Neri Oxman plagiarized directly from Wikipedia in her doctoral dissertation

• Neri Oxman, a former star professor at MIT, admitted that she cited passages from other scholars’ work in her paper.
• Business Insider found 28 more instances of plagiarism in her doctoral thesis and other papers.
• Oxman quoted text from more than a dozen Wikipedia articles without attribution.

Neri Oxmanformer MIT professor, celebrity At the inner The academic girlfriend stole entire sentences and paragraphs of academic documents from Wikipedia, other academics, and technical documents, Business Insider discovered.

Oxman is married to billionaire Pershing Square Capital Management founder bill ackmanwho campaigning loudly A number of university presidents have resigned over what he sees as mishandling of student protests related to Israel’s war in Gaza. Ackman said plagiarism is a “very serious” crime.

He capitalized on revelations about the president of Harvard University unearthed by right-wing activists. claudine gay He had plagiarized her academic work dozens of times to emphasize his demands for her resignation. Gay resigned on Tuesday.

On Thursday, Business Insider identified four cases: Oxman lifted the aisle Her doctoral dissertation, completed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2010, draws from the work of other scholars. Three of the sentences were sentences where she should have used quotation marks but did not, and one included another author’s words without quotation marks. In X’s post, Oxman admitted plagiarismHe apologized and said he would check the primary sources of information and request corrections if necessary.

“As I have dedicated my career to the advancement of science and innovation, I have always recognized the profound importance of the contributions of my colleagues and predecessors,” she wrote to X.

In her response, Oxman explained her mistake as an example of “omitting quotation marks in a particular piece of work that I used.” The incident for which she apologized was similar in nature to several incidents uncovered by the Washington Free Beacon. Claudine Gaye’s educational background — Failure to put quotation marks around passages of works that are otherwise cited.

However, a thorough review of her published work reveals that Oxman’s failure to cite sources goes beyond that, to plagiarism in which she passes off passages from other sources as her own without citing the original at all. It was revealed that it contained multiple examples of. At least 15 sections of her 2010 MIT PhD thesis were removed without citations from the Wikipedia entry.

The instances of plagiarism discovered by BI on Friday approximate the more common definition of plagiarism: using someone else’s words without any hint of passing them off as your own.

Neri Oxman copied directly from Wikipedia during her Ph.D.paper

On page 81 of her paper she writes: “Material-based design calculation” Oxman published two articles previously published on Wikipedia without attribution.

“Both warp and weft threads may be visible in the final product,” Oxman writes. “If the warp threads are spaced more closely together, they can completely cover the weft threads that join them, resulting in a warp surface fabric. Conversely, if the warp threads are spread out, the weft threads will slip off and completely cover the warp threads. , yields textiles with a weft surface, such as tapestries and kilim carpets.

This passage appears in the paper as Oxman’s original text, without any reference to the source of the text.

The Wikipedia article on “weaving” contained virtually the same sentence. April 2010, when Oxman’s doctoral thesis was submitted. “In the final product, both the warp and weft threads will be visible. By spacing the warp threads more closely, the weft threads that bind them can be completely covered, resulting in a fabric with a warp surface. .Conversely, as the warp threads unfurl, the weft threads slip off and completely cover the warp threads, creating weft-threaded fabrics such as tapestries and kilim rugs.”

Eight snapshots of Wikipedia articles randomly reviewed by BI dating back to 2009 contained virtually identical wording, and variations of those wordings appeared in articles going back at least to 2009. Masu. November 2004according to Wiki’s faulta search tool that allows you to easily compare previous versions of Wikipedia articles.

Oxman’s clipping from the “Weaving” article was one of 15 instances in which BI found Oxman plagiarized from Wikipedia articles in his doctoral thesis. The articles she cited were primarily technical, covering topics such as “functionally graded materials,” “manifolds,” and “constitutive equations.”

However, Oxman never acknowledged quoting from Wikipedia. Not only did she quote the text, she also took the illustration from the Heat Flux article without attribution, despite the Creative Commons license requirement to credit the source of the image. It’s no surprise that Oxman doesn’t credit Wikipedia in her doctoral thesis. Although Wikipedia is generally accurate, teachers regularly tell students that they should not cite her website as an authority because anyone can edit it.

“It’s really disappointing,” said Rick Norwood, a mathematics professor at Eastern Tennessee State University who helped revise the Wikipedia article about manifolds that Oxman reiterated in his paper. “I can’t imagine why anyone would do that. Anyone who knows the basics of algebraic topology can come up with their own sentences.”

Copy citations from websites, textbooks, and academic papers

Oxman works at the intersection of design and natural science, and uses the label “material ecology” to describe her field. She once talked about growing her iPhone from nature on a podcast. Her team at the MIT Media Lab persuaded silkworms to create sculptures. She also created wavy structures from natural materials such as cellulose and chitin found in shrimp cells.

However, like other scholars, she also published long and detailed research papers, sometimes with other authors and sometimes alone. The bulk of the plagiarism discovered by BI was in her more than 300-page paper.

Wikipedia wasn’t the only resource she cited without attribution in her PhD thesis. In a footnote, she used her 54 consecutive words without attributing her source. Website Design software maker Rhino explains what a “heterogeneous rational B-spline” is. She also used technical terminology for tessellation that matches the language. From the Wolfram MathWorld website — again, she didn’t quote it.

She plagiarized before and after receiving her Ph.D. Two of her three peer-reviewed papers reviewed by BI (2007’s “Get Real: Towards Performance Driven Computational Geometry” and her 2011’s “Variable Property Rapid Prototyping”) also contained plagiarism. Ta.

The 2011 paper contains more than 100 words identical to those published in the 2005 book Rapid Manufacturing: An Industrial Revolution for the Digital Age, with quotation marks, citations, and There was no mention of Mann’s bibliography. She took material from her 2004 paper “Path Planning of Functionally Graded Material Objects for Additive Manufacturing” by MY Zhou, without mentioning it in her bibliography. She also quoted her two sentences verbatim, without quotation marks or inline citations, from her 1999 book “Functionally Graded Materials: Design, Processing and Applications,” but this research is not listed in the bibliography. I am.

The 2007 “Get Real” paper extracted the language for describing tensors (an algebraic concept that includes scalars and vectors) from the previously published work “CRC Concise Encyclopedia of Mathematics.” In a 2010 paper, “Per Formative: Towards a Post Materialsist Paradigm in Architecture,” which has not been peer-reviewed, BI also notes that Oxman used portions of the description from publisher Da Capo Press’s “The Modern.” I discovered another example of plagiarism. “The Language of Architecture” by Bruno Zevi.

MIT did not respond to requests for comment outside normal business hours.

BI has contacted Mr. Ackman and Mr. Oxman for comment. They declined through a spokesperson. However, after BI emailed its findings to Oxman, Ackman posted a reply to X in which he promised to conduct a plagiarism investigation of MIT’s leadership.

“It is unfortunate that my actions in trying to address issues in higher education led to this attack on my family. This experience has inspired me to save all news organizations from the hassle of plagiarism review. It gave me that motivation.” he wrote to his 1 million followers. He pledged to use MIT’s plagiarism standards to thoroughly investigate evidence of plagiarism by MIT President Sally Kornbluth, all MIT faculty, officers and other executives of the MIT Corporation.

“In the spirit of transparency, we will share the results of our completed investigation in the public domain,” he said.