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German Science Minister Faces Plagiarism Scandal
An anonymous reader writes "Germany's minister for science and education, Annette Schavan, faces allegations that substantial parts of her PhD thesis have been copied without proper attribution. According to the Wordpress blog that brought up the accusations(German), 56 out of 325 pages of her thesis contain instances of plagiarism. Schavan is the same minister who called an earlier instance of plagiarism by the former German defense minister to be 'embarrassing.'"
Politics tends to attract lying hypocrites. Maybe at this stage its a self fulfilling prophecy, everyone thinks politicians are lying greedy people, so only lying greedy people apply for the job. Perhaps if we all started talking about how politicians are upright and honourable it might give them something to aim for.
Aber das Informazionen wollen frei sein!
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
When asked for comment, she responded, "Der Vorwurf, meine Doktorarbeit sei ein Plagiat, ist abstrus." ("The accusation that my doctoral work was plagiarism is abstruse!")
WARNING! This girl exceeds the MAXIMUM SAFE standards established by the FDA for BRATTINESS
What they found in her thesis is that she rightly referenced the authors she quoted word for word, but didn't reference the authors again in following sentences that were in relation to those first quotes in 56 cases.
... or at least, I'm not seeing it.
Page 1 of http://schavanplag.wordpress.com/ has a list of six "prominent" plagiarisms, and even there, it simply looks like two people quoting from the same (acknowledged) source. This guy, whoever it is, obviously has no pieces of text he can put side-by-side that contain more than five identical words in a row.
I mean, look at this one: http://schavanplag.wordpress.com/2012/04/28/seite-280/
Two people, separately, each come to the stunning conclusion that a bad conscience, over a long period of time, will have a bigger impact on your life than a good conscience. And that's one of the good "matches".
Mudslinging, that's all.
1. there has not yet been any scientific peer review of the claims. It's all unproven and should be treated as such
2. the thesis was written in 1980. This is quite a different area regarding both scientific citation rules as well as the abililty to "copy+paste" in today's sense.
Using ideas and deriving information from former work is not unusual, and from what I have read in analyses of the analyses, it's quite unclear how much of these so-called plagiarized pages will really be named as such by a university committee (that will most likely be instantiated).
Also worth to mention that the thesis (for all 350 pages!) received an scl grade.
http://schavanplag.files.wordpress.com/2012/05/plagiatsdokumentation_schavan_020512.pdf
Starting at page 7 is where it gets good...and definitely not explainable. It reminds me of the elementary school "We have zero tolerance for plagiarism. It's easy not to plagiarize! Change some verb forms, add a few prepositions, and reposition clauses!"
Was she just not using absolutely complete citations, or was she ripping off another author? Usually, when we get these stories about someone famous it's the former sprinkled with embellished headlines to attract more eyeballs.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
What american readers probably don't know is how much politics and politicians have changed during the past 20 or so years.
Initially, the "new" West Germany after WW2 had a functional (not without faults, but functional) representative democracy. People with vision, connections and public support would rise to power. We didn't have the pseudo-aristocratic US system of clans and super-rich. In fact, none of the chancellors were very wealthy.
Then, the political elite started to close and shut out insiders. The majority of the people in positions of power today are career politicians, people who have worked a small part of their lives - if at all - outside of their political parties.
For all the flaws they had, the old guard was a different kind of human. They were sometimes arrogant, often egomaniac, but they were in it for their vision of the future, not for the paycheck and the nice kickbacks from the lobbyists.
Our current government is just the worst of that kind. It has no vision whatsoever, no plan whatsoever and is purely reactive. We have satire magazines commenting the current political theatre with sentences like "sometimes I wonder why we are even doing satire anymore". You could take some of their talks straight from the protocol of the Bundestag (our parliament) and if you published it in a humor magazine, you'd love about it and applaud the author on a brilliant piece of mockery - except that they're serious.
There was indeed a former minister and hopeful to be next chancellor, a "superstar" of politics (which, these days, is about the same as being the winner of "Britain's Got Talent" or "American Idol") who had to drop out of politics because his Ph.D. was basically fraudulent. The affair damaged on of the most respected academics in his field, who had fallen for the young man's charm and trickery and issued the Ph.D. to him.
What was most telling, however, was how the political elite dealt with it. Basically, the MOTD was that it's not a big deal. Only massive and sustained public pressure finally made them carve in, one by one, until the guy had to step down.
These are the people who want to lock you away for 5 years for downloading a DVD. "Shame" was the rallying cry at some demonstrations asking for the guy to step down.
Oh yeah, did I mention that he tried a comeback earlier this year? The political class mostly welcomed him back. The public didn't. He went away again. I have no doubt he'll be back.
Yes, shameless about sums up the assholes that currently rule us. And it doesn't matter which party.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
I am not defending Ms. Annette Schavan nor condoning what she did, but I gotta say that it's getting harder and harder these days to finish a major thesis without actually adopting (copying?) ideas from online sources
And regarding "Attribution" --- Unless you keep a very detailed log of at what date and time you visited which site and what information interested you and who is the author of that article, it is very hard to keep tract of what you've copied from whom and where you've copied it from
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
... but it's ridiculous to hold politicians to absurdly high standards and react with cynicism when they fail them ...
Politicians? Isn't this really the case of holding a PhD candidate to a really high standard?
I don't see how knowing who makes the allegations of plagiarism makes it "difficult" to respond to the substance of the allegations. Who dug out these passages is not relevant to whether they are plagiarized.
Germany seems to have a serious problem with anonymous speech; it's already somewhat restricted, and politicians and other important figures are increasingly saying that anonymity and democracy are incompatible and seem to intend creating laws to restrict it further. I think it's Germany's totalitarian heritage: for nearly all of Germany's history, people in power have oppressed inconvenient speech via reprisals, and reprisals are still frequent in Germany today.
I assume her thesis has already been accepted? Why wasn't this caught by her universities thesis review panel? Sounds like her university has done a crappy job here.
1.) The method used to find the unattributed quotations is using a strong peer-review system. It's not the same thing as scientific peer-review, because it's not an experimental science but a document review. It has proven unassailable in previous cases.
2.) The basic rules broken here haven't changed. This is not a matter of how to quote your source, but that you need to list your source. The claim is that she has copied whole passages from other sources without indicating that fact, passing the text off as her own instead.
The problem is and never has been using ideas and deriving information from other sources. Much of science is about that. The problem is the wholesale verbatim lifting of entire passages (allowed) without marking them as quotes (not allowed).
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Yes, but that is still plagiarism. That was one of the things I was preemptively cautioned about by my advisors before I even started writing my thesis. Hence the common citation abbreviation "Ibid".
At best one could say she was sloppy. Not nearly as bad as fraudulent but still something that *should* get your thesis rejected. However in the sloppy case you should be allowed to clean it up and resubmit.
The web site lists a bunch of passages and analyzes them; I don't see anything "unfair" about that. It doesn't demand that the thesis be withdrawn and passes no judgment. On the other hand, once people get started, they tend to find more.
"Peer review" is a mechanism for vetting scientific results for publishing. It has little to do with adjudicating plagiarism claims. A university inquiry may also be held by "peers", but it's a different process. And plagiarism was very much a violation of rules of scientific conduct in 1980 already.
Having looked at some of the passages, there seem to be some improprieties there, but probably not yet enough to condemn the entire thesis. The thesis itself, however, looks like a bunch of b.s. to me. People get Ph.D.'s for such nonsense?
What american readers probably don't know is how much politics and politicians have changed during the past 20 or so years. Initially, the "new" West Germany after WW2 had a functional (not without faults, but functional) representative democracy. People with vision, connections and public support would rise to power. We didn't have the pseudo-aristocratic US system of clans and super-rich.
Nonsense. People who grew up in the US would describe US politics and politicians in precisely the same manner. Needing only vision, connections and public support. Your pseudo-aristocratic clan and super-rich description would also be how uninformed Americans would probably describe European politicians. I would blame the Bond movies for the American misperception. What gave you your misrepresentation? The recent political talking points and political spin of the current era of economic crisis?
to get caught, yes.
Not that I read more than the first few of the 'noteworthy' examples, but what's there is a few (attributed) word-for-word copies, followed by (not correctly attributed) paraphrases. On the assumption that what's left of the thesis (i.e. most of it) is neither unattributed copying nor paraphrasing, I wouldn't call that plagiarism. You can't talk about someone else's work without explaining at least a bit what they said, and then you can either quote the lot or paraphrase it: mostly people do the former when they want it to be really clear that this is exactly what the author said, and the latter when it saves space (or you want to misrepresent what the author said for purposes of knocking them down..). Maybe you should be a bit more clear about the fact that you are paraphrasing text, but it's not exactly hard to see that this is what's going on even without a cite: mainly because the author obviously wants the reader to be aware that this is the position of a previous commentary, then give her own views on that.
The allegations were made anonymously. She wants this person to show up so they could talk. How should that change the quality of her work?
For me this is the most disgusting part. She used the title in public to show her achievement, which in effect is a vector from personal (her) to anonymous (the public) without accepting the vector back - anonymous checking the validity of her personal claim.
cb
For all what it's worth, the attitude towards plagiarism was far stricter in the 80ies than it is today. I've studied in the nineties and I'm pretty sure that any student who got caught even just cheating in one exam at my universities (Tuebingen and HU Berlin) would have been dragged in front of an honor comission and expelled from university. Although officially the rules have not changed, I'm not so sure this would happen nowadays.
Another big difference is that in the 80ies it was demanded and accepted that you have to read all significant literature without any exception in a doctoral thesis. If you weren't able to do that your topic was too broad. Formally, this requirement is still in place, but I don't think that anybody thinks it can be taken seriously nowadays, as the amount of literature has exploded.
To cut a long story short, even "just" paraphrasing a few pages without mentioning the origin is not allowed today and was unthinkable in the 80ies, and since you weren't able to make copy&paste errors showing that there was intention to plagiarize is much easier in that time period.
To cut a long story short: Yes, we shouldn't judge her prematurely, but if there is any passage longer than a paragraph in her thesis that has been copied, then there can be no doubt that she intentionally plagiarized and the time period only makes things worse.
The real problem is that it's pretty clear that the politicians who have been caught didn't actually write their thesis, but paid a ghostwriter for doing it. Guttenberg is the best example, he inadvertantly revealed at press conferences that he didn't have a clue what was in his own thesis! These people are crooks and imposters and have no place in politics. (The ghostwriters couldn't talk even if they wanted to, because their acts likely fall under criminal law and their principals would, of course, do everything to stab them in their back.)
Please explain an scl grade.
If I understand the summary correctly, "56 out of 325 pages of her thesis contain instances of plagiarism" this might be the least plagiarized PhD Thesis in the history of higher education. She should be commended.
Another big difference is that in the 80ies it was demanded and accepted that you have to read all significant literature without any exception in a doctoral thesis.
That's a vacuous statement which could apply at any time. "Which literature must I read?" "All significant literature." "How do I know it's significant?" "Because you must have read it."
Formally, this requirement is still in place, but I don't think that anybody thinks it can be taken seriously nowadays, as the amount of literature has exploded.
That depends entirely on the field. Just because there's more academic output in total it doesn't mean that any individual field produces more output of significance. Many fields are producing much less interesting output than thirty years ago. And what counts as relevant to your field has been narrowed.
What we have today are lots more people competing at undergraduate level. But there hasn't been an explosion in intelligence, and the environment at PhD level remains unchanged, unless you've jumped on the bandwagon of some ephemerally fashionable field (and they've always existed).
These people are crooks and imposters and have a place in politics.
FTFY.
every idiot can get one in like 4 years.
unlike the doctor title.
He probably studied under Lobachevsky.
Tom Lehrer - Lobachevsky
When on one hand you begin demanding a PhD or masters degree for even the most mundane task like it is the case in many places across Europe, you shouldn't be surprised when a lot of fraud happens, these people didn't go into their fields because they have any inherit interest in them, they simply do it out of necessity.
So he's now advising on things copyright, DMCA and three-strikes?
How very fitting indeed!
This European Commission seems to be just a bunch of criminal lobbyists all around
Remember that this was written in 1980 probably using at typewriter handwritten notes. It was an absolute nightmare in those days to keep track of sources with small paper cards or notebooks (notebook as in paper notebook).
Errors in major academic works when it came to sources was probably more common in those days, simply because of manual errors in handling stacks of paper-notes. As a rule you will also find far fewer foot-notes in works before electronic word-processing became common, because the workload associated with the footnotes was so high. It was much more acceptable to give general source notes for a chapter instead of placing a foot-note after each paragraph.
I haven't looked at all the claims of plagiarism, but those I have seen seems very minor, like she could have quoted a source from page 14 instead of page 15. Most of claims seems very vague or downright wrong, like claiming 1-2 citations per paragraph is plagiarism when paraphrasing. That is simply absurd.
I haven't seen even one example of substantial plagiarism in the dissertation, in fact, looking at the very few accusations they call "exceptional" all I see is errors likely to be caused by simple mistakes, or outright absurd claims because her accuser doesn't seem to know that paraphrasing with full sources given, is an acceptable and useful academic tool. It is, and especially was, acceptable to paraphrase eg. an academic theory by stating the source used once, instead of after each and every paragraph.
I don't see any pattern of cheating. Her foot-notes are plentiful, she seems to have both read and understood the cited works, the paragraphs allegedly quoted without sources seems more like trivial error than cheating because they seem to contain banal information, not her conclusions. Most of the rest of the accusations seems to bickering about citation standards. Of course, one can discuss when a paragraph should be a direct citation or how much word changing is necessary to call it a paraphrase, but as long as full sources are given for that paragraph (which she seems to do) so that no one can be in doubt where the informations stems from, it is way over the top to bring forth accusations of plagiarism.
There is simply no comparison to former defence minister "Guttenberg"'s wholesale copy-paste cheating (I doubt he even wrote a single word of it, he probably paid a hack to do it for him).
What disturbs me is how politicized science has become. Science should be a discipline of absolutes.
Not science, but social "science". Which includes the study of politics ('nuff said) and shares its mistaken equivalence of victory in an inflamed debate with factual accuracy. Social "science" is and always has been infested with absurd propositions, bad experiments, misinterpretation of results, paucity of data, appalling innumeracy, and unsupported dodgy inferences dressed as fact. Goal-oriented plagiarism to get a doctorate is just par for the course.
Those of us actually in science don't regard social studies as a science for these and many other reasons.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
Her degree is in education, hardly a science... says a German female neuroscientist, MSc, PhD
Summa cum laude
That matches my experience as a US college student in the 80s. But I don't buy the claim about inadvertent copying and pasting. "Oops, I stumbled, the mouse flew across the screen with the button down, and then my nose and forehead hit CTRL and C at the same time, as I struggled to get up, my ear and my tongue collided with the computer once more, likely hitting CTRL and V. I can only explain not noticing this with the confusion caused by my head injury."
Another big difference is that in the 80ies it was demanded and accepted that you have to read all significant literature without any exception in a doctoral thesis.
That's a vacuous statement which could apply at any time. "Which literature must I read?" "All significant literature." "How do I know it's significant?" "Because you must have read it."
I agree that it's not very precise, but it's not that vacuous. Actually I shouldn't have written "significant", the rule is that you needed to have read all literature about the topic at hand. Basically, what it means in practice is that you should never say "I haven't read that" in a German doctoral defense if you want to pass it. Not that it's harder to pass a German defense than anywhere else, it's just that the German doctoral system is historically a bit different from the PhD system. What's most ridiculous about these plagiarism cases is that at least in the humanities virtually anyone can get his stupid degree. I've put in hard work into my thesis, but I've seen so many lazy morons get a PhD or doctoral degree for practically nothing that in restrospective I'm sure it was worth it. How stupid must one be for not being able to write a thesis in, say, literary science or philosophy and successfully defend it on his own?
Meh. The law was not written for such minor issues. You're right that it's plagiarism, and even a scientific mistake. And in all fairness, the opponents should have picked up on this during her PhD defense. But that's utopia. In the real world, there are hundreds of PhD defenses every day in Germany, and I'm sure that in the stress to finish the PhD, almost all of them make minor mistakes like this... and none of the opponents ever read the entire booklet anyway. And unless you become a minister in Germany, all these PhD booklets disappear into a drawer, or become a support for a computer monitor.
The source was mentioned, so it is not theft or real plagiarism. It's just a mistake. This has nothing to do with plagiarism, and everything with politics. As soon as someone becomes a politician, we expect them to be perfect. Well, if this is the worst someone has ever done, then I'm fine with the idea that that person becomes a minister...
Or, in that last one, New World.
Inherently, for the english speaking (you do realise that most posters, even if they're not naturalised english speakers are writing english, right?) world, any word has at least some connection to a greek root.
Though in several cases, that root has a (germanic, for example) root itself.
But if you move to places that were highly developed in their language before the greeks and only really connected liberally after the greek language had solidified, then you'll find that, by definition, you cannot find a greek root to their word.
There are probably a good number of plagiarized papers out there that have launched careers. No doubt some of their authors have a pucker factor worrying that somebody with too much time on their hands will examine their paper.
Wansu, th' chinese sailor
and continue into the body, BTW.
When you learn to capitalise correctly you can presume to tell me what I do or don't realise, OK?
And your original claim didn't specify words from English, or even the Indo-European family. Indo-European, sometimes referred to as Indo-Germanic, is the parent of both Greek and Latin, among others.
You appear to contradict yourself. In any case, if having a Greek root and having "some connection" to one are the same thing then your great uncle's third cousin twice removed is identically equivalent to your great grandmother's next door neighbour.
P.S. pig, dog.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
It's as likely as "I didn't accept the EULA, my cat did" which I've seen suggested here.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
With a plagiarism rap under her belt, a vice presidency cannot be far away. The perfect career move.
Vietnam Veteran / Former Postal Worker -- Use Caution When Taunting!
It could be something I ran into in college. Writing a paper had a quote, the quote in my own words and other stuff that needed to be cited with a big citation at the end of the paragraph for the first draft. I get it back with essentially "Citation Needed" at the end of the quote. I move the citation to the end of the quote for second draft. I get back reviewed paper with "Citation Needed here also" at the end of the paragraph. I put the citation in both places and got back the review saying "Combine Citations" marked on the paper. Keep in mind that these were all done by the same teacher. I pretty sure I see a lot of the same silliness on Wikipedia with lots of those "Citation Needed" tags on stuff.
Frankly, the citation system we have sort of suck as it may designate the end of the cite nobody has any idea where the beginning of the cite is.
At least German universities act when academic fraud is discovered. See how one of Thailand’s elite universities has for over 4 years covered up allegations of plagiarism in the PhD thesis and academic paper of the Director of Thailand’s National Innovation Agency: http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?sectioncode=26&storycode=419680&c=1