So I finally indulged my curiosity about l'affaire Oxman and spent five minutes browsing her dissertation. The problems with it are, if anything, way worse than seem to have been reported.
I didn't use any special plagiarism software, and I wasn't even particularly looking for it, I was just putzing around. But sometimes the writing style would abruptly would take a 90 degree turn, so I'd google and find the original source immediately. Twice in five minutes.
But the defense that "it was a different time, man" is even more bizarre, because it wasn't.
I didn't grow up in a household with two professors, but in my mediocre public schools we got a plagiarism lecture at least once a year from such time as we were capable of committing it
But after looking into this for five minutes, the plagiarism issue seems more like busting Al Capone for tax evasion.
The real issue is that there's just no there there, and if you read it with any technical background it feels like that scene from The Shining.
In a 330 page document with "Computation" right there in the title, there are ten equations. None of them are original work, one of them (for Euclidean distance [!]) is typoed so bizarrely it looks like it was written by an alien.
The real issue, which is harder to appreciate let alone concisely relate without a technical background, is that there appears to be no original technical content.
Practically, it's not really a matter of forgetting a few punctuation marks (as I was led to believe). The cumulative effect of the volume of plagiarism and general disorganization of thought is that it's quite difficult to tell what Oxman wrote, let alone understood, at all.
A trolley is hurtling down the tracks, about to run over five people. You can pull a switch, diverting the trolley to an empty track. No RCTs, however, have ever demonstrated a link between switch-pulling and mortality reduction. Neither have you received any training or accredi
Phase diagrams for metal alloys from other papers are presented without comment, in a dissertation that otherwise makes no mention of phase diagrams, alloys, or even the subject of metallurgy, excepting a brief and abrupt digression about samurai swords [!]
So AFAICT there is basically no original technical content, and much to suggest that Oxman isn't well-acquainted enough with the fields she draws upon to even fake it convincingly.
More, the issues with the dissertation are so clear and unignorable that you have to wonder what was going on with her committee during the years they were supervising her.
