Researcher A from the field of social sciences suspected that doctoral student B had plagiarised A’s doctoral dissertation in their licentiate thesis. The issue was first considered in 2010, when the examination process of the licentiate thesis was suspended. Later, the licentiate thesis was approved. According to A, only minimal changes had been made to the thesis, so A notified the university about the RCR violation allegation. The faculty Dean inspected the case and stated that the thesis did not include conscious or deliberate plagiarism. TENK was not notified about the process. A notified the university’s Rector about the allegation again in 2017. After the investigation proper, no misconduct was verified in the matter.
Furthermore, according to TENK, the matter did not fulfil the definition of plagiarism in the RCR guidelines, as the licentiate thesis refers to A’s dissertation several times. However, TENK found B to be guilty of disregard for the responsible conduct of research by denigration and insufficient references. The insufficient references were so frequent and misleading to the reader, that TENK found the conditions for misappropriation to be fulfilled to some extent.
TENK found much to reprimand in the university’s conduct. Among other things, TENK saw that the university committed a procedural fault by not initiating a process in accordance with the RCR guidelines. According to TENK, there were no members genuinely independent of the university in the investigation team.