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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.
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.
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!"
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
... 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?
it's getting harder and harder these days to finish a major thesis without actually adopting (copying?) ideas from online sources
Remove the word "online" from that sentence and it apply it to any given time.
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
Yes, this is exactly what you do.
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
Being hard is no excuse for not doing it. Keeping track of your sources is not a huge task, since the information most often is available right in front of you when you're reading someones work already.
... whatever
There's a simple rule. Either you came up with an idea yourself, in which case you need to show all reasoning steps and all experimental tests you performed, or you didn't, in which case you need to cite it. If you can remember enough to reproduce every step of someone else's work without referring to the original paper, but can't remember the paper you read it in, then you've got a very unusual mind.
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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.)
[raises hand]
Many moons ago (almost a whole yonk) I could remember fragments of a poem, but not its name. Couldn't find it in bookstores, nobody I asked (including som Eng Lit grads) had heard of it [1]. I wondered if I'd made it up, perhaps as a school exercise - today's homework is to write a poem in the style of ... - or if I was just a bit barmy.
Then I was at a party, in a house I'd never been to before. I picked a book of poetry off a shelf and not only was the poem in it, there was a marker in the exact page.
I also find I get confused about whether I saw something on TV or read it, and sometimes which language I read it in. I occasionally don't notice if words are upside down.
tl;dr version: stuff gets in my head sometimes and I have no idea how it got there.
[1] Brin & Page were still in short trousers.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
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).
It is unusual to copy it verbatim, or nearly so, without knowing what you copied it from. If you copy, you have a duty to attribute. Even if you are only copying into your notes, you should copy the attribution in case you put it into a paper. Both out of respect for the original author, and for readers of your paper who may legitimately ask how you knew what you state. We don't want scientific papers where the answer to "how did you know that?" is "I read it on the web somewhere".
Consciousness is an illusion caused by an excess of self consciousness.
Being hard is no excuse for not doing it. .
Of course not.
Keeping track of your sources is not a huge task, since the information most often is available right in front of you when you're reading someones work already.
I humbly suggest you are entirely wrong. Even simple manual copying of information leads to errors. Not even double or triple checking will find them all. The errors may be small, but may be significant like writing down a wrong page number. Now imagine 350 pages of text with 1200 foot notes derived from a text corpus of 100 major works ( 30.000 pages) produced over 3 years with some chapters having more than 10 re-writes or revisions. Not counting all the notes and foot notes that never made it into the dissertation, but was produced and needed tracking. You are simply bound to have errors; a simple move of a text section may delete a crucial foot note or place the right foot note at a wrong place. Now imagine doing all this tracking without any computer at all, and only using pen and paper (index cards and notebooks), and type it using a typewriter like the accused did in 1980.
Errors and errata are facts of life, even with the most meticulously produced work, and likewise it is a major challenge and hard work to ensure that the sources in a dissertation are as correct as possible. You simply have to reread and check them all when finished. Not easy at all.