In universities, the period spanning the late 1990s and early 2000s became known as the “dark ages” for plagiarism.
It was an era when the blooming of the internet made copying easier than it had ever been before, but the software required to detect it had yet to be designed.
Conversely, for aspiring students seeking a shortcut to graduation, the technological grey zone that the abrupt advance of internet-based research enabled presented a golden opportunity.
Many years later, historic dissertations submitted during that time are coming under renewed scrutiny.
One such complaint was recently made to the University of Portsmouth in relation to allegations of plagiarism in a dissertation submitted by a high-profile student, a senior Kuwaiti royal who now serves on the board of the Kuwait Investment Authority, the Gulf state’s sovereign wealth fund.
His Excellency Sheikh Dr Meshaal Jaber Al-Ahmad Al-Sabah - who sits on the board of Trustees of the Oxford University Centre for Islamic Studies (OXCIS) - obtained his PhD from the University of Portsmouth in 2011 with a dissertation titled ‘Resource Curse Reduction Through Innovation: The Case of Kuwait’.
A formal complaint submitted to the university by a whistleblower alleges that the thesis contains repeated examples of unattributed copying from publicly available sources, including Wikipedia pages, articles from the Guardian newspaper and Kuwait government websites.
This was based on an independent review of the document which identified 35 alleged instances of copied or near-verbatim material, with the wider body of overlapping text estimated to account for roughly 20 per cent of the thesis overall.
Among the examples cited is a passage which allegedly reproduces wording from a 2010 Wikipedia entry on the “resource curse”. According to the complaint, the wording and punctuation matched the archived Wikipedia page exactly.
Another passage allegedly copied directly from a Guardian article discussing corruption risks linked to Cambodian oil revenues. According to the complaint, the sentence appeared in the dissertation without quotation marks or attribution despite matching the published article word-for-word.
The complaint argues the examples are not isolated referencing mistakes but repeated instances where third-party material appears to have been presented as original academic writing.
Jonathan Bailey, a leading plagiarism expert and author who has written extensively about academic misconduct, said the examples appeared to be typical of a transitional period in academia before plagiarism detection systems became widespread.
“This does look like patchwork plagiarism,” said Mr Bailey. “It's a pattern that has someone copying and pasting content from various sources and then trying to make it their own by editing it".
“I think that this is a case of extremely poor writing habits combined with a lack of tools to detect this kind of plagiarism. It doesn't justify the practice, but this is likely a case very much of its time, when it was surprisingly common.”
In a 2024 essay, Bailey described the late 1990s and early 2000s as the “dark ages of academic plagiarism”. “Students and researchers could find information online and easily incorporate it into their work, both ethically and unethically,” he wrote.
Turnitin similarity detection software, which is now standard across much of higher education, only began gaining widespread adoption years later, often after 2011 when Al-Sabah’s dissertation was completed. Bailey argues that many dissertations produced during this period reflected poor digital research practices that universities struggled to police in real time.
The University of Portsmouth has rejected the allegations.
In a written response, the University said the matter had been “thoroughly investigated” under its research misconduct procedures.
“The thesis was considered to be original and, therefore, no further action has been taken,” the University wrote.
The case highlights an increasingly uncomfortable problem facing universities reviewing work produced during the internet’s first academic generation.
While institutions are being confronted by a new challenge in the form of AI, standards today are undoubtedly stricter, plagiarism software is more sophisticated and students are routinely warned that copied online material can be detected within seconds.
