Pressure Rises On German Science Minister In Plagiarism Scandal

An anonymous reader writes "Germany's minister for science and education, who is currently under investigation by her alma mater for plagiarizing parts of her Ph.D thesis, is facing new accusations: a total of 92 alleged incidents of plagiarism (German) have been documented by a blogger, who calls 'this number of violations inexcusable.'"

Comments

No fun

[tsa]

I've been plagiarized once. This bitch had copied one of my articles I wrote in a Proceedings of a conference, with pictures and everything, and used it in an overview article. The worst part of it is that my professor didn't care about it. I'm still mad, and it happened 15 years ago.

Re:No fun

[RogueyWon]

Plagiarism does seem to be getting more and more common, with people getting ever more casual about it. When I was at University in the 90s, there were a small number of students caught engaging in plagiarism. If it was felt to be deliberate, it was basically immediate expulsion. If it was more likely to be carelessness or ignorance of proper academic processes, the consequences were still severe (being made to redo substantial chunks of work).

Speaking a couple of months ago to a niece who's now at University, I was told that around a third of the students in her year for her subject had been caught copying material from the net. The response, a few sessions where they were sat down and told "Plagiarism is bad, mkay".

I came across a hilarious example of (non academic) plagiarism a couple of months ago, while sifting a pile of job applications.

This was the first sift and I had a pile of about 50 in front of me (which I was aiming to get down to about 15 or so by weeding out the obvious no-hopers). We had three other people sitting down with a similar pile (200 applications for 2 posts - this has been the norm for us over the last couple of years - I guess the job market is a scary place right now).

Anyway, I'm only being fairly cursory about it, but even so, I spot that three of the applications seem to use the exact same stock few (clumsy, badly worded) paragraphs. I tap the first line of one of these paragraphs into google and the first hit is a "how to write a job application" site. A very poorly put together site (think site design that dates from the circa 1998 geocities era), written by somebody whose first language is probably not English. The paragraphs in question aren't even particularly relevant to our job application form (which is fairly specific and focussed).

A quick e-mail around to the other people on the panel turns up a total of 6 forms which use text from that site. Clearly it had somehow managed to get a high ranking for a few of the relevant search terms. But seriously, you're competing against hundreds of other people and you decide to use material you've copy/pasted from something that is only one step away from having animated gifs of dancing cats? Unless said site had itself plagiarised its content from somewhere else, of course..

Re:No fun

[Savage-Rabbit]

Plagiarism does seem to be getting more and more common, with people getting ever more casual about it. When I was at University in the 90s, there were a small number of students caught engaging in plagiarism.

Are you sure plagiarism rates are increasing? Maybe it's simply that these days, with everything being digital, it is way easier to uncover plagiarism. I wonder what would happen if one was able to digitize the scientific literature of the last 100 years and then started plagiarism checking Phd. thesis from the same period with a computer.

Re:Oh who gives a fuck?

[fph il quozientatore]

Yeah, and I might sustain myself with a right granted to me by law that forces everyone to give me a few dollars every so often for no reason at all. I mean, sure, authors think of new material, but the mere fact that that's the only way they know how to sustain themselves doesn't justify such freedom-violating laws. Find a business model or die.

Exactly. I have a research position at a university. I get paid to write scientifical papers that are then available for everyone to download on my website. Why would the same thing be inconceivable for musicians?

Re:Oh who gives a fuck?

[HaZardman27]

And it is not welfare, nor is it for those of poor skill, quite the opposite.

Sorry, I must not have phrased what I was saying clearly. I'm not trying to compare researchers at universities to welfare recipients; I was trying to point out that state-funded artists and content producers would essentially be just that.

And do not talk as if currently used business models are the best we can do

No, they clearly aren't. But the ability for content producers to sell and distribute content digitally is removing much of the need for big business there. With that type of model, an artist or producer's ability to sustain that career is completely dependent on whether or not consumers appreciate his/her work enough to pay for it. If you aren't producing anything of worth, why should you be supported in doing so?