German Science Minister Faces Plagiarism Scandal 166
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.'"
And in other news (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:And in other news (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Plagiarism and Attribution (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:Plagiarism and Attribution (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:And in other news (Score:5, Insightful)
It's actually quite beautiful in a Dawinian kind of way, though the creature that will be the end-product of this selection process will almost certainly be a true horror of conscienceless manipulation.
Re:Plagiarism and Attribution (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Well, lets keep fair for a while and look at fa (Score:5, Insightful)
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.)
Re:Plagiarism and Attribution (Score:4, Insightful)
A thesis is about describing your own, original, significant ideas and contributions to science. If you don't remember whether something is your own contribution or whether you saw it on a web page somewhere, it's probably not significant enough to put into a thesis in the first place.
Re:It's plagiarism (Score:3, Insightful)
It seems to me that plenty of this is perfectly explainable by failed bookkeeping in the notes. I mean, this is a thesis from pre electronic times. Quite possibly this could come about by making handwritten notes while reviewing a text, and later misstaking text that was copied for your own summary of what was written. Which also explains the minor variations that appear. They are of the kind of stylistic alterations you would make when copying your own text, not when trying to change the style to avoid being caught plagiarizing.
In all cases the texts that were plagiarized were also marked, though decidedly insufficiently. Hence the category Bauernopfer. It bears explanation, absolutely, possibly also a revision of the text, to clearly mark the authorship where apropriate.
But it affects a very small fraction of the text in her dissertation, another marked difference to von Guttenberg. How severe this is is hard to judge. In particular for a non-expert it's not easy to tell quickly how much this impacts the original contribution in the dissertation. In either case, by what we can see so far it's in a completely different League from the von Guttenberg case.
Doesn't seem like anything serious to me (Score:5, Insightful)
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).
Re:Plagiarism and Attribution (Score:2, Insightful)
the hard part is that certain clinicly insane lecturers set the bar insanely low like 5 words in a row.
If you read a book and then a year later write something on the subject it's exceptionally easy to use a 5 word phrasing from the book without realising that you're quoting it or even realising that that's where you learned the fact. You then cite some other source with the same facts perfectly innocently.
Re:Plagiarism and Attribution (Score:5, Insightful)
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".
Real world vs. Utopia (Score:4, Insightful)
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...
Re:Plagiarism and Attribution (Score:5, Insightful)
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.