After all, the study “Plagiarism prevention and testing at Austrian universities and colleges” is 112 pages long.

Status report on practice in studies and teaching”, which the Institute for Advanced Studies in Vienna prepared on behalf of the Austrian Ministry of Education.

68 out of 73 public and private universities, teacher training colleges and technical colleges took part in an online survey.

There were also eight interviews.

The focus of the management report is on student work.

It's not about promotions.

The most important findings: Around three quarters of the universities have named an organizational unit or a person who takes care of the standards of good scientific practice or plagiarism.

Almost all Austrian universities have guidelines on plagiarism, and almost 60 percent also publish them on the Internet.

Students learn the standards of good scientific practice in subject-specific courses: 85 percent of the universities state that they offer these courses.

Almost all institutions use plagiarism software,

However, it is irritating how the study design was created.

The data was collected by sending questionnaires to the universities.

Except for a few expert interviews, there was no research of our own.

The information provided by the universities has not been verified - and cannot be verified, as the raw data remains secret.

Only an aggregated picture of the situation was published.

This is incomprehensible in the case of public facts (such as the question “Does your university use plagiarism software?”).

There is no reason for secrecy.

In addition, the interpretation by the authors of the study seems questionable.

The summary of the study states: “Allegations of plagiarism affect the scientific community in several respects: the accused themselves, the respective university, but also the credibility of science as a whole suffers.

The head of the Institute for Science and Technology Studies, Ulrike Felt, was one of the interviewees.

Regarding their statements, the study says: “Overmoralization is problematic because it tends to blur the actually meaningful distinction between the different motives of the plagiarists and the severity of the plagiarism.

Felt speaks of 'innocent plagiarism' (Ulrike Felt, paragraph 22) if this refers, for example, to the unconscious transfer of parts of incompletely created flashcards or flashcards or from unclean notes into texts.” The categorization of plagiarism into guilty and innocent is at least an innovation of this study, albeit of a bizarre kind.

A contributor has distanced himself from the study

On page 104 it says, also as a finding after the interviews: "Another factor, which may affect Bachelor's and Master's students to a greater extent, is the fragmentation of the citation rules between disciplines, journals and university departments, which is particularly overwhelming for inexperienced students.

Finding your way through the multitude of different guidelines, handouts and fields of application requires the ability to critically reflect on the respective citation styles and to make them manageable for one’s own situation.”

Felix Hagenström leaves this statement at a loss.

The first reason is a formal one: the sentence before the quoted passage is in the subjunctive, the sentences before it are in the indicative, and the quoted passage is also in the indicative.

"Is what Felt (or someone else?) put on the record inaccurately reproduced here, or do we read the authors' opinion here," asks Hagenström, adding to the content: "Both should be criticized." In fact, the globally valid basic ones are Citation rules very simple and can be summarized in a few sentences.

Every student should already be familiar with these rules in the first semester.

One contributor has since distanced himself from the study because it put the discussion in Austria back 15 years: "Plagiarism does not seem to be an educational problem, but rather an image problem for the universities," writes the philosopher Stefan Weber in his blog: "Study inability, Source (work) immaturity and secondary illiteracy are not an issue.

Nor is there concern for the thieves who have been robbed of their 'intellectual property' and the wrong people who then make a career.

Curiously, the concern is with the accused (!) and the institutions.”