Plagiarism in a PhD Thesis
From The Embassy of Good Science
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Plagiarism in a PhD Thesis
What is this about?
A committee on scientific dishonesty investigated accusations of plagiarism that a supervisor brought against his student. The student was accused of plagiarizing figures, equations and text from (1) the supervisor’s published and unpublished work and (2) the PhD dissertation of a former student of the supervisor. The committee ruled largely in the supervisor’s favour, though it stipulated that the use of others’ material did not always constitute plagiarism. The student corrected their thesis.
Why is this important?
The case discusses several possible instances of plagiarism:
1. Plagiarizing journal articles;
2. Reproducing and taking credit for figures presented in another researcher's articles;
3. Reproducing figures from a co-authored article;
4. Plagiarizing PowerPoint presentations;
5. Copy-and-pasting sections of a PhD thesis produced by another student.
It shows that plagiarism comes in different forms and does not just pertain to copy-and-pasting text.
