Plagiarism

I know, you found this blog because of pictures of stave churches or some other nice destinations to go to.

So this time I have to disappoint all the travellers and bombard you with a lot of text. 

Why do I bother? 

In the past two years, there have been quite a few politicians in Germany who have been found out to copy their PhD theses from other sources. One dissertation had one or more copied passages on 90% of the pages and the thesis was given a "summa cum laude" (which would equal something like an A+++++++++ for those who are not familiar with the German grading system). Needless to say that this person cannot call himself Dr. anymore nor could he keep his post as minister. Despite all the evidence, there were quite some people who argued that this was just a political coup of the opposition to get rid of the (oh so great) person and that he didn't need a PhD to be a good minister and that most people have copied some reports in school (the general bagatelle argument). 

Sure, you do not need a PhD to go into politics but if you cannot get one HONESTLY just leave it to other people and be decent enough to live WITHOUT that title.

Now of course you will wonder why I am so annoyed about this. I have written a thesis (PhD) which is hopefully  going to be defended within the next few months. It was the worst nightmare of my life because of many reasons but I won't go into that. Scientific writing is very special and sometimes it takes me days to just write a paragraph. In short, it is very hard work and the hardest part is the introduction because you have to be so carful about citing. And for those people who are not really into this topic a citation is a reference to the original source. This does NOT mean that I can copy a sentence from somebody and put a citation behind it (I would have to mark this with quotation marks as a quote and still give the source). So again, citing means that I REFORMULATE the ideas of somebody in my own words and then give the source. Reformulating without a reference is basically plagiarism because I have not marked the text as coming from somebody else hence pretending it is my own (for a better definition see: http://copy-shake-paste.blogspot.de/2013/02/a-good-definition-of-plagiarism.html).

And yes, mistakes can happen, people might forget to cite the source or the references are in the wrong place but there is a limit to how many times this can happen to be called a "mishap". Personally I also do not care if the person left out the citation by intention or if they were just sloppy and did not cite carefully enough for too many times ... the result is the same: you have gotten a degree by using material from other people (if it was intention, it is certainly fraud and if you were just sloppy you probably are not qualified enough for a PhD). The importance lies on DEGREE .... this is not just some homework you copied or a report (which is bad enough in my opinion because that is how it starts) but you get a PhD with material you pretend is your own and possibly you get a university position afterwards and maybe even a professorship and you will be responsible for other PhD students as somebody who actually even shouldn't have that degree.

And that is where the actual case comes in ... you could even be a minister of EDUCATION. What kind of example are you then for people at the beginning of their education? You are basically telling them that cheating is ok and lying about it is good form, too. Thanks a lot! Now of course, there are lots of people who say that the case is not "as severe" as the other plagiates. Is that a criterion? You copied 80 pages and I copied just 10 so my thesis is ok but yours is definitely faked? Of course it is difficult sometimes to find out where the original comes from but this woman we're talking about copied the mistakes in the references from an uncited secondary source. So the source from which she was copying (and not referencing) cited a John Doe but the article was by Arthur Doe instead, had the wrong title for an article and used wrong authors for another article and she copied all these mistakes except for one where she replaced the wrong title with another wrong title (which shows that she has not read or looked up any of those articles and the whole text around them cannot really be her own while the original author is not cited).

My thesis is article based which means that I have to submit manuscripts to journals which publish them after being peer reviewed (and corrected a thousand times). All journals have a plagiarism detection software so I cannot afford these kind of "mistakes". Why should the minister of education keep her PhD with that kind of sloppy work (even if we do not call it INTENTIONAL plagiarism) and I have to turn around each sentence a thousand times? Don't get me wrong, I want my PhD to be completely honest and  I am happy that there are these high standards so even if there were some citation mistakes they would be detected and corrected before any of my work is published or evaluated. These standards should be valid for everybody and it doesn't matter if she wrote the thesis 30 years ago or now, she still had the same rules for citing and obviously didn't follow them. 

To me it is like a slap into my face if that woman can keep her PhD because it does not only show that you can get a degree with dishonest methods but it also puts all people who have a PhD into the same boat and we will have to ask ourselves if this title is worth anything at all. And in case you wonder, I purely did the degree to get a university job with focus on teaching and not to show off with it.