The University of Vienna intends to decide whether to initiate plagiarism proceedings against Justice Minister Alma Zadic (Greens) by mid-March. The basis is an anonymous report that was published by the ÖVP-related online medium Exxpress, it said today.
In the minister’s office, the accusation that had been in the air since January was again rejected: the work corresponds to internationally recognized legal standards. “As an English-language work, the work is written strictly according to the citation rules of the Harvard Bluebook,” it said. In 2017, Zadic wrote his dissertation on the influence of the UN tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) on legal developments in the successor states.
Weber changed his mind
Zadic’s work was criticized a few weeks ago by plagiarism hunter Stefan Weber, who has since changed his mind several times. In 2020 he had already received an order to examine the English-language dissertation. His verdict at the time: zero plagiarism.
After a first report, also published on Exxpress, he looked at the work again a few weeks ago out of self-interest and found four passages that he rated as fragments of plagiarism – some of these were serious, but due to the small number they led to a loss of the doctorate certainly not enough.
In view of the new report, however, that was also a “misjudgment”, according to Weber. Many passages could not have been found with the usual “Turnitin” software due to the changes made. Zadic quoted extensively in her work – even if not always correctly with quotation marks.
“Criterion of self-employment no longer met”
However, many passages were not copied, but rewritten with a slightly different wording and not sufficiently marked – for example, the sources of the passages are mentioned elsewhere, but not everywhere where necessary.
His new verdict: “For me, the criterion of independence is no longer met – in a dissertation, scientific questions must be dealt with independently.” “And you can’t set the criteria so low that rewriting is a personal effort.”