T-invariant, co-founder of Dissernet Andrey Rostovtsev and community project coordinator Larisa Melikhova continue their “Plagiarism Navigator”. Through individual cases of international academic plagiarism, we examine the global-scale imitation of scholarly activity. To tackle this issue, specially trained NLP language models—developed in collaboration with linguists from the universities of Helsinki and Oslo—are employed. The sixth installment examines how translated academic fraud became a commercialized scheme for Russian and Ukrainian scholars.
Previously in Plagiarism Navigator
- Episode 1: China-Ukraine-Poland – The story of a Chinese scholar who defended a dissertation in Kharkiv, cobbled together from Russian-language works translated into Ukrainian.
- Episode 2: Russia-Tajikistan-Iran – The case of Iranian scholars obtained degrees in Tajikistan (2011–2013) under Russia’s VAK system.
- Episode 3: Russia-Serbia-Turkey-Switzerland-Lithuania – The tale of a Serbian academic who resorted to buying co-authorships and outright plagiarism.
- Episode 4: Russia-USA-Brazil-UK-Switzerland-India – A professor at Sechenov University who infiltrated an Iran-Iraq publication scheme in top Western journals, creating a lucrative paper mill within his own institution.
- Episode 5: Russia-Ukraine-Romania-India – The story of Andriy Vitrenko, Ukraine’s former deputy Minister of Education and Science, whose dissertation and academic papers were found to contain plagiarism
Despite the explosive surge in AI-generated scientific papers, the issue of translation-based plagiarism in academic publishing remains relevant to this day. How does it work? The scheme is simple and often relies on collaborative effort. One member of such a group, proficient in, say, Spanish, scours Argentine, Chilean, or Colombian platforms for suitable articles. Another focuses on Latin American and Indian journals. They select scholarly-looking texts that have not yet been indexed by major international databases or plagiarism detection software. Then begins the process of “scientific adaptation”: machine translation, light paraphrasing of paragraphs, altered titles, and substituted references. Sometimes, even the original tables and graphs are retained, with only their captions slightly adjusted—most existing plagiarism detection tools currently do not index visual data. The final text is submitted to a journal, typically an English-language one based in countries with less rigorous peer-review procedures.
Surprisingly, such journals are far from uncommon in the scientific world—especially if the authors are willing to cover “publication fees.” A month later, the paper is published. Two months later, a new citation appears in Google Scholar. A year later, the Hirsch index climbs. This went on for years. The luckiest beneficiaries of this system secured grants, delivered keynote speeches at international conferences, formed dissertation committees, and rapidly ascended the career ladder. They became the very image of academic success.
Yet over time, the pool of unindexed texts freely circulating online has been shrinking irreversibly, like the pebble-leather. Finding new dark corners of the internet untouched by ubiquitous search algorithms became increasingly difficult. In this seemingly hopeless situation, a solution was nevertheless found. As often happens, the answer lay close at hand. Ukraine, embroiled in war for three years now, turned out to be a bottomless well of academic thought for Russian researchers. Just as looters pillage Ukrainian villages with impunity, taking anything of value, some Russian scholars began stealing Ukrainian academic works and repurposing them for their own needs.
As it turned out, translating openly accessible texts into Russian and publishing them under one’s own name in Russian academic journals was an entirely risk-free endeavor. For obvious reasons, official plagiarism detection platforms have legitimate concerns about openly processing sources from an enemy’s domain—on both sides of the conflict. Moreover, the domain zones of the warring parties are formally mutually inaccessible via the internet. Unofficially, however, cross-border access to texts remains possible through VPNs.
One striking example emerged early in the war: the journal “FGU Science”, published by the Chechen State University named after A.A. Kadyrov, featured an article titled “Modern Trends in Corporate Mergers and Acquisitions” by Yakub Dadayev, a senior lecturer in Commerce and Marketing. The text, with only minor alterations, was lifted from the 2020 doctoral dissertation of Serhiy Yevstafiev (“Institutional Regulation of Corporate Merger and Acquisition Processes in the National Economy”), defended in Odessa.
It should be noted that, unlike Russian dissertations, all Ukrainian theses are publicly accessible. However, for obvious reasons, they cannot be utilized by official state institutions of the opposing side in the war. This is precisely why Senior Lecturer Dadayev has nothing to fear: editorial boards of Russian journals are in no position to retract his article, even if they identify plagiarized content translated from Ukrainian—at least not in the foreseeable future.
To be fair, it is worth mentioning that plagiarists and their academic enablers on the Ukrainian side also exploit the circumstances of the ongoing war. For instance, shortly before the invasion, Wang Jing Yi, a Chinese graduate student at Kharkiv University, successfully defended her doctoral dissertation titled “Formation of Readiness in Future Music Teachers for Vocal-Pedagogical Activities in Higher Education Institutions of the PRC.” Later, it was revealed that the text was a compilation of two earlier Russian dissertations translated into Ukrainian. When Ukrainian scholars submitted a formal request to Kharkiv University to revoke Wang Jing Yi’s candidate of pedagogical sciences degree, the university administration demanded that the complainants provide duly certified copies of the original Russian dissertations—a near-impossible demand, given that no institution in wartime is willing to officially authenticate the academic works of an enemy state. Kharkiv University’s leadership seized on this very loophole to shield the plagiarist.
In December 2023, Senior Lecturer Dadayev of Grozny University, in collaboration with colleagues from Dagestan, published an article titled “The Role of Digital Technologies in Managing the Integrative Development of Enterprises” in the Russian journal Economics and Entrepreneurship. The text was later revealed to have been lifted almost verbatim from the Ukrainian doctoral dissertation of Aliona Holoborodko (“Managing the Integrative Development of Enterprises in the Modern Economic Paradigm of Digitalization”), defended in Kyiv just six months earlier, in June 2023.
This case became particularly revealing when, shortly after Dadayev’s incident, Sergey Dokholyan—a Doctor of Economics, professor, Honored Scientist of the Republic of Dagestan, and member of the Russian Union of Journalists—published an article titled “Features of Digital Economy Development at the Present Stage” in the Bulletin of the Kabardino-Balkarian Scientific Center of the Russian Academy of Sciences, also lifted from the same Ukrainian dissertation.
Using scientific works published shortly before their Russian-language translations appear allows plagiarists to avoid updating dates and bibliographic references. Nevertheless, even minimal “authorial” adjustments must be made to the automatically generated translation. For instance, references to the works of Ukrainian scholars must be disguised as “research by a number of scientists,” while, for example, the “Concepts for the Development of Ukraine’s Digital Economy and Society for 2018–2020” must be replaced with “Strategies for the Development of the Russian Federation’s Information Society.” Any mention of Ukraine is prudently scrubbed from the article, with Ukraine often being replaced by Russia in the text.
Professor Dokholyan is no stranger to Dissernet’s scrutiny. According to the Free Dissertations community, the professor has been implicated in large-scale improper borrowing—not only in his own doctoral thesis but also in fifty (!) dissertations where he served as either academic supervisor or official opponent. Twelve of these have already been revoked. His record extends beyond post-Soviet academia: Dokholyan previously co-authored an English-language paper in a Latin American journal, later exposed as a translated plagiarism of a Russian dissertation. Evidently, cross-lingual academic fraud is a well-practiced tactic for the renowned Dagestani scholar.
The fact that two unrelated Russian authors independently plagiarized the same Ukrainian dissertation—out of 150,000 publicly available theses—is unlikely to be a coincidence. This strongly suggests both utilized the same shadowy “academic service” specializing in publication trafficking, co-authorship deals, and citation manipulation.
Let’s be clear: a decorated Dagestani professor like Dokholyan hardly scoured Ukrainian archives himself. The logical conclusion? Cross-border translational plagiarism has been commodified in the Russia-Ukraine warzone—a safe and profitable scheme to inflate academic metrics. As the Russian proverb goes: “For some war is war, for others it’s a dear mother-in-law.”