iThenticate Blog

Steven Strachan snapped up headlines this month due to his plagiarized yearbook address.

Earlier this month, three professors who currently teach in Britain, claimed that Nebojsa Stefanovic, Serbia’s Interior Minister, plagiarized in his doctoral thesis, which he defended at Megatrend University’s Faculty of Business Studies in June of last year.

The professors used iThenticate to perform their analysis and published the allegations on a site named Pescanik, which translates to “Sandpit”, only to have the site go down after being hacked and blocked. However, the allegations remained online long enough to attract public interest and with it an investigation by the Serbian Parliament.

A recent study published in the Indian Journal of Medical Ethics reveals that over half of all doctors who responded, 56%, admit that they have observed plagiarism in papers being submitted to medical journals.

Chris Spence, the former head of the Toronto District School Board, which is the largest school board in Canada, is asking the University of Toronto, where he received his Ph.D, to drop its ongoing investigation to plagiarism in his dissertation.

Earlier this month, CNN posted an editor’s note on their site stating that they had terminated Marie-Louise Gumuchian after discovering some 50 of her articles contained plagiarized materials, including 128 incidents of plagiarism in total. Gumuchian worked for about six months as an editor at CNN out of the London Bureau, where she reported on news from Africa, the Middle East and Europe.

According to the note, CNN learned of the plagiarism after an editorial review of an unpublished story turned up issues. CNN then investigated further and found at least 50 other articles with issues, prompting them to terminate Gumuchian’s employment and edit or remove the offending stories.

In Maine, Republican Governor Paul LePage has announced that he is seeking to withhold more than $400,000 owed to the Alexander Group, a consulting firm that was promised $925,000 to draft an evaluation of the Maine welfare system.

Several years ago, I attended the International Society for Medical Publishing Professionals (ISMPP) annual meeting.  As a presenter, I was introducing attendees to a new initiative called CrossCheck.  Our company, iParadigms, had recently partnered with CrossRef, a non-profit providing several services to the scholarly publishing community including Digital Object Identifier (DOI) registration.  The partnership was straightforward.  CrossRef's publisher and society members would receive access to iThenticate for use in editorial review in return for allowing us to index their published content.  Where plagiarism detection software is concerned, the primary value is the world of content against which you can compare manuscripts.  My introduction of the CrossCheck initiative received mixed reviews.  Many wondered how the use of our software would impact existing editorial processes.  Would efficiencies be affected?  Would the scholarly research community support the effort? 

 According to Kai Kupferschmidt at Science, the plagiarism saga of former German Education and Research Minister Annette Schavan has reached a conclusion as Schavan is giving up her legal bid to keep her Ph.D.

Schavan found herself in the center of controversy in late 2012 when an anonymous blogger and part of the Vroniplag Wiki posted an accusation that she had plagiarized portions of her dissertation, written in 1980. Schavan was then a key member of Angela Merkel’s cabinet and a high-ranking figure in German politics.

According to Yomiuri Shimbun at The Japan News, Weseda University’s Graduate School of Advanced Science and Engineering has begun an investigation into all of the doctoral theses that have been written for it to determine if any had been plagiarized or suffered from other ethical lapses.

The investigation comes after the controversy surrounding Haruko Obokata, who earned her doctorate at Wesada University and then went on to work at the RIKEN institute, where she claims to have discovered anew way to create stem cells. However, her work has come under fire as accusations of plagiarism and difficulties replicating her results have raised questions about the research.

According to a recent report in the Times Higher Education, prominent sociologist Zygmunt Bauman has been accused of plagiarism in his most recent book, Does the Richness of the Few Benefit Us All?