Olekas backs prime minister’s plan to correct dissertation

Parliament Speaker Juozas Olekas said Prime Minister Mindaugas Sinkevičius’s promise to correct errors in his doctoral dissertation was a sufficient step to address the issue, LRT reported. He also said universities should examine doctoral work more carefully before awarding degrees.

Olekas made the comments on Žinių radijas on Wednesday after being asked about politician Dainius Gaižauskas’s call for Sinkevičius to resign. Olekas said the findings he had reviewed described citation errors that could be corrected within a set period, and that Sinkevičius had committed to making changes.

He said dissertation committees and universities shared responsibility for ensuring academic work met the standards for a doctoral degree. The issue, he added, should prompt greater care from all involved rather than placing all the blame on the dissertation’s author.

The Ethics Commission at ISM University of Management and Economics found five cases of plagiarism and two cases of text overlap that it said did not amount to plagiarism in Sinkevičius’s 2015 dissertation on alcohol consumption. It concluded that he had breached the university’s academic integrity principle and the requirement that a dissertation be independently produced.

The commission gave Sinkevičius six months to correct the errors and did not recommend immediately revoking his doctoral degree. He has acknowledged the findings and promised to prepare a correction supplement.