ only in the last digit. And actually reading the "Terms and conditions" should scare the daylights out of anyone: If you submit a paper to Viper, you give the company "All Answers Limited" the irrevocable right to keep a copy of the paper forever and to use it for marketing purposes, either for Viper or any "associated website".  The email account I used for the test (we use a different email address for every test to see what kind of spam shows up later) now gets fun letters with subject lines such as "Enjoy the sun and get your dissertation done on time". Oh, and Viper has the distinction of being the worst system for detecting plagiarism in the test, coming in last with just 24% of the effectiveness points on all of our test cases in 2010.

ad (3): Another system is mentioned as being "solide", respectable, in my analysis. Again, "partially useful" is not even close to respectable.

I wonder why the journalist is in effect advertising the services of three companies, one of which is extremely questionable, instead of really trying to answer the question. At least the comments are good: Most of the comments note that one does not actually plagiarize by mistake. If you are taking careful notes and making the difference clear between what is your own words and ideas and what is from someone else, you are fine.

Now, how do I get journalists who just breeze through writing something like this without actually reading and understanding what hat been written on the topic to start doing real research themselves instead of just blowing off an email to me? I suppose I need to answer all journalists, as soon as possible, with short and snappy sayings. I do wish, however, that they would read at least the summaries before they ask.

Swedish Editor-in-Chief Steps Down in Plagiarism Row

Katarina Ekspong, the editor-in-chief of the Swedish daily newspaper Nerikes Allehanda, published in Örebro, stepped down the end of August/beginning of September over a plagiarism row. 

At first it seemed that she had only plagiarized one piece by a free-lance journalist published in January of this year about Örebro.  Upon closer inspection of her work, additional word-for-word plagiarisms were discovered.

She first just stepped down as publisher, but has since resigned from all positions. She declines all requests for comment or interviews.

The Case of Faheed Zakaria

The news from the States is full of stories about India-born Fareed Zakaria, an American journalist with Time and CNN who has been suspended in a plagiarism scandal. He has admitted to plagiarizing a number of paragraphs from a New Yorker article on gun control. His article, "The Case for Gun Control", is still online, as is of course the article by Harvard University history professor Jill Lepore, "Battleground America". CNN appears to have suspended him for similar plagiarism in a blog that has been taken offline.

I feel that this is a problem, to take stuff offline. I want to be able to examine the evidence for myself. My news feeder (Shameless plug for Highbeam) from the States led me to the Seattle Times' article "CNN's Zakaria sorry for plagiarism". There an example of the "plagiarism" is given, and I looked up, puzzled. This was statement of fact. The only text similarity was the name of the person quoted and the book quoted from.

I dug around for the articles and threw them at the comparison tool, SIM_TEXT, that we use on the VroniPlag Wiki.

Fareed Zakaria

Jill Lepore

Hmm. Wow. We have cases of plagiarism in Germany that have massively more copy and pasted that were found by their universities (BTU Cottbus and University of Heidelberg) to be only "technical weaknesses": Dd with 44 % of the pages affected: 28 -  35 - 48 - 103; Nk with 75 % of the pages affected (many from her doctoral advisor): 17 - 66 - 81 - 90.

I am, of course, of the opinion that both universities listed above are in error and that these theses are grave plagiarisms, the doctoral titles should be rescinded.Fareed's sin is the selection of facts and quotes, that were lifted from the New Yorker. It is right to suspend him, give him some time to think about what he did here. I don't know about other texts that might contain similar material. But this is far, far less than the Jayson Blair case. But should he be fired? What do my readers think?

Update 2012-08-19: The Chicago Tribune reported on Aug. 16. that Zakaria has been reinstated both at Time and at CNN. I'm quite glad, as it would have been very difficult to explain large-scale copy and paste in Germany being okay, and a paraphrasing error in the US costing one their job.

Plagiarism and no end

In the never-ending story of Helene Hegemann and her plagiarism in the book "Axolotl Roadkill", the German newspaper FAZ (which seems to have devoted approximately 100 pages of newsprint to this topic in the last few weeks) has printed a comment by Durs Grünbein entitled "Plagiarism".

It was a puzzle for the readers, who quickly thought that the way of writing was so old-fashioned and remembered a piece by Gottfried Benn from 1926, also entitled "Plagiarism".

One wonders if the newspapers now think that plagiarism is okay, just as long as they tell us in the end who the real author might have been.

Update: The blog Dialog International has a nice translation of the meatist parts:

Gottfried Benn:
"Was heißt demgegenüber Entlehnung, was Plagiat oder Herkunft des Materiellen, man vergesse doch nicht, dass diese Begriffe in Sphären liegen, die ohne Raum und ohne Atem sind. Seit es Welten gibt, wo immer sich Reiche des Geistigen bildeten, gab es nur eine einzige Sphäre, in der alle Begriffe des Seelischen Maß und Halt, Verurteilung oder Rechtfertigung enthielten, die Sphäre des Schöpferischen, die Kunst."
(What, by contrast, constitutes borrowing, what is plagiarism or origin of the material. Lest we forget that these are terms in the spheres, which are breathless and space-less. Ever since worlds have existed, wherever spiritual realms were formed, there was only one sphere which contained all the terms of the spiritual dimension and support, condemnation or justification, the sphere of creativity, art.)

Hegemann:
"Das, was wir machen, ist eine Summierung aus den Dingen, die wir erleben, lesen, mitkriegen und träumen. Originalität gibt's sowieso nicht, nur Echtheit."
(What we do is the sum of the things that we experience, read, observe and dream. There is no originality, only authenticity.)

Quotation copying

The German online newspaper Travemünde Aktuell reports on a blatant case of plagiarism from one of their articles. They had reported on a (actually rather boring) podium discussion with a bunch of politicians evading questions posed by a moderator.

The Travemünde Aktuell had made a transcript of what was actually said, but it was rather incoherent, so they reformulated it into sentences that actually made sense and reported it online without using quotation marks, since they weren't actually quotations.

The story got picked up by the advertising weekly Lübecker Stadtzeitung. And suddenly it looks like they have direct politician quotes! They have sentences in quotation marks and these are attributed to the various politicians. Except that they did not actually say that in direct speech. The sentences are 1:1 copies of the text Travemünde Aktuell.

The link above is an interesting article commenting on this copy/paste/add quotation marks job. They have documents of the transcript, of their version, and of the Lübecker Stadtzeitung version. And they are pretty clear that they consider this to be a particularly horrible kind of plagiarism. They are suggesting that they did the work, went to the discussion, talked with the politicians, got the quotes verified. But all they really did do was Google, copy and paste and then decorate with quotation marks. Didn't even have to get off their seats to read through other papers in order to steal the words.

This appears to be something very commen - I often find direct quotes from me in some newspapers by some journalists I have never spoken with. Some are quoting my online learning unit (I suppose that is okay), others just steal quotes and take them out of context for their own articles.