Prominent sources[]
- The entire introduction (pp. 7-25) as well as large parts of the methods chapter have been copied verbatim from the dissertation Cervello (2009) that has been defended in Valencia three years earlier. The author of this dissertation is mentioned in the acknowledgement section in general terms, the dissertation Cervello (2009), however, isn't mentioned anywhere at all.
- Wikipedia: ELISA (2012). Three pages have been copied from the Wikipedia without any attribution.
Prominent fragments[]
- Fragment 007 01: The first page of the thesis is identical to the corresponding page of the source. Even the text formatting is identical.
- Fragment 021 01: A fragment including a copied figure.
- Fragment 051 01: An entire page taken from the Wikipedia.
Other observations[]
- The main body of the dissertation includes altogether 13 pages that are empty or filled only with chapter titles (pp. 26-28, 30-31, 33-34, 58-59, 78, 84-86). Those pages have been excluded from the analysis.
- Almost the entire results section (pp. 60-76) has been translated from the publication Santamaria et al. (2011), also most figures in this section are taken from there. This fact is nowhere mentioned in the thesis, but Santamaria et al. (2011) is listed in the bibliography. As X. S. is the first author of this publication, these parallels have not been documented as plagiarism, but the question arises whether all this material is the work of X. S. alone, given that the publication has altogether five authors. The first supervisor is one of the four coauthors.
Statistics[]
- Currently there are 32 reviewed fragments documented that are considered to be violations of citation rules. For 32 of them there is no reference given to the source used („Verschleierungen“ and „Komplettplagiate“). For 0 fragments the source is given, but the extent of the used text is not made clear („Bauernopfer“).
- The publication has 68 pages that have been analyzed. On a total of 32 of these pages violations of citation rules have been documented. This represents a percentage of 47.1%. The 68 analyzed pages break down with respect to the amount of text parallels encountered as follows:
- From these statistics an extrapolation of the amount of text of the publication under investigation that has been documented as problematic can be estimated (conservatively) as about 35% of the main part of the publication.
- In all, text was taken from 3 sources.
Illustration[]
The following chart illustrates the amount and the distribution of the text parallel findings. The colours show the type of plagiarism diagnosed:
- grau="Komplettplagiat" (copy & paste): the source of the text parallel is not given, the copy is verbatim.
- rot="Verschleierung" (disguised plagiarism): the source of the text parallel is not given, the copied text will be somewhat modified.
