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Regular version of the site

Self-Regulation of the Russian “Science”

On April, 6, SESL hosted a meeting with Professor Andrey Rostovtsev, Dr. Sci. in Physics and Mathematics and a co-founder of the Free Network Community Dissernet. The meeting was attended mostly by the bachelors of the Department of Sociology, and staff of the HSE and SESL.

Daniel Alexandrov opened the meeting by explaining why Dissernet is such an important and interesting phenomenon for sociologists. Since the early 2000s, the science in Russia has been existing in a state of anomy, which was manifested in the decay of established values within the scientific community, and, as a consequence, in the all-encompassing fabrication of counterfeit theses and research papers. Thus, Dissernet is presented by a community of people united by a common goal, and as such it offers a very interesting example of self-regulation in the scientific community that mostly aimed at the restoration of symbolic value to its products.

Professor Rostovtsev started his talk with in a truly sociological way, by stating that a research thesis can be considered as a litmus test for assessing academic qualifications. He also talked about the history of founding his Free Network Community. The main feature of Dissernet is a flat, non-hierarchical structure. This is a platform for like-minded people whose goal is to check and verify the authenticity of degree theses, research papers, and uncover cases of fraud and plagiarism.

Professor Rostovtsev also spoke about the software component of Dissernet, which was especially interesting to the listeners from programming courses. The process takes two steps. At the first step, an algorithm compares the text on each page to texts from the Dissernet database. After that, a volunteer manually checks the correctness of the algorithmic matching of similar elements and enters the results in a table. The verdict on the level of plagiarism is made based on the results of both automatic and manual checks.

However, the discussion on the mechanisms of the proliferation of counterfeit theses was of particular interest to the audience. For example, several persons may ask the same individual to write a thesis for them. As a result, one can find whole clusters of falsified publications, all united around the same “academic advisor”.

Also, the members of Dissernet have collected data on the areas where plagiarism is more common. It has turned out that, in Russia, plagiarism is most common in the areas of social sciences, humanities, and medicine. The exact and natural sciences are less affected by plagiarism.

The audience asked many questions, from the details on algorithms used in Dissernet, to comparisons with similar communities in European countries, including the level of their authority in voicing their opinion about stripping academic degrees from the counterfeiters.

The meeting ended with an informal tea party at SESL, during which the attendees discussed the organizational problems in the Higher Attestation Commission, which made such fraud possible. Professor Rostovtsev also mentioned that many of the Dissernet members are expatriates from Russia, who are able to affect the fate of their Motherland even in this way.

By Stas Pozdnyakov