How to find Plagiarism in Dissertations - Copy, Shake, and Paste

Germany is awash in another wave of discussions about plagiarism. This time it is the Minister of Education and Research, Annette Schavan. The story about plagiarism in her dissertation broke in May, and the University of Düsseldorf has been examining the case since. Today, October 17, the committee is meeting to decide on the results, but the documentation that they prepared was leaked to the press this past weekend, and the press has been in a frenzy.

And I have laryngitis and can't talk. I have journalists pleading with me to explain how the "magic" VroniPlag Wiki software works. The problem is, there is no magic software. The method used to find plagiarism in dissertations (or any other written work) is called "research". Just normal research.

But since so many people need to know how this is done, here's a crib sheet with 10 easy steps:

1. Obtain the thesis. If you are just trying to find the dissertation of a particular person who did their doctoral work in Germany, give the German National Library a try. Type in the name and see what it comes up with. Then use the catalog of your local library (often called an OPAC, online public access catalog) or a union catalog to try and locate a copy. Most German states have a union catalog, in Berlin it is the KOBV.  If there is none in your locality, you can obtain a library card and then have the thesis sent to you using inter-library loan.
2. Read the thesis. There is no royal road. The so-called plagiarism detection software can turn up the odd reference, but only if the sources are online. The best bet is to start reading it, and look for shifts in writing style, or places where the writing turns Spiegel-esque, or for sudden useless details, or misspellings, or just wrong content.
3. Google. I've given up on other search machines. Just belly up to the search bar and type in three to five words from a sentence or paragraph and see what turns up. If you get a lead through Google Books, use step 1 to obtain a copy of the book. If you get lucky and the first paragraph is taken from the FAZ or the NZZ -- paydirt! Don't just try one paragraph, take a few from different parts of the book. 
4. Follow the footnotes. University teachers do this when teaching their students how to footnote, and it scares the daylights out of students when they see that the professor found out that they were just making up the footnotes. Does the reference exist? Is the thing being said found on that page? Is the whole paragraph taken from the reference with the quotation marks "forgotten"? Does the chapter in the dissertation continue on after the footnote without a further reference? Is this paragraph perhaps just a translation of the reference? 
5. Browse the bibliography. What is the most recent source used? Is it five years older than the dissertation? In some fields, this would sound an alarm. Is there some strange or obscure literature listed? Obtain it! Do you need journal articles? Germany had a wonderful listing of the holdings of all libraries nationwide, the Zeitschriftendatenbank. It will tell you where they can be found, and many can even be delivered to your email account as a pdf for a few Euros. Many libraries also subscribe to digital libraries that can be used when sitting at the library. A walk would do you good, anyway, so get over there and have a look.
6. Digitize. If you have already found a source plagiarized in a dissertation, the chance is that there is more. Have a good look at each, and now digitize the relevant portions. Use a book scanner in the library to get a high-quality scan of the pages as a PDF. You lay the book flat under the camera, press a button, turn the page, press a button, until you are done. Experienced scanners can do over 100 pages per hour. Now use an optical character recognition (OCR) software on the PDF. There are free ones like Google's Tesseract or professional versions such as the one built into Adobe's Acrobat or OmniPage or Abbyy Fine Reader.
7. Compare. This is one if the few software systems the VroniPlag Wiki people use. It is a text comparison tool that is based on the free algorithm of Dick Grune. The tool marks identical passages in two documents that it is comparing. Put the dissertation in one side, the source in the other, and press "Texte vergleichen!". Don't forget to make a screen shot if the results turn out colorful.
8. Document. If you find anything, document it exactly. Page and line numbers from the dissertation, URL or page and line numbers from the source, and a copy of each. A two-column side-by-side has proved easy to understand when showing the results to others.
9. Need help? If you have already found some nasty text parallels, drop in at the VroniPlag Wiki chat or use the drop if you want to be discreet. You might be able to interest someone in working on the case. But remember, they are all volunteers. Or you can continue on yourself, and then inform the ombud for good scientific practice at the university in question.
10. Publish. If you feel that it is necessary to publish your results, you can either choose a wiki, such as the GuttenPlag Wiki or the VroniPlag Wiki, which makes it easier for others to help you with the documentation, or you can publish on a blog, like the SchavanPlag blog, which gives you complete control of what is published. Or you can print up a book, like Marion Soreth did in 1990 when she documented the dissertation of her colleague Elisabeth Ströker. 

All clear? If I've missed anything, please add in the comments!

Scientific fraud: a sign of the times? - The Guardian

If you read about scientific fraud in the recent news, it would seem that there is much to worry about. It's on the rise, apparently! There has been a 10-fold increase in the number of retracted papers since the 1970's, and a number of these are due to fraud or suspected fraud.

An investigation of retractions from the biomedical scientific literature database PubMed published in the prestigious Proceedings of the National Academy of Science USA (PNAS) found that a whopping 63.2% of health- and life-science related retractions were due to fraud, suspected fraud or plagiarism, with good old honest error retractions in the sound minority. This sounds scary – especially the 'suspected fraud'. Is this just the tip of the scientific deceit iceberg? Just how many lies are lurking in the scientific literature?

Then there are the stories. Professor Marc Hauser (formerly) of Harvard was accused by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services's Office of Research Integrity of inventing results to support his idea of a biological foundation for cognition in monkeys – specifically if they could recognize changes in sound patterns like human babies can. Hauser was a popular scientist too; he even has a best-selling book: Moral Minds: How Nature Designed Our Universal Sense of Right and Wrong where he somewhat ironically argued that "policy wonks and politicians should listen more closely to our intuitions and write policy that effectively takes into account the moral voice of our species." Which worked out in his case; he was busted for scientific misconduct. His book also tells us that "our ability to detect cheaters who violate social norms is one of nature's gifts". Nature's gifts or not, his students and research assistants blew the whistle.

And this isn't just in life science, it's everywhere. Physics has its high profile cheaters too! There is Jan Hendrik Schön, the physicist who made up his data – 26 of his papers have been retracted and he has been stripped of his doctoral degree. And then there is the cold fusion boys who, to be fair, are probably more victims of faulty equipment and sticking to your beloved theory despite the facts, than perpetrators of actual fraud. Psychology is not immune either; Dirk Smeester, whose results seemed too good to be true, has also been caught just making stuff up.

Is no scientific discipline safe? Are scientists just incapable of keeping their modern houses clean? It has been argued that because of recent pressure for scientists to publish groundbreaking results that change the world, the temptation to commit fraud is perhaps bound to increase, implying that there was a simpler, more honest time for science. Dewy-eyed, there is a temptation to believe that scientists back in the day were only of high moral character and were purely duty-bound to pursue the truth. But this isn't really true. Fraud in science isn't new, just like fraud in anything isn't new.>>>

Misconduct, Not Error, Found Behind Most Journal Retractions - THE CHRONICLE

Paul Basken
Research misconduct, rather than error, is the leading cause of retractions in scientific journals, with the problem especially pronounced in more prestigious publications, a comprehensive analysis has concluded.

The analysis, described on Monday in PNAS, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, challenges previous findings that attributed most retractions to mistakes or inadvertent failures in equipment or supplies.
The PNAS finding came from a comprehensive review of more than 2,000 published retractions, including detailed investigations into the public explanations given by the retracting authors and their journals.>>>