Alma Zadic actually has it in her own hands to immediately silence the accusations against her doctoral thesis, which are becoming ever louder – she would only have to agree to an external examination of her doctoral thesis, as is usual in such cases. But the Minister of Justice has so far rejected this. Instead, she rejected the criticism, which was raised not only by plague researchers from Austria, but also by a high-ranking scientist from Germany, as “wrong” without dealing with the content in more detail.
A general statement only states that her dissertation strictly follows the citation rules of the Harvard Bluebook and thus corresponds to internationally recognized scientific standards. But that Harvard Bluebooks states: “All citations, except block citations, are to be enclosed in quotation marks.” Block citations must be set up entirely with five spaces between the left and right margins. Zadic did neither in any of the 85 positions of the doctoral thesis.
In recent years, politicians have repeatedly been accused of cheating on their theses. In the case of the former ÖVP Family Minister Christine Aschbacher, this even led to her resignation. A commission of experts then reviewed her work and acquitted her of the allegations. Such an examination would therefore also be in the interests of the Minister of Justice, if she has nothing to blame, but so far she has not taken any corresponding steps or signaled such a willingness. Meanwhile, voices are being raised calling for Zadic to be temporarily suspended from office until the allegations are clarified.
Expert Stefan Weber, known as a “plagiarism hunter”, received the dissertation from Minister of Justice Alma Zadic (Greens) criticized for quality defects. He would the approach of Zadic “Do not rate it as plagiarism, but as bad science or rather meaningless work,” he explained to eXXpress. “The work is certainly not scientifically correct.”
The former dean of the faculty for business administration at the Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich, Manuel Theisen, who among other things is the author of the book “Scientific work”, speaks of “text plagiarism” in Zadic’s work. In Zadic’s dissertation, the work is characterized by a sampling of sentence parts or word chains from foreign literature, with sentence parts that were almost always taken over verbatim not being placed in quotation marks. The work was “certainly not scientifically correct”.
