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Humboldt University Berlin: No sufficiently clear citation standards?
Photo: Robert Schlesinger / picture alliance / dpa
Five doctoral theses are currently being developed under the supervision of Marina Hennig.
Two women and three men qualify with the Mainz sociology professor with their scientific work.
The projects deal with network and family research and the situation of young adults between education, work and family.
But it is doubtful whether the young scientists will learn from their supervisors how to work scientifically properly.
Because her professor Marina Hennig, who has held the chair for network research and family sociology in Mainz since 2011, has been accused of serious plagiarism in her academic career.
In 1999, Hennig submitted her dissertation to Berlin's Humboldt University (HU), titled "Change in attitudes and values under the aspect of the authoritarianism of German parents in comparison over time".
Studies by the research platform Vroniplag Wiki show that 43.5 percent of the pages in this work contain plagiarism.
»Generous understanding of verbatim quotes«
The spectrum ranges from presumably copied passages to abbreviated citations to incomplete or completely missing references.
And even if citations are given, they do not necessarily match the originals, the plagiarism searchers complain: "The work shows a generous understanding of literal quotations," says the Vroniplag Wiki report.
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The compiled deficiencies also convinced the Humboldt University, where the doctorate was created.
In December 2018, after a 12-month investigation, the sociologist had her PhD revoked;
four days before Christmas Eve, Hennig then filed a lawsuit against this decision with the administrative court.
After a procedure lasting almost three and a half years, she was able to achieve a partial success on May 6, 2022 before the Berlin Administrative Court: The university's decision was overturned due to a formal error.
According to the judgment, which was delivered last Thursday, the composition of the doctoral committee violated the procedure provided for in the examination regulations.
When asked by SPIEGEL, the Humboldt University stated that it wanted to first evaluate the written reasoning behind the judgment.
Only then can it be decided, for example, whether the procedure will be reopened.
Almost two thirds of the habilitation under suspicion
There are good reasons for the HU to be even more active.
Hennig's habilitation thesis »Individuals and their social relationships«, published in 2006, is full of passages that are strongly suspected of being plagiarism.
The Vroniplag Wiki searchers found corresponding passages on 70.2 percent of the pages: In some cases, entire paragraphs were copied from templates without naming the original passage.
The sociologist could have acted particularly boldly in the case of a study paper that was created in a project seminar she led in the summer semester of 2003.
Under the title "Vitamin B", three students had dealt with the "benefits of social relationships in finding a job".
Her lecturer presumably made generous use of her students' work, but the source was not mentioned in Hennig's habilitation.
For example, the student work states: »In view of the obvious overcrowding of the labor market and simultaneous discussions about the competence of the state job placement service, fewer people see the formal job search strategies, especially the traditional application for advertisements, as the best way to find out about the information on the labor market and to find a new job.«
Hennig uses the same sentence and only adds a single word ("always"): "In view of the obvious overcrowding of the labor market and simultaneous discussions about the competence of the state employment service, fewer and fewer people look up to the formal strategies of job search, especially to the conventional application Advertisements, the best way to find out about the labor market and find a new job.«
Remarkably long procedure
"The sociologist is probably responsible for one of only two double plagiarisms that are known in Germany so far in academic careers," says the science journalist Jochen Zenthöfer.
The fact that someone plagiarized both the dissertation and the habilitation on a large scale is rather an exception.
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In his newly published book »Plagiarism in Science«, Zenthöfer deals with the history and working methods of the Vroniplag Wiki platform.
He has reconstructed the Hennig case in detail.
"What is particularly remarkable here is the long - and slow - course of the administrative court proceedings," says the science journalist: "That plays Ms. Hennig directly into the cards." Because if one assumes that the sociologist will retire in 2026, then it is realistic that Hennig, through objections and further proceedings before the Higher Administrative Court, was delaying the revocation for so long that she could save her professorship until she retired.
The average length of proceedings at the administrative court last year was 17 months, a VG spokesman explained to SPIEGEL in a statement: "There are a number of reasons why this length of time was exceeded in a specific (above-average) case: the chamber, its composition has changed constantly in recent times, was also responsible for a large number of asylum procedures that had to be processed as a matter of priority;
due to Corona, the number of possible but necessary chamber meetings at the VG Berlin was only possible to a limited extent in the last 2.5 years;
in the specific case, evidence had to be taken, so that the availability of the people involved in the proceedings had to be coordinated;
after all:
Professor argued with the »at that time customary citation style«
Hennig himself has so far left a written SPIEGEL inquiry about the allegations and the administrative court proceedings unanswered.
Before the administrative court, however, she had declared that she "did not significantly deceive about the independence of her doctoral work".
Her practice of citation, according to her statement in the judgment of the administrative court, »moved within the framework of the citation style customary in the social sciences at the time.
In any case, there were no sufficiently specific citation standards at the time that she could have used as a guide."
And the literal correspondences with the work of others?
"In individual cases, this can be attributed to the fact that she took over those statements verbatim in her notes without noting that they came from a third party and that it was a literal quotation." Hennig had "internalized such that it was inevitable that their explanations would correspond to these works«.
"In view of the numerous questionable points in her work, it would be remarkable if she could continue to act as a professor," says Jochen Zenthöfer.
He therefore hopes that the Humboldt University will also decide on the withdrawal of the sociologist's habilitation.
However, university spokesman Hans-Christoph Keller puts on the brakes: “The faculty will promptly advise on these questions in coordination with the executive committee.
We can't give an exact time for this at the moment," he told SPIEGEL.
