iThenticate Blog

It’s been only a few months since German Defense Minister Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg resigned after being accused of plagiarizing his doctorate. Now two more German politicians have resigned and been stripped of their Ph.D’s as a result of plagiarism.

Last month Silvana Koch-Mehrin, a leading politician of the Free Democratic Party (FDP), and previously vice president of the European Parliament, was investigated by the The University of Heidelberg for plagiarism in her thesis, revocation of her Ph.D as the final result. According to DW-World.de, 120 passages on 80 different pages from nearly 30 different publications (and two-thirds of those not accurately cited) in her thesis were plagiarized.

Jorgo Chatzimarkakis, also a member of the Free Democrats (FDP), is the latest German politician to be revoked of his doctorate for plagiarism. The faculty at the University of Bonn invested his Ph.D thesis and found enough evidence to revoke the doctorate degree.

All three of these political figures had different excuses to the accusation of plagiarism.

Johann Hari has certainly set off a media frenzy the past two weeks challenging the definition of plagiarism. Last week it was discovered that Hari, columnist for the British newspaper the Independent and winner of the Orwell Prize, has a habit of taking statements or quotes from other reporters' interviews and inserting them into his own interview article as if the person had said it to him instead of the original reporter. Of course, without credit to the original reporter.

Everyday, plagiarism is becoming a more frequent subject in the news.  The New York Times recently published a very interesting article that examines the current state of plagiarism in the world today. 

‘International research community’ is a term you hear quite often; referring to a global consortium of researchers working together towards a common discovery. 

China’s economy is rapidly growing in a variety of industries.  One growing sector is even profiting off of the rising incidence of plagiarism in China’s university and research institutions. 

One of the biggest plagiarism law suits of the decade continues to make headlines in the UK and internationally. Billionaire ‘Harry Potter’ author J.K. Rowling and her publisher Bloomsbury Publishing PLC face an ongoing law suit coming from the estate of a now-deceased fantasy writer.  

A recent article from Times Higher Education discusses a new ‘Tariff’ that academics in the UK are proposing that will lay out a universal system of penalties for university students that plagiarize.