As some of you may know â?? I am concerned with plagiarism (some earlier posts on the subject). In one of these earlier posts I wrote about a situation where a supervisor had borrowed/stolen/plagiarised a student work and presented it as his/her own at the EMAC conference in Milan in 2005.
The plagiarist is a PhD â?? not a student. The conference submission was a five-page paper. There is something very wrong with the fact that a person with a PhD cannot write his/her own five-page conference paper (Actually I would call five pages an extended abstract).
What really annoyed me (besides the bad plagiarism and all it stands for) was the fact that:
The majority of the research ethics committee found that while it was wrong that the supervisor did not ask the students, it was too far to say that the supervisor had cheated. This position was motivated that by calling the supervisor actions plagiarism would effectively be damage scientific research. (from earlier post).
Thankfully today the local newspaper writes that the University Dean has sent the errand onwards and upwards to the research ethics group of the National Swedish Research Council. Maybe by going beyond the confines of the own organisation the message can be stated clearly that plagiarism by researchers is as unacceptable as we claim it is when students attempt it.