Popovienė declines political judgment on plagiarism in prime minister’s dissertation

Education, Science and Sport Minister Raminta Popovienė declined to give a political assessment of plagiarism found in Prime Minister Mindaugas Sinkevičius’s dissertation, LRT reported. She said the matter fell within the university’s remit and called for academic ethics guidance to be reviewed and applied consistently.

“The university’s decision has been made, and I believe the university commission’s decision is lawful,” Popovienė said during a government question-and-answer session in parliament.

She said existing regulations had been in place for a long time and that the academic ethics ombudsperson had been asked to review the recommendations and advise universities on ensuring the same requirements apply to everyone. “In this age of technology, the recommendations should certainly be reviewed,” she said.

An ethics commission at ISM University of Management and Economics, which investigated Sinkevičius’s dissertation, found significant breaches involving academic writing, citations and the attribution of sources, including instances of plagiarism. It concluded that he had breached the university’s code of ethics requirement that a dissertation be produced independently and gave him up to six months to correct the work.

Sinkevičius acknowledged the citation and source-attribution breaches but said he did not question the dissertation’s scientific value. He said a publicly available correction appendix would be prepared under the university’s procedure. He also said the doctoral committee considered the dissertation to retain its scientific value, while the ethics commission viewed initiating a procedure to revoke his degree as disproportionate.