1/9/20
Ghostwritten papers. Research reprinted elsewhere under a different name. Plagiarism. For years it's been an open secret that all is not well in the world of academic writing in Russia. A committee appointed by the Russian Academy of Sciences last year tried to tackle what many said was a huge task. Its report, released on January 6, confirmed what a gargantuan effort it may turn out to be. The committee said more than 800 scientific papers had been retracted since last summer, when it first pinpointed more than 2,500 dubious papers published in some of Russia's 6,000 scientific journals. "I think this is just the tip of the iceberg," said Anna Kuleshova, the chairwoman of an ethics committee at Russia's largest scientific publishing association.
The root of the problem dates back to 2012, some analysts say, when, in a decree issued shortly before his reelection, President Vladimir Putin ordered universities to pay professors more but also to publish more academic papers to boost Russia's international clout. To churn out more papers, many Russian universities resorted to linking academics' pay and contracts to article productivity. However, others say the problem is older and deeper. Not only academics, but businessmen and senior government officials -- including Putin -- have been accused of plagiarizing college and doctoral theses. The commission's findings were largely in line with what other researchers have found, including Dissernet, a grassroots group that has focused on ferreting out plagiarism not only in Russian academics, but elsewhere.
Putin himself, whose official resume says he holds a law degree earned from Leningrad State University in 1975, has faced charges of plagiarism. His biography says in 1997, Putin defended a doctoral thesis on economics at the St. Petersburg State Mining Institute, a paper titled Strategic Planning Of The Reproduction Of The Mineral Resource Base Of A Region Under Conditions Of The Formation Of Market Relations. In 2005, two researchers at the Brookings Institution in Washington got a copy of the thesis, and concluded that it had been heavily "borrowed" from a 1978 textbook written by two University of Pittsburgh professors. "Even Vladimir Putin himself doesn't reference or cite his own dissertation," said Igor Danchenko, a senior research assistant at Brookings. "This fact is also omitted in his famous book of interviews, In The First Person." "Moreover, Putin seems to evade questions about his dissertation," he added. "He [has] never openly said that he has a degree in economics." Putin has never responded publicly to the allegations.