Three words suffice!

I am currently testing about 20 plagiarism detection systems (PDS). During one of the tests we saw a very nice turn of phrase that we had plagiarized from one newspaper site (with permission!): "paranoide vorolympische Kraftmeierei" (paranoid pre-olympic muscle-flexing).

The system did not find our source, the Süddeutsche Zeitung, but the Swiss Tagesanzeiger. Putting just these three words into Google proved something I have been saying all along: three to five words suffice.


As it happens, the author, Henrik Bork, is the author of these identical articles. He sold one in March, one in April. The ethics of this is another discussion. But the use of PDS is so time-consuming, one really just needs to pick out phrases like this upon reading, and use a search engine. Full stop.

Wissenschaftsbetrug - Scientific Misconduct

I was at the German National Library the other day picking up some material on a plagiarism case and I casually riffled through the catalogs as I am wont to do. I found a very interesting dissertation from the University of Zürich in Switzerland:

Völger, Marion: Wissenschaftsbetrug - Strafrechtliche Aspekte - unter besonderer Berücksichtigung des Missbrauchs staatlicher Forschungsförderung. Schulthess, 2004. ISBN: 3725548129

The dissertation is quite interesting, even for non-lawyers. The author first gives a good overview of definitions for scientific misconduct and an analysis of how scientific enquiry works in the first place. She uses a number of cases that have come to light in recent years to illustrate her points.

Then she goes into the legal aspects: University law, criminal law, all sorts of other legal bits and pieces. She focuses, of course, on Swiss law and explains the complicated system of research financing in Switzerland.

She basically comes to the conclusion that there is not much that one can do, although certain aspects of scientific misconduct could be covered by certain laws. There is a nice summary (in German) at http://archiv.ethlife.ethz.ch/articles/campuslife/betrugundrecht.html.

The 2009 Plagiarius-Award is taking applications

If you find a plagiarism in the area of industrial design, you can nominate the plagiarist for the Plagiarius Award 2009! The deadline is December 10, 2008. The prize winners for 2008 and previous years can be seen online. The prize is a black garden gnome with a gold-painted nose (German for "get rich" is sich eine goldene Nase verdienen, to earn a gold nose).

Strangely, no winners have ever shown up to collect their prizes.

It's all right to break the law.....

This is perhaps a bit off-topic, but in the area of ethics, so I will put it in.

Since Berlin is close to Poland there are many (usually Vietnamese) sellers of untaxed cigarettes on choice street corners. And since smokes are expensive, they have many customers, who don't mind breaking the law.

I see them every morning on the way to work, and this morning I saw a guy
purchase five packs, the exchange of cigarettes and money being quite open. Since he was going my way and didn't look to be a knife-carrying druggie, I spoke to him.

"You just committed a crime," I stated. "What are you going to do about it, tell the cops?", he retorted. "The state makes me pay tax twice on cigarettes, once for the cigarette tax and once for the VAT added on to that price, so it's okay for me to get my cigarettes here. They are cheating us, so I cheat back." And he turned into the next street.

Is this one of the reasons that so many people think that it is "all right" to cheat, lie, and plagiarize? Everyone does it, and "they", the state or the university system or are cheating you anyway, so the only way to get even is to cheat back?

A popular book by Ulrich Wickert some years ago in Germany was titled: Der Ehrliche ist der Dumme: Über der Verlust der Werte. The honest person is the stupid one.

Plagiarism Detection Software Test 2008

We are currently conducting our Plagiarism Detection Software Test 2008. The current field of candidates is:

• turnitin
• Ephorus
• Plagiarism-Finder
• Docoloc
• Urkund
• StrikePlagiarism
• TextGuard
• CopyScape
• WCopyFind
• CatchItFirst
• SafeAssign
• ArticleChecker
• JPlag
• PaperSeek
• YAPLAF
• AntiPlag
• PlagAware
• PlagiatCheck
• PlagiarismDetector

This year we are not only testing the quality of the plagiarisms found, but also assessing the usability of the systems, awarding points in the categories of information, cost transparency, layout, readability of the reports, navigation, and integration in the teaching workflow.

If you have plagiarism detection sofware you would like to have tested, please leave a link here or contact me. We will publish our results on September 30, 2008.

A Plagiarist for the White House?

I was dismayed this morning to see that Obama had chickened out and chosen Joe Biden as his running mate. My first associations were: old, Senator, something-nasty-but-what? A quick check with Google defined the nastiness: plagiarism.

In the 1988 presidential race, the senator from Delaware, Joe Biden, wanted to be president. In 1987 he gave a speech in Iowa as he was jockeying for the Democratic nomination with Michael Dukakis, amongst others. What he didn't realize was, that it was being filmed.

Dukakis' campaign recognized that this was a speech from the far-left British politician Neil Kinnock. They put together an ad with a few sound bites from Biden, then the same thing from Kinnock, and leaked it to the press. Biden had to withdraw his bid, as more and more reporters found the sources for other bits of his rhetoric, as reported on FamousPlagiarists. It was also found that he had been guilty of plagiarism in law school.

Barack Obama has also be nabbed for mimicking Deval Patrick, as shown on YouTube (1, 2, 3). Apparantly, the politicians (or their speechwriters) think that a good turn of phrase can be used by anyone.

I hope someone finds a copy of the Biden talk and has it digitized for YouTube soon. Video and searching rather changes the environment for plagiarists - maybe they need to learn how to attribute things better in the future.

Spiegel "borrows" from Atlantic Monthly

I was looking forward to the current issue of the German newsweekly Der Spiegel to see the article for which they had contacted me for a comment about plagiarism in schools. The plagiarism topic usually comes up in August when there is nothing else to report on, something I always find amusing.

Looking at the title page, however, I was not amused. I had so enjoyed Nicholas Carr's article in the July Atlantic Monthly called "Is Google making us stupid?", and Atlantic had had a great cover for this. Here Google was using the same cover for its August 11, 2008 issue - just translated into German!

Der Spiegel, August 11, 2008

Atlantic Monthly, July/August 2008

Ouch. Deep down in the article, Spiegel does refer to Carr's article in the Atlantic. But I can't find an explanation for why they lifted the design of the cover. I wrote a letter to the editor - we'll see if there is an answer next week.