The controversy over the selection of National Taiwan University’s (NTU) president has continued for two or three months, with no resolution in sight. In the study methodology course that I teach at the university, students keep asking whether the paper that NTU president-elect Kuan Chung-ming (管中閔) presented at an academic seminar on May 6 last year really contains any improper citations or plagiarism, as some people have claimed.
The media have reported that, although the paper coauthored by Kuan and the master’s thesis of a student surnamed Chang (張) were written by different authors, a number of diagrams in the two contain the same information. However, both papers say that the diagrams were compiled and drawn by the researchers separately.