Studies in Research Integrity – serie

Getting a doctorate in Europe is supremely attractive for young Catholic priests from the Global South. They attain prestige, career advancement, and – in many cases – the opportunity to move permanently from impoverished countries to some of the world’s wealthiest. But do they submit rigorous, original doctoral research in keeping with universal academic standards? This study examines theological dissertations by international students accepted by major Austrian universities and shows that academic incompetence, plagiarism, and negligent supervision are seriously damaging theological institutions – in Europe and abroad. By looking the other way, advisors and administrators do their students and the church a disservice.

This book demonstrates that the principles of textual criticism—borrowed from the fields of classics and medieval studies—have a valuable application for plagiarism investigations. Plagiarists share key features with medieval scribes who worked in scriptoriums and produced copies of manuscripts. Both kinds of copyists—scribes and plagiarists—engage in similar processes, and they commit distinctive copying errors. When committed by plagiarists, these copying errors have probative value for making determinations that a text is copied, and hence, unoriginal. To show the efficacy of the newly proposed techniques for proving plagiarism, case studies are drawn from philosophy, theology, and canon law.

“What do we want? Evidence-based science! When do we want it? After peer review!” We have come to think of peer review as the stamp of quality that separates real results from mere conjecture, but a look under the hood reveals that the participants inside of peer review are far from objective. This book reclaims subjectivity and affirms a social mode of objectivity, which prevents peer review from overpromising and underdelivering in its vital role in knowledge production.