{"id":702,"date":"2015-10-14T02:59:59","date_gmt":"2015-10-13T22:59:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/klnran.ru\/?p=702"},"modified":"2015-10-14T11:29:40","modified_gmt":"2015-10-14T07:29:40","slug":"dissernet","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/klnran.ru\/en\/2015\/10\/dissernet\/","title":{"rendered":"Mass-produced PhDs lie at heart of Russia\u2019s \u2018plague\u2019 of doctoral fraud"},"content":{"rendered":"

Academic \u2018scallywags\u2019 are gaining doctorates thanks to the circulation of dodgy theses within some universities, says the founder of plagiarism pressure group<\/strong><\/p>\n

The extraordinary scale of PhD fraud in Russia can be attributed to the reproduction of near-identical doctoral dissertations within universities, a new study says.<\/p>\n

With more than 3,500 falsified theses identified by the anti-plagiarism group Dissernet<\/a> in the past two years, PhD forgery is now an \u201cintegral part of Russia\u2019s statehood\u201d, rather than a \u201cfringe phenomenon\u201d, according to the analysis published<\/a> in Higher Education in Russia and Beyond, a quarterly newsletter published by the country\u2019s National Research University Higher School of Economics.<\/p>\n

But its author and Dissernet\u2019s founder Andrei Rostovtsev says that it is wrong to think about plagiarism in Russia in the same way as in Western Europe or the US.<\/p>\n

\u201cMost of the authors under scrutiny by Dissernet have\u2026most probably never written a single page of their dissertations and might have never read them or even seen them at all,\u201d says Professor Rostovtsev, a physicist based at the Russian Academy of Sciences\u2019 Institute for Information Transmission Problems.<\/p>\n

This type of fraud can be achieved when dissertations defended at one university department (for instance, sociology) are passed to another PhD candidate at another department (economics) and defended after a few words are changed, he explains.<\/p>\n

\u201cOne notorious \u2018scholar\u2019 transformed a dissertation about the confectionery industry into a dissertation about the beef-and-dairy industry by substituting \u2018dark chocolate\u2019 with \u2018imported beef\u2019 and \u2018nut chocolate\u2019 with \u2018bone-in beef\u2019,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

\u201cAll the data, spelling, tables and pictures remained unchanged\u201d, although some authors alter their dating of statistics to make them seem more up-to-date, he adds.<\/p>\n

Mass-production of PhDs is generally centred in Moscow and St Petersburg, where \u201cconveyor units\u201d were found for \u201cPhDifying\u201d politicians, public officials and teachers, he says.<\/p>\n

A series of dissertations on ground beetles identified by Dissernet, all defended at the same university, also exhibited this hallmark of dissertation exchange, Professor Rostovtsev says.<\/p>\n

Each of the PhD theses claimed to examine the various beetles found in sand dunes in the same part of Russia, but they all shared the same basic structure, standard conclusion and bibliography, he explains.<\/p>\n

\u201cCertainly the arthropoda of each and every dune deserve to be studied. Yet such work is nothing more than that of a research assistant who merely collects necessary specimens, therefore such dissertations are rather poor in terms of contents,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

However, PhD fraud in physics, chemistry and biology are relatively uncommon, according to Professor Rostovtsev\u2019s analysis of cheating authors identified by Dissernet.<\/p>\n

\u201cMost of the fake dissertations (40 per cent) accrue to economics\u201d, with education, law, politics and other social sciences also popular with cheats, areas in which Russia is traditionally weak in international journal citation scores, he says.<\/p>\n

\u201cScallywags prosper in the academic areas where Russia is still lagging behind,\u201d he says, with fraud much smaller in the sciences in which the country\u2019s academy has some international standing.<\/p>\n

Dissernet has now built up a unique database of plagiarised dissertations and developed a semi-automatic algorithm to detect when editors of pay-to-publish journals \u2013 in which unoriginal PhDs are routinely published \u2013 have been connected with dissertation fraud, he says.<\/p>\n

However, with PhD fraud now \u201cwell-integrated into the contemporary Russian political system\u201d, this is unlikely to be enough to stop this \u201cplague of major academic transgressions\u201d, he concludes.<\/p>\n

Text: Jack Grove<\/em><\/a>
\nFirst published: THE (Times Higher Education<\/a>). October 4, 2015<\/em><\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Academic \u2018scallywags\u2019 are gaining doctorates thanks to the circulation of dodgy theses within some universities, says the founder of plagiarism pressure group<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[221,220,222,223,224],"class_list":["post-702","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-monitoring","tag-andrej-rostovtsev","tag-dissernet","tag-plagiat","tag-rejting-universitetov","tag-sfabrikovanny-e-dissertatsii"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/klnran.ru\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/702","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/klnran.ru\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/klnran.ru\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/klnran.ru\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/klnran.ru\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=702"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/klnran.ru\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/702\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/klnran.ru\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=702"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/klnran.ru\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=702"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/klnran.ru\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=702"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}