According to the “plagiarism hunter” Stefan Weber, the independence of Justice Minister Alma Zadic’s doctoral thesis is no longer fulfilled. The University of Vienna intends to decide by mid-March whether to initiate proceedings.
The University of Vienna intends to decide whether to initiate plagiarism proceedings once morest Justice Minister Alma Zadic (Greens) by mid-March. The basis is an anonymous report that was published by the ÖVP-related online medium Exxpress, according to the university. In the minister’s office, the accusation that had been in the air since January was once more rejected: the work corresponds to internationally recognized legal standards.
“The work is written as an English-language work strictly according to the citation rules of the Harvard Blue Book,” it said. In 2017, Zadic wrote his dissertation on the influence of the UN tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) on legal developments in the successor states.
In the sights of Stefan Weber
Zadic’s work was criticized a few weeks ago by “plagiarism hunter” Stefan Weber, who has since changed his mind several times. In 2020 he had already received an order to examine the English-language dissertation. His verdict at the time: zero plagiarism. After a first report, also published on Exxpress, he looked at the work once more a few weeks ago out of self-interest and found four passages that he rated as plagiarism fragments – some of these were serious, but due to the small number they led to a loss of the doctorate certainly not enough.
In view of the new report, however, that was also a “misjudgment,” according to Weber. With the usual “Turnitin” software, many passages might not have been found due to the changes made. Zadic quoted extensively in her work – even if not always correctly with quotation marks. However, many passages were not copied, but rewritten with a slightly different wording and not sufficiently marked – for example, the sources of the passages are mentioned elsewhere, but not everywhere where necessary.
His new verdict: “For me, the criterion of independence is no longer met – in a dissertation, scientific questions have to be dealt with independently.” If the reformulated passages had also been correctly provided with footnotes, there would hardly have been any work of their own left. “And you can’t set the criteria so low that rewriting is a personal effort.”
“Plagiarism or paraphrasing culture”
“Whether you call it plagiarism or paraphrasing is a question of etiquette,” says Weber. In his opinion, the university should revoke the doctorate – unless Zadic can prove that she learned this way of working at the law faculty. That cannot be ruled out either: “Then there is no intention to deceive.”
Weber does not blame the original reviewers of the work at the university: In order to recognize the corresponding reformulations, you have to take a close look away from plagiarism software: “That’s more than a single reviewer can do.” After the appearance of the first “Exxpress” report, both the deputy head of the Institute for Criminal Law and Criminology at the University of Vienna, Ingeborg Zerbes, and Zadic’s doctoral supervisor Frank Höpfel defended the work.
Weber sees a training problem in particular: “We shouldn’t train female doctoral students to only reformulate, but to get them to think for themselves and not get stuck on the literature. At the moment, we mainly produce librettists: our culture brings people together out who need a template.”
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