IT MAY be an important lesson of Confucian philosophy that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, but Chinese universities have been forced to introduce anti-plagiarism software to try and save their reputations after a raft of academic fraud scandals.
Plagiarism is seen as an impediment to innovation and is rife at Chinese universities.
The major universities, particularly the big institutions in Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou have a strong domestic reputation. But efforts to establish international renown and prevent the brain drain to western colleges has stalled due to a perception that they lack innovation and rigour.
Xinhua news agency reported how the elite Zhejiang University fired an associate professor last week who was caught copying a former doctoral supervisor’s research results in eight of his theses and sending one paper to different journals for publication.
The agency said the scandal also involved one of China’s top experts on traditional Chinese medicine and an academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering.
There was particular concern over these cases because of the damage to China’s international reputation in areas in which it is supposed to excel, such as traditional Chinese medicine.
Recent years have seen Tongji University in Shanghai sack its dean of biology for faking research into lung cancer, while a professor at another top Shanghai university, Jiaotong, was fired for falsely claiming to have invented a new kind of computer chip, a Chinese “superchip” called the Hanxin, widely heralded as real competition for Intel.
University professors tell of how they regularly discover huge tracts of plagiarised passages in essays and theses, particularly if the student is writing in a second language. A special website called New Threads has run since 2000, exposing cases of plagiarism.
The anti-cogging software, Academic Misconduct Literature Check, was developed by the China Academic Journals Electronic Publishing House and Tsinghua Tongfang Knowledge Network Technology Group (TTKN), Xinhua reported. You can be sure that it was developed without reference to existing text-comparison programmes.
The programme was rolled out to editors of natural science journals last December and to college professors on March 12th, a spokesman for TTKN told Xinhua.
The software will allow cross-checking of theses and papers, with more than 60 million published articles collected on a database established by Tsinghua University in 1994, composed of thousands of academic journals, dissertations and seminar briefing documents. About 200 universities have signed up for the programme, Xinhua reported.