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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.'"
That's cynicism dressed as realism. The plagiarism in question seems mild and perfectly explainable by honest mistakes. Which was absolutely NOT the case for von Guttenberg, the case she called embarrassing.
Not a fan of her policies, but it's ridiculous to hold politicians to absurdly high standards and react with cynicism when they fail them. That's not the way towards better politics and politicians.
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?
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
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.