Neri Oxman’s problems may be getting worse.
The researcher, who has become embroiled in plagiarism accusations following her billionaire husband’s push to depose the president of Harvard for plagiarizing in her thesis, appears to have lifted about 100 words in her thesis from an article that has been plagiarized before.
Last week, Business Insider reported that Oxman “plagiarized multiple paragraphs of her 2010 doctoral dissertation…including at least one passage directly lifted from other writers without citation.” Oxman, who earned her PhD at MIT and was later a professor there until 2020, has since acknowledged some citation errors.
The new allegation is that Oxman’s thesis also lifted about 100 words from a 2000 article in Physics World without quoting or citing the piece. (See a comparison here using the Vroniplag similarity detector set at a minimum of six consecutive words of overlap. The 2000 article text is on the left, and part of the thesis is on the right.) That article was plagiarized in 2005 by a then-leading sports medicine expert, Paul McCrory, who resigned from a key post in 2022 following revelations of that and other pilfering. McCrory has now had more than ten papers retracted.
Steve Haake, a sports engineer who wrote the 2000 Physics World article, was alerted to the overlap, and who in turn alerted us to it told Retraction Watch that Oxman:
had done what Paul McCrory did:
- Copied and pasted my words and passed them off as her own, as identified by the © 2010 Neri Oxman on page 1
- Copied the sentiment of my article without reference to it.
If she hadn’t done the first, the second could have been fixed with due citation and an addition to the references.
The overlap was also noted by an X user on January 6.
Michael Dougherty, who has documented plagiarism throughout the philosophy literature and has written an academic book on the subject, said the identified text seems to be “one more [example] where quotation marks and a precise footnote attribution to Haake’s words are warranted,” noting “Oxman has pledged to correct the failures of attribution in her dissertation.”
He continued:
Without basic punctuation and source attribution, readers cannot know whose voice is truly speaking in the text, and genuine authors are left uncredited. I don’t see any reference to Haake in the dissertation.
Sleuth Nick Brown, who was involved in determining the extent of McCrory’s plagiarism, told Retraction Watch he did not “think this is remotely as bad as what we saw from Paul McCrory. It probably didn’t save her much time compared to writing her own three or four sentences from scratch.”
Brown continued:
Of course, in an ideal world the right amount of text for anyone to be recycling from other authors (or, in most cases, themselves) without attribution is zero, but this kind of thing seems to be so common that if we set out to retract a PhD every time it happened we would never finish. A correction and 15 minutes of awkwardness are probably appropriate consequences, regardless of the identity of the perpetrator. I do think it’s pretty amazing that two prominent cases of plagiarism link into the same piece from a non-academic publication!
Haake also noted Oxman:
misread my article and mistakenly says that pole vaulting was an ancient Greek Olympic sport. Pole vaulting was never in the ancient Olympics!
In response to a request for comment we sent at 7 a.m. ET, a representative of Oxman’s company said “Neri has not had the opportunity to review the language presented.” They did not respond to a follow-up asking when she would be likely to be able to review it. We will update with any responses.
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