Agriculture minister denies plagiarism accusation

Taipei, Sept. 24 (CNA) Council of Agriculture (COA) Minister Chen Chi-chung (陳吉仲) on Saturday rebutted an accusation that he had plagiarized other sources in a paper about a research project he undertook at the behest of the COA in 2012.

In a social media post, Kuomintang (KMT) Kaohsiung city councilor candidate Pai Chiao-yin (白喬茵) accused Chen of plagiarizing large portions of two research papers written by Lin Kuo-ching (林國慶), a professor at the National Taiwan University Department of Agricultural Economics, published in 2007 and 2008.

The project cost COA NT$1.25 million (US$39,302 at the current exchange rate), Pai said.

The accusation came amid media reports that former premier Simon Chang (張善政), the KMT’s Taoyuan mayoral candidate, had plagiarized from various sources in papers produced as a result of a NT$57 million research project he undertook from COA between 2007 and 2009 while he was vice president of the technology company Acer Inc.

COA has determined that six of the papers overseen by Chang showed overlaps with other publications ranging from 25 percent to 45 percent and asked Chang to provide an explanation before Sept. 30.

In response to the allegation, Chen posted on social media results of a plagiarism detection software analysis of his 2012 research paper, which showed a mere 3 percent overlap with Lin’s research, but he did not specify where the similarities occurred.

He said that except for some statistics and a bar graph that were also cited in Lin’s research, which were government data, all of the content in his paper was original, "unlike research overseen by Chang."

(By Wu Hsin-yun and Sean Lin)

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