Studies have shown not only the scale of plagiarism in Russia doctoral candidates have become a “status symbol” and a sign of “impressive consumption,” according to the words of co-author Anna Abalkina, sociologist from Munich University Ludwig-Maximilian and an expert on scientific violations. “This shows that most governors defended their positions full-time, and 18 of our sample defended their positions the same year they were appointed governors,” “she” said. The degrees were obtained so that “many businessmen and politicians were able to write theirdoctorates’ on their business cards,” “she” said, with a subgroup of professors turning a blind eye to plagiarism as they defended their proposals. Digitizing dissertations on the Internet revealed nearly 10,000 cases of significant plagiarism, resulting in the arrest of congressmen and university presidents. However, this does not necessarily mean that other powers have written their reports; perhaps they simply avoided detection by hiring the best ghostwriters. Research has shown that half of the PhD regional governors plagiarized them. The study names a thriving market for ghostwriting and concludes that the average governor defended “his” doctoral dissertation in the early 1940s, much later than the average. “It seems plausible that high-ranking Russian officials rarely write their own doctoral dissertations,” says an article published in the journal Saentometria. The study is based on a study of plagiarism from the Russian website Dissernet, which was created in 2013 by Russian scientists and journalists to eradicate this practice. In one case, the governor’s thesis consisted entirely of text copied and pasted from other sources. Just over half of the regional governors were promoted, plagiarized or not. It is absolutely “impossible” to write an intellectually honest thesis while working as a governor, Abalkina said. In other words, even if they are not honest, they are at least competent and therefore better managed.