Neri Oxman Plagiarized Straight From Wikipedia in Her Dissertation

• Neri Oxman, a former star professor at MIT, admitted to lifting passages from different students’ work in her dissertation.
• Enterprise Insider discovered 28 further cases of plagiarism in her dissertation and different papers.
• Oxman lifted textual content from greater than a dozen Wikipedia articles with out attribution.

Neri Oxman, a former MIT professor and superstar inside the world of academia, stole sentences and entire paragraphs from Wikipedia, different students, and technical paperwork in her tutorial writing, Enterprise Insider has discovered.

Oxman is married to billionaire Pershing Sq. Capital Managment founder Invoice Ackman, who has been vociferously campaigning for quite a few college presidents to resign over what he perceives as their mishandling of pupil protests associated to Israel’s struggle in Gaza. Ackman has termed plagiarism a “very severe” offense.

He used revelations unearthed by right-wing activists that Harvard president Claudine Homosexual had plagiarized dozens of occasions throughout the physique of her tutorial work to underscore his requires her resignation. Homosexual stepped down on Tuesday.

On Thursday, Enterprise Insider recognized 4 cases by which Oxman had lifted passages from different students’ work in her doctoral dissertation, accomplished at MIT in 2010. Three of these had been passages the place she ought to have used citation marks however didn’t, and one included language from one other creator with none quotation. In a put up on X, Oxman admitted the plagiarism, apologized, and mentioned she would overview the first sources and request corrections as wanted.

“As I’ve devoted my profession to advancing science and innovation,” she wrote on X, “I’ve at all times acknowledged the profound significance of the contributions of my friends and those that got here earlier than me.”

In her response, Oxman described her errors as cases by which she “omitted citation marks for sure work that I used.” The circumstances she apologized for had been related in character to some circumstances that the Washington Free Beacon present in Claudine Homosexual’s tutorial historical past — failures to make use of citation marks round passages from works that had been in any other case cited.

However a radical overview of her printed work revealed that Oxman’s failure to quote sources went past that — and included a number of cases of plagiarism by which she handed off writing from different sources as her personal with out citing the unique in any method. At the least 15 passages from her 2010 MIT doctoral dissertation had been lifted with none quotation from Wikipedia entries.

The cases of plagiarism BI discovered on Friday are nearer to a extra widespread definition of plagiarism — the usage of another person’s phrases with none indication that you’re passing them off as your personal.

Neri Oxman straight copied from Wikipedia in her Ph.D. dissertation

On web page 81 of her dissertation, “Materials-based Design Computation,” Oxman printed two sentences with out attribution that had beforehand appeared on Wikipedia.

“Each warp and weft might be seen within the remaining product,” Oxman wrote. “By spacing the warp extra intently, it will probably utterly cowl the weft that binds it, giving a warp confronted textile. Conversely, if the warp is unfold out, the weft can slide down and utterly cowl the warp, giving a weft confronted textile, equivalent to a tapestry or a Kilim rug.”

The passage is introduced within the dissertation as Oxman’s authentic writing, regardless of any supply for the sentences.

The Wikipedia article for “Weaving” featured nearly equivalent sentences in April 2010, when Oxman’s dissertation was submitted. “Each warp and weft might be seen within the remaining product. By spacing the warp extra intently, it will probably utterly cowl the weft that binds it, giving a warpfaced textile … Conversely, if the warp is unfold out, the weft can slide down and utterly cowl the warp, giving a weftfaced textile, equivalent to a tapestry or a Kilim rug.”

Considerably equivalent language was current in eight snapshots of the Wikipedia article that BI randomly reviewed going again to 2009, and variations of these strains have appeared within the article going not less than way back to November 2004, in response to WikiBlame, a search device that enables for fast comparisons of historic variations of Wikipedia articles.

Oxman’s cribbing from the “Weaving” article was one among 15 examples that BI discovered Oxman plagiarizing from a Wikipedia article in her dissertation. The articles she pulled from had been primarily technical, masking matters like “Functionally graded materials,” “Manifolds,” and “Constitutive equation.”

However Oxman by no means acknowledged having pulled from Wikipedia. She did not simply elevate textual content, both: She additionally took an illustration from the article for “Warmth flux” with out citing a supply, regardless of necessities within the picture’s Inventive Commons license to credit score the place the image got here from. It is not stunning that Oxman would not credit score Wikipedia in her doctoral dissertation: Whereas Wikipedia is usually correct, anybody can edit it, so lecturers often inform their college students that they need to not cite the web site as an authority.

“It is actually a disgrace,” mentioned Rick Norwood, a math professor at Jap Tennessee State College who contributed a revision to the Wikipedia article on manifolds that Oxman repeated in her dissertation. “I can not think about why anybody would try this, as a result of anybody who is aware of even the rudiments of algebraic topology may give you their very own sentence.”

Lifting copy from web sites, a textbook, and tutorial papers

Oxman works on the intersection of design and the pure sciences and has used the label “materials ecology” to explain her subject. She as soon as talked on a podcast about rising iPhones from nature. Her crew on the MIT Media Lab coaxed silkworms to construct sculptures. She additionally made undulating buildings out of pure supplies like cellulose and chitin, the fabric present in shrimp cells.

However like different lecturers, she additionally printed prolonged, detailed analysis papers, generally with different authors and generally by herself. The majority of the plagiarism BI discovered was in her dissertation, which runs greater than 300 pages.

Wikipedia wasn’t the one useful resource she cited with out attribution within the paper that earned her a doctorate. In a footnote, she used 54 consecutive phrases with out attribution from the web site of the design-software maker Rhino to clarify what a “Non-Uniform Rational B-Spline” is. She additionally used technical language about tessellations that matched language from the web site Wolfram MathWorld — which, once more, she did not cite.

She plagiarized each earlier than and after she obtained her Ph.D. in 2010. Of three peer-reviewed papers reviewed by BI, two — 2007’s “Get Actual: In the direction of Efficiency Pushed Computational Geometry” and 2011’s “Variable Property Speedy Prototyping” — additionally contained plagiarism.

The 2011 paper included greater than 100 phrases precisely as they appeared within the 2005 ebook “Speedy Manufacturing: An Industrial Revolution for the Digital Age,” with out citation marks, quotation, or a point out in Oxman’s bibliography. She pulled materials from “Path planning of functionally graded materials objects for layered manufacturing,” a 2004 paper by M.Y. Zhou, with out mentioning it in her bibliography. And she or he included two verbatim sentences from the 1999 ebook “Functionally Graded Supplies: Design, Processing and Purposes” with out citation marks or an in-line quotation, although the work is talked about in her bibliography.

The 2007 “Get Actual” paper pulled language describing tensors — an algebraic idea that features scalars and vectors — from an earlier-published work, the “CRC Concise Encyclopedia of Arithmetic.” In a 2010 paper, “Per Formative: In the direction of a Publish Materialist Paradigm in Structure,” that was not peer-reviewed, BI additionally discovered one other occasion of plagiarism, with Oxman utilizing chunks of language from writer Da Capo Press’ description of “The Trendy Language of Structure” by Bruno Zevi.

MIT didn’t reply to a request for remark despatched outdoors regular enterprise hours.

BI sought remark from Ackman and Oxman; they declined by way of a spokesperson. However after BI had emailed its findings to Oxman, Ackman posted a response on X by which he promised to conduct plagiarism opinions of MIT’s management.

“It’s unlucky that my actions to handle issues in greater training have led to those assaults on my household. This expertise has impressed me to avoid wasting all information organizations from the difficulty of doing plagiarism opinions,” he wrote to his 1 million followers. He pledged to conduct a radical overview of MIT president Sally Kornbluth, all MIT college, and board members and different officers of the MIT Company for proof of plagiarism, utilizing MIT’s plagiarism requirements.

“We are going to share our findings within the public area as they’re accomplished within the spirit of transparency,” he mentioned.