An Austrian communications professor who hunts plagiarists
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
The case that started this was Guttenberg, and that was very blatant plagiarism on a large scale in his PhD thesis. That one was certainly intentional. The most recent one was the Green chancellor candidate in the current election, Baerbock. In my opinion her case isn't actually plagiarism as it was mostly about collections of facts in her book. So some very short passages were taking from other sources, but these were things like the list of countries that joined the EU.
What I hate about these cases is that it is pretty much impossible to determine how serious the cases are from the news coverage. You have to actually look into the alleged plagiarised sections yourself. The first case was a real and very serious case that rightfully stopped Guttenberg's political career at that point. But since then this has also become a political tool, and some of the people doing this have clear political motives for it.
Nobodys says she (and others) are not allowed to quote things, they just have to provide references for it.
Personally I am tired of these people - they seem to feel entitled to have PhDs and whatnot without doing the actual work. We are even supposed to feel sorry for them, when actually, they should just do their jobs without the superfluous titles.
Not a fan of plagiarism either way, but those two cases are hardly comparable. Both are copyright issues, but faking a dissertation adds fraud to the equation and disqualifies the person from future academic work.
Pointing out the book was not such a big deal then is like pointing to a fake PhD thesis full of quotes, picking out one quote and saying "see, that is not really that bad". Yeah, a single quote is not that bad. It is the sum of them that makes it bad.
I didn't do that, you mis-inferred that from my post.
Funnily enough this is exactly what happened with Baerbocks CV: She didn't "fake" anything there, she e.g. said she studied in Hamburg without saying that she obtained a degree there. And she stated that she was a member of some high profile organisations, which was technically true. In both cases she wasn't lying.
Well you didn't point out that the book was just a small part of the whole story.
"She didn't "fake" anything there"
Iirc almost every entry on her CV turned out to suggest something that wasn't actually true.
I don't know if it was lying or not. I was actually the first who said it is normal to make a CV look good by certain phrasings and so on. (like if you were a stay at home mom, you describe it as "heading a small family business" and so on).
I can imagine her problem was that she didn't realize that she is now a candidate for chancellor of Germany, so different standards apply, and rightfully so. It is absolutely OK to scrutinize a person who applies for the highest German office.
Also, againk she doesn't face any legal consequences for her "fakes" or whatever you want to call them. It just isn't a good look given that she wants to project an image of highest qualifications and integrity.
I haven't seen the new allegations about Baerbock, I only looked at the original set of allegations. This is one of the original alleged instances of plagiarism:
Baerbock:
Der Wettbewerb scheint auch weltweit eröffnet. In Amsterdam ist ein 130 Meter hohes Holzhochaus geplant, in Chicago ein 228 Meter hohes und in Tokia eines mit 350 Metern Höhe
Und der Rekord dürfte früher oder später ohnehin gebrochen werden: In Amsterdam ist ein 130 Meter hohes Holzhaus geplant, in Chicago ein 228 Meter großes und in Tokio eines mit 350 Meter Höhe.
And Laschet had plagiarism allegations as well shortly after these ones, those news just disappeared faster.
The book just fed into that story, especially as it was published when she was already in trouble for her CV.
No, these were not just facts, but slightly edited passages taken from studies and other books (https://www.tagesspiegel.de/politik/plagiatsjaeger-stefan-we...). But in the end, she probably didn't do it herself, but her ghostwriter. She doesn't have much luck with people working for her. Like her financial officer who embezzled 270000 EUR from the party and later has been accused of prostitution (sorry, only German: https://www.berlin.de/aktuelles/berlin/2811150-958092-neue-v...).
Also of note is that this seems to be a part of a larger anti-Baerbock campaign in the media, perhaps similar to the one Corbyn faced in the UK, where she is being disproportionately (compared to other politicians) and unfairly targeted. Take for example the issue with the resume mentioned by notanzaiiswear here, there were some really minor inaccuracies (on the level that it's necessary to argue about semantics to show that), and it was weaponized against her by the media.
>Most of those he has named and shamed have neither lost their titles nor jobs,
It's not clear to me how many of these situations include intentional plagiarism or how serious it is.
Johannes Hahn was indeed "cleared of plagiarism" for his 1987 dissertation by the university which bestowed him with his PhD, but consider that this fact doesn't really mean much. University leaders may have other motivations than upholding academic integrity, and in this case the university was actually open with the fact that Hahn's dissertation would be considered plagiarism were it written today, but not in 1987, as the standards were supposedly lower back then. This explanation is indeed something I've already noticed in other cases where politicians were "cleared of plagiarism". Note that Weber's group found that 17.2% of Hahn's dissertation was plagiarized. Wikipedia link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johannes_Hahn#Doctoral_thesis
> It's not clear to me how many of these situations include intentional plagiarism or how serious it is.
Again, it's up to the university to revoke a PhD, and it shouldn't be surprising that plagiarists don't lose jobs or social standing, that's the society we live in, sadly. I'm glad that Weber is trying to change that.
EDIT: I looked into the most recent plagiarism find now, against the Green politician, and in this case Weber is acting a bit absurdly (something he's getting paid for, though). He's literally applying the same standards that would be applied to an academic paper to some political statement books, which is ridiculous. Now, I'd like it if ghostwriters were always credited (even in books by politicians and celebrities), but Weber's analyis is simply dumb.
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2020/07/23/joe_bi...
The problem, in my opinion, is with the new type of the "young politician": This is someone who is the absolute opposite of "accomplished". For a person who is actually "accomplished", journalists would have more important things to say than that they may or may not have plagiarised in the past.
Take for example Sebastian Kurz, the chancellor of Austria (where Weber hails from and has broken many a "scandal"): Kurz joined his party when he was 17, from which point the party "groomed" him for a career in politics. He worked for the party, having no notable employment or self-employment outside of working for the party. Part of his grooming was that, when he was 25, they invented a new public office for him. One where he would frequently get positive media attention and where there would be little opportunity for him to do anything wrong or get any negative attention. At that point he hadn't even completed any university-level education. When he was 31 they made him their new party leader and candidate for the highest office in the country, and he won the election to become the youngest European head of state.
It's the same thing with Baerbock. Her resume is essentially nothing but jobs inside her party.
Such people are "politically invincible". A political opponent simply has nothing that they can be opposed to: They have done nothing, they stand for nothing, they are nothing. But also: They've done nothing wrong [yet].
This is where the plagiarism stuff comes in: Even somebody who has done nothing of note in their life will probably have done a little bit of writing here or there. Maybe a thesis at university. Maybe a non-fiction book outlining their view on politics.
But: Thanks to the "plagiarism hunter" and his exceptionally wide definition of what constitutes plagiarism, that's actually enough to generate a bit of scandal.
So: What have we learned? We need to add "writing" to the list of things a person must not have done in order to qualify for a career in the politics of the "young politician".
An analogous thing occurs in US politics: congressmen and senators (i.e. people with voting records at the national level) find it harder to become their party's candidate for President than state governors do.
While it is generally against most codes of conduct to plagiarize your own work (for example, publishing something you published 10 years ago again, without a notice that it has been published before), I have never seen any cases of anyone actually being penalized for doing so, short of issuing a new edition with a citation to the prior work.
As for who the victim is, typically the direct victim would be the funder: if you received a grant to pursue novel research and it turns out you were just rehashing prior work, then you have stolen funding. Similarly, if you are under the employ of a university, then you have stolen funds by reproducing old research and passing it off as new...instead of actually producing new research. These are of course only the monetary victims, the broader victims are those robbed of scholarly advancement by having your job title filled by someone who recycles material versus advancing the field.
I see no reason to change terms and structure in scientific publications so as not to plagiarize myself.
There generally is no reason to change terms and the like. The solution is simply to cite one's prior work when quoting from it - the lack of the latter (citing that a given text is one's prior work) is what constitutes self-plagiarism, not the mere reuse of terminology.
> [Self-plagiarism] doesn't mean "I use the same turn of phrase every once in a while". It means "I reproduced substantial portions of prior research or other text of my own and passed it off as new research."
The term is not used to mean occasional repetition of phrases or concepts, nor does it apply when that expectation is not the production of new research (e.g. when delivering a course lecture). The term is used to mean something more along the lines of when you take a paper you published some time ago, make a few edits, and re-submit it to another journal.
I once reviewed a paper. It seemed familiar. I pulled up a paper by the same authors from a decade previous. Yup, the first 10 pages were almost identical. I had read the earlier paper, and others had cited it -- though not the authors.
That was a waste of time, adding nothing to the dialog.
sniffle