plagiarism in phd

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• v.26(2); 2014 Apr

Plagiarism in Scientific Research and Publications and How to Prevent It

Faculty of medicine, University of Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina

Quality is assessed on the basis of adequate evidence, while best results of the research are accomplished through scientific knowledge. Information contained in a scientific work must always be based on scientific evidence. Guidelines for genuine scientific research should be designed based on real results. Dynamic research and use correct methods of scientific work must originate from everyday practice and the fundamentals of the research. The original work should have the proper data sources with clearly defined research goals, methods of operation which are acceptable for questions included in the study. When selecting the methods it is necessary to obtain the consent of the patients/respondents to provide data for execution of the project or so called informed consent. Only by the own efforts can be reached true results, from which can be drawn conclusions and which finally can give a valid scholarly commentary. Text may be copied from other sources, either in whole or in part and marked as a result of the other studies. For high-quality scientific work necessary are expertise and relevant scientific literature, mostly taken from publications that are stored in biomedical databases. These are scientific, professional and review articles, case reports of disease in physician practices, but the knowledge can also be acquired on scientific and expert lectures by renowned scientists. Form of text publications must meet standards on writing a paper. If the article has already been published in a scientific journal, the same article cannot be published in any other journal with a few minor adjustments, or without specifying the parts of the first article which is used in another article. Copyright infringement occurs when the author of a new article, with or without mentioning the author, uses a substantial portion of previously published articles, including past contributions in the first article. With the permission of the publisher and the author, another journal can re-publish the article already published. In that case, that is not plagiarism, because the journal states that the article was re-published with the permission of the journal in which the article is primarily released. The original can be only one, and the copy is a copy, and plagiarism is stolen copy. The aim of combating plagiarism is to improve the quality, to achieve satisfactory results and to compare the results of their own research, rather than copying the data from the results of other people's research. Copy leads to incorrect results. Nowadays the problem of plagiarism has become huge, or widespread and present in almost all spheres of human activity, particularly in science.

Scientific institutions and universities should have a center for surveillance, security, promotion and development of quality research. Establishment of rules and respect the rules of good practice are the obligations of each research institutions, universities and every individual researchers, regardless of which area of science is being investigated. There are misunderstandings and doubts about the criteria and standards for when and how to declare someone a plagiarist. European and World Association of Science Editors (EASE and WAME), and COPE - Committee on Publishing Ethics working on the precise definition of that institution or that the scientific committee may sanction when someone is proven plagiarism and familiarize the authors with the types of sanctions. The practice is to inform the editors about discovered plagiarism and articles are withdrawn from the database, while the authors are put on the so-called black list. So far this is the only way of preventing plagiarism, because there are no other sanctions.

SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH AND PHASES OF SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH

Jacques Yves Cousteau said: “What is a scientist after all? Scientist is a curious man looking through a keyhole of nature, trying to understand what is happening” ( 1 ).

Whether it comes to young enthusiasts eager to contribute to the scientific community or, in turn, experienced scientific researchers who want to establish their name in the pillars of science for the general good of the research, from the idea to the final realization there is a certain sequence of steps to be followed ( 2 ). Scientific research in medicine is the process of implementation of systemic study within well-defined aspects which can contribute to universal mental, physical and social well-being of individuals and communities, as defined in the Constitution of the World Health Organization (WHO). There are several types of medical scientific research: laboratory, clinical research and public health. Scientific research contributes to the community and individuals in the community. The benefit to the community is reflected in the collection of evidence that will enhance clinical and socio-medical policies and practices, identifying health problems and methods of health promotion, prevention of disease and disability, the expansion of scientific literature that is the basis for all future scientific research, policy and practice. The well-being of the individual is acquiring new knowledge, and the development of new, improved skills, which will result in the individual academic growth ( 3 , 4 , 5 ).

1.1 Scientific research

In order that research project be valuable and recognized by the academic community and other researchers, it is essential that contains the same elements as other articles. It does not matter to which level of academic status belong the author of the study, it is essential that the steps are the same for all studies. The author Kathryn H. Jacobsen in her book “Introduction to Research Methods in Health: A Practical Guide” ( 1 ) states that the research process consists of five steps: problem identification, selection of the research manner, the choice of study design and data collection, data analysis and writing the conclusion ( 5 , 9 ).

Studies on the population level have clearly defined goals, while the most important of these are ( 5 – 10 ):

• Identifying and classifying new clinical identity;
• Detection of risk factors for disease;
• The development and testing of new protocols for the prevention or treatment of disease ( 1 , 8 ).

The process of scientific research from ideas, hypothesizing, through evidence, analysis of results, to the conclusion and publication of research results in an indexed journal can take months, even years. Unfortunately, the funds allocated for research is often provided by the researchers themselves, and it is a major limiting factor that some research can even begin or end.

1.2 Stages of scientific research

Scientific research has several stages ( 11 - 20 ):

• Determining research topics;
• The choice of scientific methods of research;
• Study design and data collection;
• Data processing, analysis and interpretation;
• Writing and publishing a scientific article;

1.3 Rules for proper research

In order that study had its purpose and effects, but also justify the intent and invested funds, it must meet certain postulates:

• Every scientific research from idea to written scientific article should go through certain phases: the review of the relevant literature on the topic of research, defining the objectives and hypotheses of research, sample selection for the study, implementation of research based on scientific methodological principles, statistical analysis, comparing the obtained own results with results of other authors published in scientific publications, conclusions and specific recommendations for any specific application in practice. Study design and project outline research are usually conducted by experienced researchers as mentors and by own work;
• Researchers and authors of scientific papers must follow the rules of the Ethics Code of Good Scientific Practice (GSP), primarily to follow the principles of honesty and integrity;
• Researchers rely on published data, and must be trained to selectively process the information, then, must be able to distinguish between original ideas and, finally, to have knowledge in order that their research results are compared with previously published in the scientific literature.

In order to achieve and realize the above mentioned:

• Authors are required to follow ethical principles and stick to moral and legal regulations acceptable by the scientific community;
• Authors must properly cite relevant publications and cite facts and conclusions, or published or unpublished ideas and words of other researchers and authors. The reader should be clearly informed of the facts from the original texts of other authors, or of recycled articles from other sources (numerical marking, following Vancouver, the Harvard, APA, PubMed and other rules of citation of articles and other sources, for example: 2,9,14,15, etc.);
• Authors should properly cite references in their original form (the author(s), article title, abbreviated journal title, year of publication, volume editions, number, initial and final page of the published article, or the other sources in accordance to the order prescribed);
• Authors should use the knowledge acquired in the lectures, conferences or other sources of scientific and technical literature, provided that each source must include full bibliographic information;
• Authors must each citation in the text indicated in the bibliography at the end of the text and put it in quotation marks copied the contents of which have more than six consecutive words;
• Authors must obtain permission from other authors or publishers of scientific reproduction of protected materials (texts, images, charts, graphs, etc.) copyright;
• If the author re-used text or attachment as another author's own observations, then published in the article, in quotation marks, should be accompanied by a quote of recycled text, published in the primary source;
• Authors and coauthors must sign a declaration of originality and authorship which provides descriptions of contribution by each of them separately in an article that is going to be published;
• Every author of the publication must respect the rules of writing an article in which he/she wants to publish the article, considering that most journals have their own rules, but in line with the principles ICMJE, COPE, etc.

1.4 Scientific publishing

Publications are the products of scientific work. Once published, scientific work becomes a source of reference, post publishing review and critique. To contribute to the largest evidence-based medicine (EBM), the paper should be credible, while honesty of each author becomes a pillar of trust in science. Researchers become responsible for what they publish and influence the future of the publication, science and education in general.

2. SCIENTOMETRICS

Scientometrics is part of Scientology (the science of science) that analyzes scientific papers and their citations in scientific journals selected sample ( 1 , 8 ).

The term scientometrics first appeared in the literature in 1969. The original definition of scientometrics is that it is a scientific discipline or field of science that deals with the study of science as an information process by applying quantitative (statistical) methods, and later Tibor Braun (who is the 1977 formed an international magazine Scientometrics) introduced the world to name Scientometrics ( 8 ). Some of the indicators used in the evaluation of scientific research ( 1 , 8 ):

• Impact Factor;
• Citing articles;
• Citing journal;
• The number and order of authors, etc.

Impact factor is the number of citations of articles published in the journal during the previous two years, divided by the total number of articles published in the journal for the same time period. Impact factor depends on: the quality of the journal, the language in which it was printed, the territory covered by the distribution system ( 8 ).

2.1 Impact factor (IF)

Given the growing number of scientific publications, there is a need among the readership to assess quality and reliable source of information. IF is the most commonly used evaluation aid. IF does not indicate quality, but high impact factor indicates the possibility of high quality ( 1 , 4 , 6 , 8 ).

In order to assessed IF and citation in general, it uses a large number of databases, such as Thomson Reuters' Web of Science (WoS), Scopus, etc. Thomson Reuters Journal Citation Reports are involved and the scientific citation index (Science Citation Index, SCI) and Social Scientific Citation Index (SSCI) ( 1 ).

In the use of IF there are some pitfalls to be avoided ( 1 ):

The two-year period is not long enough to assess the quality over quoting, as in many disciplines, yet these publications did not reach the top. Five-year estimate of IF gives better results.

Citing is considered as “currency” of modern science, which is why its analysis of the editors, authors and readers become indispensable. Many authors, intentionally and inappropriately, citing their previous articles to raise their rating in the research community.

SCI database covers less than one-quarter reviews of contemporary journals and shows preference to journals in the English language. As a result this reveals a serious discrepancy between the citation in English and in other languages.

In 2009 an article had 5,624 citations, which shifted IF this journal from 3 to 49.93 while all other articles in this journal had three or less citations. Because of this uneven distribution it is impossible to estimate the IF on the basis of a single article or author ( 1 , 5 ).

Incompleteness depends among other things on, the discipline, the language and location of scientists–researchers.

Articles within the fast growing discipline is more quoted than traditional scientific fields, such as mathematics and theoretician. These varieties give a distorted picture of the rating of certain journals. Also, some subject areas are additionally cited with works from other areas. Examples of medical, clinical studies that rely on the results of basic science, resulting in 3-5 times larger number of citations of articles of basic medicine in relation to the clinical part. The consequence is that the basic medical journals have higher IF of the journal Clinical Medicine, which does not give a realistic picture of any original research note. On the other hand, review articles are cited more often than the original parts, so many journals and IF it's rating rose by publishing an increasing number of review articles.

Invalid works, such articles withdrawn continue to be cited in other articles. It leads to the bias in the calculation of IF.

2.2 H-index and its application

H-index is based on the number of cited articles of an author published in a journal or other publications in relation to the number of citations of these articles in other publications. Citing provides insight into the scientific work because it encourages scientists to deal with the most current topics ( 1 , 8 ).

With regard to the respective issues when calculating the IF, the scientific community has proposed many solutions. Hirsch in 2005 suggests that every scientist has its own H-index. It is probably the simplest index, oriented on scientist and defined as the number of articles by the number of citations ≥ h. in order To raise his/hers H-index, the author must be cited additional 2h+1 times. For example, to increase its H-index from 4 to 5 must be quoted another nine times. Its only drawback is that this factor is unfavorable for young researchers who have not had enough opportunities to publish a large number of works in the short time they had available for research. Schreiber suggests that in calculating the H-index should not be used self citation because it is unethical and is subject to manipulation, and introduces the concept of “the honest h index, hh) ( 1 ). Yet, despite its many shortcomings, the Impact Factor is currently most often used metric tool for assessing the journal, which should be a message to researchers to continue their search for a reliable and applicable scientometrics method ( 1 , 22 ).

All persons who present themselves as the authors of the article must meet the following requirements: to have contributed significantly to the planning and preparation of the article, or analysis and interpretation of results and participated in writing and correcting the article, as well as to agree with the final version of the text. People engaged in collecting data or superior researchers, however, have not been active participants in the development of scientific work and cannot be authors. The editor has the right to ask the author to explain the individual contribution of each of them. The contribution of one author is 1, and if in the preparation of the article participated many authors, their contribution is 1/n. This means that the contribution of each subsequent is half the size of the contributions of previous author in order. The order is determined by agreement between the authors ( 8 , 9 ).

Citing is the way in which the author explains to the readers that certain textual content contained in particular paper is taken from another source. It also gives the reader insight they needed to find the original source, including:

Information concerning the author;

• Title of the article;
• Page numbers from which the material was taken;
• Time when some content was “downloaded” from some official sites where the content is stored and presented for public use (Open access).

Recognition of authorship by quoting is the only proper way to use the work of others and not to commit plagiarism. There are many reasons that source should be cited:

• Citing helps greatly to the one who wants to know more about the author's ideas and where these ideas came;
• Not all the sources are as good and true. Journals with a high above mentioned indices are relevant to quote;
• Citing shows how much work has gone into research;
• Citing helps the reader to distinguish between the author's and ideas of others.

Very important issues to be considered when quoting content of other authors from scientific publications are:

• When to use quotation marks;
• When to paraphrase;
• When to use an idea already expressed by someone?
• MLA (MODERN LANGUAGE ASSOCIATION);
• ACS (AMERICAN CHEMICAL SOCIETY);
• IEEE (INSTITUTE OF ELECTRICAL AND ELECTRONICS ENGINEERS);
• NLM (NATIONAL LIBRARY OD MEDICINE);
• VANCOUVER (BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES);
• APA (AMERICAN PSYCHOLOGICAL ASSOCIATION).

4. PLAGIARISM

4.1 definitions of plagiarism.

Plagiarism (Latin plagere =kidnap, plagiatum = “stealing people”), means the act of appropriation or copying someone else's written, artistic or other creative work as your own, either in part or in whole, without specifying the source or authorship of the original. Unlike forgery in which is questioned the authenticity of the work, plagiarism is the illegal and unethical copying of another's work, which is up as its own. Plagiarism is literary term for stealing, copying others' works. In recent years, it is interpreted as a violation of copyright. Generally speaking, plagiarism is when someone uses someone else's ideas, statements, linguistic style and does not recognize the intellectual authors. Plagiarism may be intentional or unintentional ( 1 , 4 , 6 , 12 ).

Types of plagiarism ( 12 ):

• Direct form–Fully or partially copy the text, computer files, audio or video recordings without mentioning the primary source;
• Mosaic form–Borrowing ideas and opinions from the original source, a few words and phrases without citing the source;
• Self-plagiarism–Reuse own work without specifying the primary (own) sources.
• In some ancient cultures of the Far East, certain forms of plagiarism were common.
• According to data from WAME - World Association of Medical Editors, precise definition of plagiarism is when are copied six consecutive words ( 6 , 21 ) in a continuous set of 30 used characters.

Generally speaking, plagiarism is when someone uses someone else's ideas, statements, linguistic style and does not recognize the intellectual pioneers. Plagiarism main goal is to deceive the reader. An interesting comment was made by Samuel Johnson, which one of the manuscripts received for publication characterized as follows: “Your work is good and original. Unfortunately, the parts that are good are not original, and the parts that are original are not good” ( 1 ).

It is “the tendency of literary theft and misappropriation of others spiritual property as a whole” or generally “attributed someone else's work as your own” ( 1 ).

4.2 Common causes of plagiarism

• Following trends of academic promotion and research funding, which entails the use of extensive text on the principle of “publish at all costs” or “Perish mantra”;
• Personal ambitions of poorly educated individuals;
• Financial pressure.

4.3 Types of plagiarism

Plagiarism is not always black and white issue. The boundary between plagiarism and research is sometimes unclear. Identifying different forms of plagiarism is a very important step towards its prevention.

Here are listed ten ( 10 ) most common types of plagiarism as follows:

• CLONE–Submitting someone else's work, which is just transcribed, as his/hers own;
• CTRL-C–Contains most of the text from a single source, without alterations;
• FIND–REPLACE–Changing key words and phrases, but retaining a substantial part of the content of the primary sources;
• REMIX–Paraphrasing multiple sources which are so arranged that complement each other;
• RECYCLE–The use of their own work (if the article is already published somewhere and not cited);
• HYBRID–Combine perfectly cited sources with the copied without citation;
• MASH UP–Blending the copied material which is taken from multiple sources;
• ERROR 404–Includes quoting non-existent or inaccurate source;
• AGGREGATOR–Include proper citation of sources, but contains almost nothing of their own work;
• RE–TWEET–Includes proper citation, but with too much text used from the original.

4.4 Plagiarizing others' research results

Unlike forgery in which is questioned the authenticity of the article, plagiarism when it comes to illegal and unethical taking of another's work, which is presented as its own.

Many people define plagiarism as copying someone else's work, or borrowing other people's ideas. But terms such as copying and lending may mask the seriousness of the offense.

According to Merriam–Webster dictionary plagiarism represents (1: a) The theft and use of other people's ideas or words as yours; b) Use of sources without attribution; c) Literary theft and d) presenting some ideas as own and as it is new, while this idea already exists in other source. In other words, plagiarism is an act of fraud, involving the theft of someone else's work and presenting as own.

4.5 Is the theft of ideas and words really possible?

Statutory legislation in the academic community in the United States and other developed countries strictly protects the expression of their own ideas, which are considered intellectual property and are protected by copyrights. Almost all forms of expression are protected by Copyright as long as they are preserved in any medium (such as a book or a computer file).

4.6 That is why under plagiarism is considered ( 1 , 6 ):

• Presenting someone else's work as own;
• Copying words or ideas of another person without specifying the original authorship;
• Not using quotation marks;
• Giving incorrect information about the source that is cited;
• Changing words but copying the sentence structure of the source without specifying the source or authorship of the original;
• Copying so many words or ideas which eventually make most of the work, regardless of whether the source is acknowledged or not.

4.7 How to avoid plagiarism?

It is very easy to find information on a topic that needs to be explored, but it is not always easy to add that information to own work and do not create a plagiarism. There are ways to avoid plagiarism, and should just be followed simple steps when writing a paper.

There are several ways to avoid plagiarism ( 1 , 6 ):

• Paraphrasing - When information is found that is great for research, it is read and written with own words.
• Quote - Very efficient way to avoid plagiarism. It is literally the wording of certain authors and they sentences are always placed in quotes.
• Quotation or citation in the text marked with the number at the end of the citations while under this number is stated the reference from which the quote was taken.
• Citing own material - If the author of the material used it in an earlier paper, he/she shall quote he/she self, because if this is not done, he/she plagiarized him/herself
• References must be listed at the end of the article and includes sources where authors found the information in the given article.
• Always follow the rules to properly cite references, acknowledging ideas taken at conference and formal/informal conversations;
• Reference must include full bibliographic information;
• Any source that is specified in the text must be listed in the references;
• Quotation marks should be used if are copied more than six consecutive words;

The author must obtain permission from other authors/publishers to reproduce the tabular, graphic or picture attachments or used text under copyright ( 6 , 12 )

Unfortunately, digitizing made copy-paste plagiarism and inappropriate reuse resources from Web sites, online journals and other electronic media. Within academic institutions, plagiarism, which is made by students, professors or researchers is considered academic dishonesty or academic fraud. Researchers and professors are usually punished for plagiarism by sanctions, suspension or even loss of credibility. It was easier to detect plagiarism, during the 1980s. In the last century, began to develop software for the detection of academic (“Turnitin” and “Safe Assign” software) and scientific plagiarism (“Cross Check” and “eTBlast” software) ( 1 , 7 ). International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) has given a detailed explanation of what is not a duplicate publication. In the U.S. in 1989, ORI proposed sanctions for plagiarism ( 4 , 6 , 8 ).

Retractions in academic publishing have reached celestial heights–even increased tenfold in the last three decades, and the biggest reason for this is plagiarism and duplications (self plagiarism). The National Science Foundation (NSF) in March 2013 stated to explore more than 100 cases of suspected plagiarism in a year. Unfortunately, this problem is not limited to NSF, but also to other academic institutions as well as other spheres of interest, which is often revealed to the public only when scandals break out. In Germany, two prominent members of the Cabinet of the Prime Minister had to withdraw from office amid allegations of alleged plagiarism in dissertations. Similar scandals rocked Canada, the Philippines, Romania and Russia. Most high-publicity scandals are illuminated in the past three years, thanks to a significant extent bringing around readership of plagiarism as well as facilitated and increased access to instruments for the detection of plagiarism. This knowledge is worrisome because it indicates that plagiarism and duplication are not problems of recent date, but are now only more easily visible ( 20 ).

The software to detect plagiarism is well tested, widely available, economically affordable and easy to use. Although it relies on human analysis, this instrument can significantly speed up the process of validation of submission originality. Publications that require the use of instruments for the detection of plagiarism as part of the review and guideline authors have significantly reduced the number of rejected or withdrawn papers. On the other hand, a large number of organizations ignore this problem. In a survey conducted by Thenticate in October 2012, one of three scientific editors said they continue to face a plagiarized work, and according to the same survey, more than half of the scientific researchers do not check their work, but leaves the editors to detect plagiarism or duplication (even those unintended) ( 20 ).

To researchers is recommended that before they even send somewhere their work, to use the software in order to identify plagiarism or self-plagiarism, which perhaps they themselves are not aware of, in order to preserve public confidence, clean professional record and the further possibility of publishing and finance works. The scientific community, with special emphasis on publishers, must be clear and consistent in finding plagiarism, deterring it, with clear sanctions for those who violate these provisions ( 12 ).

5. MEASURES TO PREVENT PLAGIARISM

Historically, the first attempts to address scientific misconduct and dishonesty were initiated in the U.S. 1992 with the establishment of the Office of Research Integrity (ORI). The main tasks of this organization are to promote scientific integrity, the development of guidelines for scientific research and investigation of allegations of misconduct, especially in biomedicine. Based on the American model, many national bodies for ethics in science are founded on a global level.

Another major step forward was the establishment of a Committee on Publication Ethics based in the UK (COPE, 1997). COPE has introduced the scientific principles of fairness and developed a set of diagrams which recorded occurrence of plagiarism. If plagiarism is treated after publication, editors should inform the reader about the misconduct. Also, plagiarism can be detected electronically (e.g. Cross Check) ( 21 , 22 ).

At the international level, databases with cases of plagiarism should start publishing the names of all blacklisted–plagiarist.

Scientific and academic institutions should have a unit for monitoring, research and quality development. In accordance with the principles of the GSP and Good Laboratory Practice (GLP) institutions should take responsibility for the integrity of research reporting ( 23 - 26 ).

6. CONCLUSION

Modern medicine from a doctor requires continuous training, follow up of new medical discoveries and implementation of new knowledge into practice. A doctor in the PHC or in hospitals encounters with patients of different disease profiles, which are manifested in a different form, different intensity, with different response to therapy and different prognosis, so that every patient is a new experience. However, this experience and knowledge is often not sufficient for the best outcome for the patient and doctors are often forced to use additional reading and research on the problem of his/hers patient. Therefore, use of medical journals and articles that are in databases widely available to everyone who knows them properly. For this reason, it is particularly important that any research conducted revealed that published an article to be written according to the rules described above, to be conducted as meta-analyzes that will shorten “wondering” of readers trough the huge number of articles related to the problem and thus conclusions from made research combined with their knowledge and experience and to provide to the patient better service (on these principles is based Evidence Based Medicine EBM) ( 10 , 14 ).

On the other hand, thanks to the databases available on the Internet and medical journals, many researchers get ideas for their own research, and are used to compare the results of different studies, taking into account not to make plagiarism and proper citation is of utmost importance.

Finally, as more the author has been cited, his credibility is increased, indicating that the quality of its scientific research work. In literature and on various websites and blogs today is revealed a growing number of cases of plagiarism and other unethical behavior of the researchers. Described are several cases of plagiarism in the countries of the Balkan region. In the countries of former Yugoslavia, the number of plagiarism in books, articles, monographs, scientific papers and it is rapidly increasing. One important reason is that the newly introduced concept of the Bologna education requires academic staff to quickly and in large quantity publish scientific and professional articles for advancement in academic career, it has become counterproductive and degrades the quality of the published articles content. Plagiarism is now easier to detect thanks to databases and software packages specifically designed for this purpose.

CONFLICT OF INTEREST: NONE DECLARED.

• World Peace Foundation

Plagiarism in Abiy Ahmed’s PhD Thesis: How will Addis Ababa University handle this?

Alex de Waal, Jan Nyssen, Gebrekirstos Gebreselassie, Boud Roukema and Rundassa Eshete

Ever since Abiy Ahmed was awarded his PhD degree at the Institute of Peace and Security Studies (IPSS) at Addis Ababa University in 2017, questions have been asked about whether this was a legitimate doctorate. One of us (Rundassa) was the first to publicly call out plagiarism. Last year another of this group (de Waal) made available a copy of the thesis and raised concerns . This post revisits the question of plagiarism.

There is now sufficient evidence to demand Addis Ababa University to re-examine Abiy’s thesis; it is adequate to suspend or revoke a doctorate. In comparable cases, universities have revoked doctoral degrees on the basis of plagiarism. Addis Ababa University rescinded a Master’s thesis for plagiarism in 2019 and adopted a policy prohibiting plagiarism in 2020.

Another approach would be to suspend the award of the PhD degree pending major revision, re-submission and re-examination.

Because decision makers have a tendency to exploit their academic degrees to boost their legitimacy in the eyes of the public, dissertations have come under scrutiny. Crowd sourcing in Germany, for example ( VroniPlag Wiki ), led to exposure of a long list of doctoral degrees of political figures with significant levels of plagiarism . Several, including a defense minister and a minister for education and research —were stripped of their doctorates and resigned. Exposure of fraudulent degrees have forced a senior politician in South Africa out of office and caused controversy in Kenya . In Russia, the scientific anti-plagiarism group Dissernet discovered that more than 10% of State Duma members received university degrees with theses that were heavily plagiarized and possibly ghostwritten.                                                          

With the appointment of Abiy Ahmed as Prime Minister in 2018, Ethiopia has increased its reliance on PhD holders for high-level political roles. Ethiopia’s Minister of Defense, Abraham Belay, for example, proudly employs the Twitter handle @AbrahamPostDoc.

We looked at Abiy’s PhD dissertation to see if there were indications of plagiarism. The title of the thesis is “Social Capital and its Role in Traditional Conflict Resolution: The Case of Inter-religious Conflict in Jimma Zone of the Oromia Regional State in Ethiopia”, completed in 2016 and defended in 2017.

Standard plagiarism detection tools identify similarities between the text submitted and other texts available online. In a thesis largely reporting results of fieldwork, the most likely places to look for this are the theoretical and literature review sections.  If a section on fieldwork findings is plagiarized, it would likely be copied from unpublished reports or student theses, which, because they are not availed online, are not detected by plagiarism detection tools.

We conducted the plagiarism check on Chapter 2, which is the literature review, filling 41 of the 150 pages of the thesis.

Annex A is the report that came back from the plagiarism software, after quotations have been cut out, showing the detected similarities. We ran it twice, independently, using different versions of Turnitin. After the exclusion, the overall similarity score is 62%. The second scan came with 64%. In both cases, the software missed (a) unpublished sources including some UN reports and (b) Wikipedia pages that have been updated since 2016, so the 62% similarity score is in reality an understatement.

Annex B is a comparison with the main identified sources.  For instance, except for its first couple of lines, page 43 is fully copied from a UNDP report published in 2012, with very minor changes. For example,

“ Although Ethiopia is one administrative unit, inter and intra-regional border demarcation has had economic implications pertaining to resource appropriation, mobilization and distribution ”

was rewritten to:

“ Although Ethiopia is one administrative unit, inter and intra-regional border demarcation has had development implications with regards to resource appropriation, mobilization and distribution ” (see Annex B).

Annex C is Chapter 2 text. Readers are invited to submit this to their own plagiarism detection software to see what they can find.

Overall, there is plagiarism on every single page of Chapter 2 of Abiy Ahmed’s PhD thesis, ranging from one detected plagiarized paragraph up to entire pages. Several scholars will recognize that their writings have been very extensively copied.

A Turnitin score of 62% and occurrence of plagiarism on 41 out of 41 pages of Chapter 2 are very high figures. A PhD supervisor should not allow a thesis to go forward for examination with this score, on the reasonable expectation that a reputable university would reject it outright.

When two texts are identical or very similar, the question arises as to who is copying from whom. The date of publication is a good guide: almost always the later piece is copied from the earlier one. However, it’s important to cross-check. In principle, a writer could produce a draft and put it aside for some years, during which time it was plagiarized by someone else who publishes before the original author gets around to finalizing and publishing. In each of the cases highlighted in Annex B , this seems unlikely. There is no evidence that Abiy was writing on these topics e.g. four or fifteen years earlier and setting his writings aside, during which time those authors found his unpublished writings and copied them. Another possibility is that both an earlier author and Abiy are plagiarizing a third, yet earlier author whose work is not online. While unlikely, this would not lessen the charge of plagiarism against Abiy.

It is beyond our personal capacity to carry out a wide scrutiny of PhD theses produced at Ethiopian universities. Informal contacts with colleagues at those universities hinted that plagiarism was observable in MSc theses by Ethiopian politicians. Two of us have run checks on masters’ theses awarded by Addis Ababa University to three senior figures :  Minister of Defense Abraham Belay (MSc 2007), as well as the leading figures in the Prosperity Party Takele Uma (MSc 2014) and Dagmawit Moges (MSc 2019). All three theses had high similarity scores with numerous fully copied paragraphs and sections. These occurrences alert us to the illicit but (according to our sources) prevalent trade in texts for essays at universities in Ethiopia (and elsewhere), which is based on copying text from unpublished reports, student theses, technical manuals and other gray literature. When those original documents are not online, the plagiarism cannot be detected by an online search tool; in that case experts with ‘encyclopedic’ knowledge of the literature on the topic and access to offline or paywalled research literature are needed.

Academic institutions have the obligation to revoke a degree in cases of significant falsification of data or plagiarism.

Violation of academic standards isn’t a minor misdemeanor. The academic world depends upon the bona fides of examiners and peer reviewers. If a hitherto-reputable university awards degrees for reasons other than academic excellence, its reputation and the value of its degrees is debased.

The question of the legitimacy of Abiy Ahmed’s academic credentials is first and foremost an issue of credibility for all graduates and faculty of Addis Ababa University and other Ethiopian universities.

Alex de Waal is Executive Director of the World Peace Foundation

Gebrekirstos G. Gebremeskel  is founder and chief editor of Tghat.com, which is dedicated to chronicling the war on Tigray. His PhD research focuses on the application of machine learning systems and their impact on society.

Jan Nyssenis a physical geographer, and professor of geography emeritus at Ghent University.

Boud Roukema is a professor of cosmology at Nicolaus Copernicus University. He obtained his PhD in 1993 at the Australian National University.

Photo: H.E. Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed at the African Union , Office of the Prime Minister – Ethiopia (Public Domain Mark 1.0)

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Harvard’s Claudine Gay was ousted for ‘plagiarism’. How serious was it really?

Gay resigned amid claims of plagiarism, but was it the person being accused rather than the violation itself that brought about her downfall?

C laudine Gay’s days as Harvard president may well have been numbered from the moment she appeared to equivocate on whether theoretical calls for violence against Jewish people violated Harvard’s rules while testifying before Congress last month. But it was allegations of plagiarism that ultimately led to her resignation on Wednesday.

Investigations by the Washington Free Beacon and the New York Post , at least partially instigated by the conservative activist Christopher Rufo and his crusade to chase “wokeism” and diversity initiatives from all corners of society, turned up nearly 50 instances of alleged plagiarism in Gay’s academic writing.

According to the Harvard board, a school subcommittee and independent panel charged with investigating the plagiarism allegations against Gay found “a few instances of inadequate citation” but “no violation of Harvard’s standard for research misconduct”; Gay was said to be “proactively requesting” four corrections.

No doubt, a top administrator accused of being a chronic cut-and-paster is a bad look for the nation’s foremost institution of higher education. But is what Gay did beyond the pale? Experts concede it’s a complicated issue.

“I used to call plagiarism the oldest profession,” says Barbara Glatt, a pioneering forensic plagiarism investigator who is regularly called upon to consult on high-profile cases within the academy and in publishing. It can be direct (copying something word for word without attribution), indirect (the wholesale theft of ideas), mosaic (changing some words while copying others) or even an honest mistake (an error of omission or execution) – all things Gay was accused to have done, even as she continues to stand by her scholarship.

Academic writing isn’t a breezy process that makes for easy reading – especially in college, where the rules often come down to a professor’s style preference ( MLA v Chicago v AP v APA ). It’s no wonder so many fall into the plagiarism trap of their own making. And while Gay more than anyone should have known better, it seems unfair that she should be the one to take the fall when her errors were missed by the institutions that published her – not least the Harvard PhD committee that awarded her the Toppan prize for the best political science dissertation in 1998.

Not even Harvard’s own board appears to have done as thorough a vetting of Gay’s bibliography before making her the college’s first Black president in 387 years, or before forcing her demotion after six months on the job. “They had a month and a half to get ahead of this scandal,” says Jonathan Bailey, a journalist and plagiarism consultant who began hearing of efforts to investigate Gay for plagiarism after her ignominious appearance on the Hill. “I also feel pretty confident that if they had started from the word go, hired an outside expert, made it a transparent process and highlighted the details, they could’ve gotten ahead of this.”

Since Gay was chased out of office, Business Insider found what it characterized as a similar pattern of plagiarism in a Harvard dissertation authored by Neri Oxman , a professor and artist married to Bill Ackman – the billionaire Harvard donor and a prominent player in the anti-Gay attack machine. (Oxman has apologized .)

‘Plagiarism fundamentalism’

When it comes to fighting plagiarism outright, few can claim as long a lead as Glatt. In the 80s, she was among the first to develop academic-focused anti-plagiarism software to suss out plagiarism in school papers. The software would take a sample of student writing, remove every fifth word – then Glatt would circle back to the suspect to fill in the blanks to determine whether the text was theirs. Back then she reckoned the transgression rates among high school and college students was between 50% and 80%. She figures the problem has only become worse since the internet came along and created “a bull market for plagiarism”, where sources and cheating services abound. In recent years AI has become as much a part of the solution as part of the problem, providing an easy means to produce work that’s not one’s own, but also for educators to cross-check for plagiarism.

It was through AI that the inconsistencies in Gay’s scholarship were found. In some works, Gay credits a source in the wrong sentence. In others, she borrows language that even those who were ostensibly plagiarized accept as common phrasing within their field of study. “I am not at all concerned about the passages,” said the political science professor David Canon, whose work the Washington Free Beacon accused Gay of plagiarizing. “This isn’t even close to an example of academic plagiarism.”

In the acknowledgments section of her political science dissertation, Gay shouts out her dissertation adviser, the esteemed social scientist Gary King, who “reminded me of the importance of getting the data right and following where they lead without fear or favor”, and paid homage to her family, who “drove me harder than I sometimes wanted to be driven”.

The Beacon report sourced both quotes back to the acknowledgments section of the 1996 book Facing up to the American Dream by Jennifer L Hochschild, another Harvard social scientist professor. Speaking to the Washington Post , Hochschild said: “My first reaction was, ‘This is a little weird.’ But my second reaction was, ‘Boy, these are cliches.’” Reacting to Gay’s resignation, Hochschild told the Harvard Crimson she was “furious” at the people who had set out on a “deliberate campaign to destroy her career and maybe destroy her personally”.

Even with the best plagiarism-ferreting tools, the answer isn’t always cut and dry. The offending passages in Gay’s dissertation acknowledgments, unoriginal as they look on first glance, could be charitably interpreted as intertextual references for a knowing audience. “If you look at the allegations,” says Bailey, “they include examples that are actually worrisome and raise serious issues. But they also include a lot of examples that are weak and meaningless.”

It’s an escalating game of cops and robbers that only figures to ratchet the already thick tension in the classroom. “I don’t believe in churning everything through turnitin.com because that’s a mechanical way of doing things,” says Susan Blum, a professor of linguistic anthropology at Notre Dame, referencing a go-to anti-plagiarism tool. Her 2009 book, My Word!, explores the evolution of plagiarism in college. She takes exception to what she calls “plagiarism fundamentalism”, the idea that every thought should be completely original – which runs counter to a human nature to mimic. “We have these things called mirror neurons, which allow us to feel what other people are doing while they’re doing them,” says Blum. “There’s a kind of continuum between originality and complete copying, and language and culture lies somewhere in the middle.”

While Gay has emerged as the face of plagiarism in the past few weeks, the issue, or derivatives of it, seem to be arising in more and more contexts lately. The court clerk in the Alex Murdaugh murder trial was outed by her co-author for lifting sections for a forthcoming memoir from a BBC article; the New York Times sued OpenAI and other bot shops for copyright infringement; and Katt Williams called out his fellow comedian Cedric the Entertainer for stealing one of his best jokes (an allegation Cedric denied). In the wake of Gay’s resignation, critics on the left have been quick to recall the 2017 supreme court confirmation of the Harvard Law alum Neil Gorsuch, who was exposed for lifting sections of his 2006 book The Future of Assisted Suicide and Euthanasia from a 1984 article in the Indiana Law Journal. (In defense of their nominee, the Trump White House called the allegations a “false attack”.)

Many of the plagiarism allegations against Gay seem archly pedantic, a thinly veiled effort to undermine Gay’s social justice-focused scholarship and discredit her as a leading Black scholar. That Ackman, Rufo et al would use plagiarism to take Gay down seems a throwback to the days of Reconstruction, when conservative lawmakers leveraged vagrancy laws to funnel free Black people into chain gangs . With the punishment for plagiarism as inconsistent as the actual transgressions, it seems cheating allegations can only prosper.

“If Gay had gotten caught as an undergrad, maybe she fails a course and has a hard start to her career,” Bailey says. “If she were a regular old faculty member, she might be ordered to make corrections, take a remedial course, serve a small suspension and earn an article on a site like Retraction Watch. But once you get to the top of a school like Harvard, it’s almost like the script flips and suddenly plagiarism is very strictly enforced, at least by the public.”

Much like with other transgressions, it seems that how plagiarism is enforced has more to do with the person being accused than the violation that was committed. “I don’t think we can actually divorce the political from plagiarism partly because it’s often the case that scrutiny is applied to some people in some moments and not others in other moments,” Blum says. “This case has a number of tragic and angering dimensions. Whether it should rise to the level of forcing her resignation, I’m not sure.”

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• 12 March 2024

Bring PhD assessment into the twenty-first century

You have full access to this article via your institution.

Innovation in PhD education has not reached how doctoral degrees are assessed. Credit: Dan Dunkley/Science Photo Library

Research and teaching in today’s universities are unrecognizable compared with what they were in the early nineteenth century, when Germany and later France gave the world the modern research doctorate. And yet significant aspects of the process of acquiring and assessing a doctorate have remained remarkably constant. A minimum of three years of independent study mentored by a single individual culminates in the production of the doctoral thesis — often a magisterial, book-length piece of work that is assessed in an oral examination by a few senior academic researchers. In an age in which there is much research-informed innovation in teaching and learning, the assessment of the doctoral thesis represents a curious throwback that is seemingly impervious to meaningful reform.

But reform is needed. Some doctoral candidates perceive the current assessment system to lack transparency, and examiners report concerns of falling standards ( G. Houston A Study of the PhD Examination: Process, Attributes and Outcomes . PhD thesis, Oxford Univ.; 2018 ). Making the qualification more structured would help — and, equally importantly, would bring the assessment of PhD education in line with education across the board. PhD candidates with experience of modern assessment methods will become better researchers, wherever they work. Indeed, most will not be working in universities: the majority of PhD holders find employment outside academia.

Collection: Career resources for PhD students

It’s not that PhD training is completely stuck in the nineteenth century. Today’s doctoral candidates can choose from a range of pathways. Professional doctorates, often used in engineering, are jointly supervised by an employer and an academic, and are aimed at solving industry-based problems. Another innovation is PhD by publication, in which, instead of a final thesis on one or more research questions, the criterion for an award is a minimum number of papers published or accepted for publication. In some countries, doctoral students are increasingly being trained in cohorts, with the aim of providing a less isolating experience than that offered by the conventional supervisor–student relationship. PhD candidates are also encouraged to acquire transferable skills — for example, in data analysis, public engagement, project management or business, economics and finance. The value of such training would be even greater if these skills were to be formally assessed alongside a dissertation rather than seen as optional.

And yet, most PhDs are still assessed after the production of a final dissertation, according to a format that, at its core, has not changed for at least half a century, as speakers and delegates noted at an event in London last month on PhD assessment, organized by the Society for Research in Higher Educatio n. Innovations in assessment that are common at other levels of education are struggling to find their way into the conventional doctoral programme.

Take the concept of learning objectives. Intended to aid consistency, fairness and transparency, learning objectives are a summary of what a student is expected to know and how they will be assessed, and are given at the start of a course of study. Part of the ambition is also to help tutors to keep track of their students’ learning and take remedial action before it is too late.

PhD training is no longer fit for purpose — it needs reform now

Formative assessment is another practice that has yet to find its way into PhD assessment consistently. Here, a tutor evaluates a student’s progress at the mid-point of a course and gives feedback or guidance on what students need to do to improve ahead of their final, or summative, assessment. It is not that these methods are absent from modern PhDs; a conscientious supervisor will not leave candidates to sink or swim until the last day. But at many institutions, such approaches are not required of PhD supervisors.

Part of the difficulty is that PhD training is carried out in research departments by people who do not need to have teaching qualifications or awareness of innovations based on education research. Supervisors shouldn’t just be experts in their field, they should also know how best to convey that subject knowledge — along with knowledge of research methods — to their students.

It is probably not possible for universities to require all doctoral supervisors to have teaching qualifications. But there are smaller changes that can be made. At a minimum, doctoral supervisors should take the time to engage with the research that exists in the field of PhD education, and how it can apply to their interactions with students.

There can be no one-size-fits-all solution to improving how a PhD is assessed, because different subjects often have bespoke needs and practices ( P. Denicolo Qual. Assur. Educ. 11 , 84–91; 2003 ). But supervisors and representatives of individual subject communities must continue to discuss what is most appropriate for their disciplines.

All things considered, there is benefit to adopting a more structured approach to PhD assessment. It is high time that PhD education caught up with changes that are now mainstream at most other levels of education. That must start with a closer partnership between education researchers, PhD supervisors and organizers of doctoral-training programmes in universities. This partnership will benefit everyone — PhD supervisors and doctoral students coming into the research workforce, whether in universities or elsewhere.

Education and training in research has entered many secondary schools, along with undergraduate teaching, which is a good thing. In the spirit of mutual learning, research doctoral supervisors, too, will benefit by going back to school.

Nature 627 , 244 (2024)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-024-00718-0

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