The Plagiarius Awards 2009 have been announced! The Aktion Plagiarius e.V. in Germany awards yearly prizes in the form of a black dwarf with a golden nose (inspired by a play on words of the German saying, sich eine goldene Nase verdienen, to earn a golden nose) to companies that instead of coming up with innovative products choose to imitate other products.
This year's winners are: The electronic hand dryer “HTE”, the knee support „GenuTrain®“, and the trolley “Carrycruiser”. Two of the plagiarisms come from China, but first prize goes to a German plagiarist.
Saturday, February 14, 2009
Thursday, February 12, 2009
But I don't want to be a scientist!
I had an interesting conversation with a student teacher last night. She's new on my sports team and I was explaining to her what I do including my work fighting plagiarism.
She exclaimed: Oh no, you can't do that, how else can I pass except by copying?
I thought at first she was joking, but she was dead serious. She only wants to be a sports and maths teacher, not a scientist. And she feels that things have been said so well by others, why should she try and say it again. I pointed out that this is how she learns things, by putting things in her own words. "I don't have time for that!" she exclaimed.
She was, of course, shocked to learn that her change-a-word-here-and-there process doesn't help: Three words suffice.
I think we have an even larger problem that student plagiarism rolling towards us like a tsunami wave. If even the young teachers - cut & pasters themselves - don't see a problem in copying, how will we teach the next generation independent thought and how to write?
She exclaimed: Oh no, you can't do that, how else can I pass except by copying?
I thought at first she was joking, but she was dead serious. She only wants to be a sports and maths teacher, not a scientist. And she feels that things have been said so well by others, why should she try and say it again. I pointed out that this is how she learns things, by putting things in her own words. "I don't have time for that!" she exclaimed.
She was, of course, shocked to learn that her change-a-word-here-and-there process doesn't help: Three words suffice.
I think we have an even larger problem that student plagiarism rolling towards us like a tsunami wave. If even the young teachers - cut & pasters themselves - don't see a problem in copying, how will we teach the next generation independent thought and how to write?
Wednesday, January 28, 2009
German Degree Mill shut down
Spiegel online reports that a German Degree Mill that sold doctorates has been shut down.
The Institut für Wissenschaftsberatung in Bergisch Gladbach had been in business for the past 20 years. Because of a very high fine in a case of bribery, the company is now bankrupt and their home page defunct.
The degree mill boasted proudly of having paired off thousands of people who wanted doctorates and were willing to pay for it with cash-starved universities and/or greedy professors.
Of course, they were always "legal" - only offereing assistance and advice, no ghostwriting, they said.
One of the two owners was put on trial for bribing a university professor in 68 cases. In July 2008 it was revealed that they paid the professor 4200 Euros (sent to the bank account of a relative): 2100 for accepting the "doctoral student" and 2100 Euros after graduation.
The state court in Hildesheim sentenced the law professor from the University of Hanover - who had raked in over 150,000 in fees that he said that he needed to do renovations on his house - to three years in prison and 150,000 in fines. The degree mill owner was sentenced to 3 1/2 years prison and fined 75,000 Euros, although only 8 of 68 people who paid the first fee actually made it through and obtained doctorates.
The second owner of the company, fearing that he could be sentenced for criminal delay in filing, especially as a second case is still in the courts, filed for bankruptcy. The liquidator has had the web page taken down.
The University of Hanover now asks all doctoral students to swear that they have not used an "advice service".
The Institut für Wissenschaftsberatung in Bergisch Gladbach had been in business for the past 20 years. Because of a very high fine in a case of bribery, the company is now bankrupt and their home page defunct.
The degree mill boasted proudly of having paired off thousands of people who wanted doctorates and were willing to pay for it with cash-starved universities and/or greedy professors.
Of course, they were always "legal" - only offereing assistance and advice, no ghostwriting, they said.
One of the two owners was put on trial for bribing a university professor in 68 cases. In July 2008 it was revealed that they paid the professor 4200 Euros (sent to the bank account of a relative): 2100 for accepting the "doctoral student" and 2100 Euros after graduation.
The state court in Hildesheim sentenced the law professor from the University of Hanover - who had raked in over 150,000 in fees that he said that he needed to do renovations on his house - to three years in prison and 150,000 in fines. The degree mill owner was sentenced to 3 1/2 years prison and fined 75,000 Euros, although only 8 of 68 people who paid the first fee actually made it through and obtained doctorates.
The second owner of the company, fearing that he could be sentenced for criminal delay in filing, especially as a second case is still in the courts, filed for bankruptcy. The liquidator has had the web page taken down.
The University of Hanover now asks all doctoral students to swear that they have not used an "advice service".
Tuesday, January 27, 2009
Thursday, December 18, 2008
Fake Conferences
It's that time of year again. Suddenly, your inbox is filled with letters requesting that you submit a paper to the "The 13th World Multi-Conference on Systemics, Cybernetics and Informatics: WMSCI 2009" or "The 6th International Conference on Computing, Communications and Control Technologies: CCCT 2008" or "The International Multi-Conference on Engineering and Technological Innovation: IMETI 2008", all interestingly co-located in Orlando, Florida, and all organized by one Professor Nagib Callaos of the "International Institute of Informatics and Systemics".
Never heard of any of this because you are a philosopher getting the emails, too? Don't worry, serious computer scientists don't usually go to the conferences, although people do easily get impressed by all the names and submit a paper.
Strangely enough, all papers are accepted, as long as you have paid your registration fee. You don't actually have to come and give the paper, although the family will surely love following you to Orlando. The "Acceptance Policy" is spelled out in pseudo-scientific detail on the conference site. I paraphrase: We accept everything, because there might happen to be a good paper in there, and because a reviewer might plagiarize a paper they reject.
This conference accepted a paper back in 2005 that had been generated by a computer programmed by some MIT students, SCIgen. A nice blog discussion of that and the conference is found here. There was quite a row about this back in 2005, as one must question how scientific a conference is that accepts random (albeit well-worded) garbage and is willing to publish it. It is said that more than 1500 papers are accepted (at $ a pop that isn't chicken feed), and the "majority" are actually presented. That is not what a real conference is about, where you meet and discuss with peers working in similar areas.
How many of these thousands of papers ever get cited? That is perhaps an indication of how good the papers really are. I just searched the ACM Digital Library. There are 19 (nineteen) citations of the WMSCI conference. There have been 12 such conferences taken place.
That's not too many, so I went through the references for all 19 papers. Eleven of these papers were written by at least one of the authors of a WMSCI-published paper, so over half are self-citations. One paper is Peter G. Neumann's note of the acceptance of the fake paper in his "Risks to the Public" column in Software Engineering Notes.
As an aside, there's a fascinating paper on bibliometrics for discovering low-quality conferences published in 2007: Measuring conference quality by mining program committee characteristics.
Glancing down the lineup of invited speakers can cause quite some hilarity: Karl H. Müller, is given at CCCT2008 as being with the "University of Ljubljana (Austria)". I don't think that Austria has acutally annexed Slovenia, and a search of their web site turns up Mr. Müller as having given a talk there a few years back, but he is not listed as a teacher. He lists himself in his CV on the pages of his institute as teaching at any number of Austrian schools, but strangely, they don't list him.
Dr. Subhas C Misra is listed for this conference as being a visiting Scientist at Harvard, for another conference as being a visiting scientist at State University of New York. At another conference he is listed as the "NSERCPDF Scientist, Harvard University", but I find no mention of this program outside of his CV. Harvard includes CVs of its visiting scientists on its home page, there is no mention of Misra.
Who are these guys?
It seems that anyone can make up a fancy institute name and make themselves director, declare themselves teachers at University X (and may actually have taught there a semester or so before being put out on their ear), make up papers and fancy conferences and rush around finding themselves soooo important - but this has nothing to do with science! They can even pretend to be from some institution. Most are so large, no one can be sure that they are not actually from that place.
What can be done to stop this pseudo-science? Or do we just ignore them, but watch young people and unsuspecting colleagues pour departmental travel money into attending these conferences to present their papers? We do get a publication point out of it.....
Note (2016-11-10): This blog entry was the begin of a long discussion. In 2012 I started speaking of "mock conferences" instead of "fake" ones. I keep getting lawyer's letters demanding that I remove this or that article because it is somehow defamatory. Please understand that science is a process, a long discussion, in which arguments are exchanged. Everyone is welcome to post comments, except those that attack a named person, and if you wish to argue your point of view I will be glad to publish guest commentary so that we can discuss it. In my opinion, having a lawyer enter a scientific conversation is akin to "Goodwin's Law": You automatically lose the argument.
Never heard of any of this because you are a philosopher getting the emails, too? Don't worry, serious computer scientists don't usually go to the conferences, although people do easily get impressed by all the names and submit a paper.
Strangely enough, all papers are accepted, as long as you have paid your registration fee. You don't actually have to come and give the paper, although the family will surely love following you to Orlando. The "Acceptance Policy" is spelled out in pseudo-scientific detail on the conference site. I paraphrase: We accept everything, because there might happen to be a good paper in there, and because a reviewer might plagiarize a paper they reject.
This conference accepted a paper back in 2005 that had been generated by a computer programmed by some MIT students, SCIgen. A nice blog discussion of that and the conference is found here. There was quite a row about this back in 2005, as one must question how scientific a conference is that accepts random (albeit well-worded) garbage and is willing to publish it. It is said that more than 1500 papers are accepted (at $ a pop that isn't chicken feed), and the "majority" are actually presented. That is not what a real conference is about, where you meet and discuss with peers working in similar areas.
How many of these thousands of papers ever get cited? That is perhaps an indication of how good the papers really are. I just searched the ACM Digital Library. There are 19 (nineteen) citations of the WMSCI conference. There have been 12 such conferences taken place.
That's not too many, so I went through the references for all 19 papers. Eleven of these papers were written by at least one of the authors of a WMSCI-published paper, so over half are self-citations. One paper is Peter G. Neumann's note of the acceptance of the fake paper in his "Risks to the Public" column in Software Engineering Notes.
As an aside, there's a fascinating paper on bibliometrics for discovering low-quality conferences published in 2007: Measuring conference quality by mining program committee characteristics.
Glancing down the lineup of invited speakers can cause quite some hilarity: Karl H. Müller, is given at CCCT2008 as being with the "University of Ljubljana (Austria)". I don't think that Austria has acutally annexed Slovenia, and a search of their web site turns up Mr. Müller as having given a talk there a few years back, but he is not listed as a teacher. He lists himself in his CV on the pages of his institute as teaching at any number of Austrian schools, but strangely, they don't list him.
Dr. Subhas C Misra is listed for this conference as being a visiting Scientist at Harvard, for another conference as being a visiting scientist at State University of New York. At another conference he is listed as the "NSERCPDF Scientist, Harvard University", but I find no mention of this program outside of his CV. Harvard includes CVs of its visiting scientists on its home page, there is no mention of Misra.
Who are these guys?
It seems that anyone can make up a fancy institute name and make themselves director, declare themselves teachers at University X (and may actually have taught there a semester or so before being put out on their ear), make up papers and fancy conferences and rush around finding themselves soooo important - but this has nothing to do with science! They can even pretend to be from some institution. Most are so large, no one can be sure that they are not actually from that place.
What can be done to stop this pseudo-science? Or do we just ignore them, but watch young people and unsuspecting colleagues pour departmental travel money into attending these conferences to present their papers? We do get a publication point out of it.....
Note (2016-11-10): This blog entry was the begin of a long discussion. In 2012 I started speaking of "mock conferences" instead of "fake" ones. I keep getting lawyer's letters demanding that I remove this or that article because it is somehow defamatory. Please understand that science is a process, a long discussion, in which arguments are exchanged. Everyone is welcome to post comments, except those that attack a named person, and if you wish to argue your point of view I will be glad to publish guest commentary so that we can discuss it. In my opinion, having a lawyer enter a scientific conversation is akin to "Goodwin's Law": You automatically lose the argument.
Thursday, December 11, 2008
When Professors Plagiarize
Henriette Haas, Ph.D., has put up an English-language page with advice for researchers who suspect that their professors may be systematically plagiarizing from them.
Tuesday, December 9, 2008
Warning: Top-Ranked Plagiarism Detection System found to contain Trojan Backdoor!
A reader from Norway, Lothar Fritsch from the Norwegian Computing Center, reports that the installer for Plagiarism-Detector, a system that came in second in our 2008 test of plagiarism detection software, is infected with a Trojan backdoor. The reader has updated his virus-detection software and downloaded the installer from plagiarism-detector.com again - the Trojan is still there. Das ist nicht die Test-Version, er hat eine Lizenz gekauft.
Until further notice we cannot recommend the use of this system! The company was notified on December 5, 2008 of this grave problem. The company promises "answers with minutes". Today is December 9, the Norwegians are still waiting for even an answer that someone has read about their problem.
Until further notice we cannot recommend the use of this system! The company was notified on December 5, 2008 of this grave problem. The company promises "answers with minutes". Today is December 9, the Norwegians are still waiting for even an answer that someone has read about their problem.
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