A comparison of the texts in the volume published by the minister Lucian Bode clearly shows that this is a plagiarism of a block of text. Why this fact is a “potential problem” and not a plagiarism problem is because the intellectual theft was done without quotation marks.

I am asking myself, publicly, the question that is presented in the title. This follows from the latest decision of the National Council for the Ethics of Scientific Research, Technological Development and Innovation (CNE) regarding the alleged situation of non-plagiarism in the case of a volume published by Minister Lucian Bode (LB), based on his doctoral thesis. Young learners, students or postgraduates reading the CNE report in question can simply count and find e.g. that the said Council, although it has reported itself, does not provide in the report published on its own website only an analysis of the 31-page text. Why exactly so many, given that the book has 256 pages (information provided after applying TURNITIN to the electronic version of the volume)? The working group in the Council, which was especially engaged in analysis, analyzed only 30 pages, or only that number of pages were suspected of plagiarism? How were the pages analyzed by the Council selected?

There are several legitimate questions that arise. The University of Babes-Boliai (UBB) and Professor Emilia Shercan of the University of Bucharest say that the doctoral thesis reproduced en masse in the analyzed book is plagiarism. CNE claims, on the contrary, that this is not plagiarism, just some citation/editing errors. How the Ministry of Education and the Ministry of Statistics will resolve this contradiction between their institutions remains to be seen. Is plagiarism by translation or use of translations free and legal? The fact that often the author of the book in question no longer quotes texts taken through/from translations, does this mean that law 206/2004 and the CNE’s own guidelines no longer matter?

I propose to insist on such questions briefly, in the hope that the public space will detail the discussion, and the institutions involved will respond.

Plagiarism through translation

I’ll start with an observation. On pages 169-170 of the plagiarized book, as the UBB analysis claims, and not only, TURNITIN indicates huge paragraphs taken from three different sources from Romania. No quotation marks, no references in the text to the sources, no pages from the source. works, where they were carried out illegal takeovers. In addition, the CNE final report number 40/18 May 2023 does not mention the pages in question as being at least suspicious of plagiarism. Why Perhaps we will learn from those who did the analysis that led to the “non-plagiarism” decision. And if you compare the report generated by the similarity software with the table in the CNE report, you will easily find that there are many other suspected plagiarized pages marked as TURNITIN but not found in the CNE analysis.

The analysis report states that “part of the text on page 20 is taken by translation from another uncited source, namely Tergin, 2006.’ This is a full paragraph, over 100 words, taken without attribution and without quotation marks. This is clearly plagiarized from a block of text that the reviewers in the task force do not explicitly say is plagiarized.

On page 21 of Report 40 dated June 18, 2023, it states that “The potential problem is that quotation marks were not used.” A comparison of the texts clearly shows that this is plagiarism of a text block. Why this fact is a “potential problem” and not a plagiarism problem is because the intellectual theft was done without quotation marks. Formula “potential problem” is used several times as a euphemism to avoid recognition of plagiarism. In which specialized work did the authors from the CNE working group find such a practice of avoiding the truth, respectively, recognizing plagiarism as a euphemism “potential problem”?

The authors of the CNE report in question justify not quoting texts illegally taken by LB by citing the text on the American Psychological Association (APA) blog. There, indeed, it is indicated that translations made by the author of this text can be considered paraphrasing and do not require quotation marks. The same prestigious American institution indicates, however, that a) it is good for the corresponding author to indicate the page from which he took the translation and b) that if it is taken from an already published translation, quotation marks should be used as a citation mark along with the author and title of the original work. Many of the works in English from which LB has adapted have already been translated into Romanian. Therefore, LB was obliged to mark the texts taken from such works also with quotation marks. The failure to mention these paragraphs in the CNE report, taken from texts already translated and published in Romanian, but not commented on in the report, seems to have been one of the main schemes used to cover up LB’s plagiarism. Read the whole article and comment on Contributors.ro