Dissernet: Fighting the Industry of Fake Reputations

– Dissernet is neither a state body nor a charitable foundation. You describe the project as 'a network community'. What kind of organisation is it?

– Dissernet is not an organisation in any official sense. There's no legal entity, no office, no director's signatures, no official stamps, no forms — none of that. Dissernet exists in the ether — it's a network in the proper sense of the word. That is a very important aspect of our community and part of the reason it has survived since early 2013. There's a chance that we'll institutionalise what we are doing to a certain extent, in order to build a dialogue with public authorities. But as soon as we get an office, of course, there'll be someone that wants to close it down. Dissernet is a thorn in the flesh for a huge number of people.

– How did it all begin?

– It began towards the end of 2012, when I met professor Mikhail Gelfand at the Russian Opposition Coordination Council, to which we were both elected. He got talking about the issue of forged theses because he was part of the commission investigating the so-called 'Danlivosky' Committee (the committee responsible for certifying history theses at the Moscow State Pedagogical University, headed by Alexander Danilov and implicated in myriad falsifications). I found it completely fascinating. Next, we were joined by Andrei Zayakin, a PhD in physics and maths, whom I met while working on the civil campaign 'Vse v sud!' ('Let's take it to court!'). Slowly, everything came together. We decided on a name and, in early 2013, launched the website and published the first handful of investigations. They weren't chosen systematically. 

– Who makes up the Dissernet network today?

– The network element of the project means that we don't know exactly where it extends. I think overall we have about three-hundred participants. But the system is dynamic — people come and go. We have a core of several dozen permanent activists. Most people involved in Dissernet are academics and scientists volunteering their time for free. Almost all of them are professionally distinguished members of the world's top academic institutions; many of them live outside Russia. They're prominent, respected figures with very busy schedules. And yet, out of a sense of social responsibility, they want to help save Russian academia and education.

– What role do social networks play in the project?

– They're important, of course — for two reasons. On one hand, the Dissernet website wouldn't attract the traffic that it does if we couldn't circulate our links on social media. On the other hand, posts on social networks have begun to draw in people keen to participate in the project or donate to our crowd-sourcing campaigns.

– What is the process for reviewing the authenticity of doctoral and higher doctoral (habilitation) theses? What role does technology play?

– In terms of what the public sees, there is the website, www.dissernet.org, which is modest but instinctive. But there is also a large hidden section which only participants can access. The review process is self-organised. A list of potentially inauthentic theses is kept on a secure server. This list was initially compiled manually, but recently it has been updated automatically: special software uses clever search parameters to scour the internet for mentions of stolen theses. For example, these programmes can study everything that has happened in a specific university, in a specific department, under the auspices of a specific professor. The Dissernet team has a group of developers who write this software. After the theses have been selected, they are put through a special review process to check for matches with other texts.

– But a match doesn't tell you anything on its own. After all, an author can quote his or her own academic works.

– Yes, exactly. That brings me to the next step, the careful examination of all this information. The participants in our network community choose a section of the thesis in question, and, if they identify any borrowed text, they inform the next group of people in the chain — those responsible for obtaining the sources. That is to say, if a thesis is comprised of ten plagiarised sections, then this group has to obtain the original texts from which the sections were stolen. An important feature of our system is that only the initial review stage is automated; thereafter, every thesis is scrutinised by real people. Once the review is finished, another volunteer checks the work of their colleagues. This rigorous quality control is Dissernet's trademark. After all these stages, the review is signed by its authors and published on our website.

– Whose academic credentials are you screening now?

– Currently Dissernet is running two search programmes. One is screening headmasters of Moscow schools, the other — the presidents of Russian higher educational institutions. Of course, Dissernet initially went after famous people with academic titles, for example deputies (members) of the State Duma. Recently, though, we've structured our thesis reviews thematically — more like carpet bombing. In addition, we've now amassed so much information that we've been able to launch a secondary analysis of how the industry of fraudulent theses is structured. For instance, we are digging deeper into expert committees of the Higher Certification Commission (VAK) that are heavily linked with violations — that appear to be important nodes of activity. Because it turns out that the system of thesis fabrication has market elements: there are 'companies', 'producers associations', 'marketing channels', and so on. We have found that half of the Duma deputies we have checked got their doctorates from the same people, for example.

– Several times you have implied that Dissernet's main goal is not to strip this or that public official of his or her academic title, but to change the very system of deceit that has grown up around postgraduate theses in Russia.

– Of course. We aren't interested in the theses just for their own sake. We are interested in reputations — the industry of fake reputations. Dissernet is a way of studying fake reputations. This is the easiest way to go about it, because there is a procedure for awarding postgraduate degrees that can be traced. We are working not only to improve education but also to clean up the currency of reputation.

– The efforts of your community of scholars and journalists to restore the reputation of the Russian academic system have been mentioned on several occasions by the British weekly The Times Higher Education, which studies higher education around the world. What is your greatest achievement since 2013?

– Unfortunately, we don't know the percentage of theses which are fakes, because we don't know the total number of theses defended in Russia every day.

– But is there not a single register of every thesis defended in Russia?

– There is, but this data belongs to the Ministry of Education, which does not officially collaborate with us. All the same, we can clearly see that the Ministry is systematically using Dissernet's materials — we can see that the university presidents we write about are being stripped of their posts, or that the thesis committees on our black list are being disbanded. Our thesis reviews are increasingly persuading certification committees to annul the corresponding degrees. Our biggest achievement is that we have broken this market — or, at least, a section of it. This year, a systematic procedure was introduced for reviewing allegations of thesis fraud and it has already led to postgraduate degrees being revoked. We have also had five or so cases of people voluntarily renouncing their titles. Another big achievement is that various expert committees of the Higher Certification Commission are being restructured: for instance, the economic sciences committee. That's what I call a good result.