Monday, January 30, 2012

Guttenberg or the Triumph of Science?

Andreas Fischer-Lescano, the German law professor from the University of Bremen who started the ball rolling on the zu Guttenberg plagiarism scandal in 2011 by publishing a review of the dissertation detailing some of the plagiarism has published an essay: Guttenberg oder der „Sieg der Wissenschaft“? in the February 2012 number of the Blätter für Deutsche und internationale Politik. It is not easy German to read, but it analyses the political situation of Germany one year after the discovery quite nicely.

Who are the VroniPlag people?

If you read German, I have a pseudo-interview published in attempto!, Nr. 31 / December 2011, page 7-9. It attempts to explain why people spend their time looking for plagiarists.

Saturday, January 28, 2012

Cracow University also finds plagiarism

In August of 2011 the VroniPlag Wiki site went public with a documentation of plagiarism in the dissertation of German professor Cornelia Scott, a professor at a polytechnic college in Saxony. The university in Cracow, Poland, where she submitted her dissertation, has been investigating the case. The university has announced at the end of January 2012 that they have indeed confirmed that the dissertation contains plagiarism on 33 pages , 4 less that the VroniPlag documentation (20% of the dissertation).

The case has been referred to a federal board for investigation into whether the plagiarism is serious enough to rescind the doctorate.