Executive Summary
This report is about documented plagiarism found in a dissertation published in 2017. The dissertation was submitted to the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at the Humboldt University, Berlin by Indika Dilhan Somaratne. It was evaluated by Prof. Dr. Boike Rehbein and PD Dr. Rolf Hepp. It is freely available online as a PDF.
This report is the 205th documentation published by VroniPlag Wiki and is based on the findings of a collaborative, manual plagiarism analysis as of 2020-03-09. It is not the result of a commercial or software-based analysis.
The investigation has documented extensive plagiarism in the thesis. Over 90% of the pages of the main text contain plagiarized passages. Over two-thirds of the main text is taken almost verbatim from other sources, generally without any or the proper reference. The passages are taken from around 100 mostly online sources. Among these sources are the Wikipedia, a doctoral dissertation available online, a master's thesis, some organizational home pages, many open access publications, and various online religious reference works. The published PDF of the dissertation contains many copy-and-paste artefacts such as numerous hidden (embedded) web links that are also found as visible links in the source material. In conclusion, the dissertation could be categorized as an outright collage of easily obtained and quite diverse sources.
The current state of the findings and additional information can be found on the pages
This document contains an overview of the thesis structure, a discussion of the most prominent findings, a tabular representation of the sources and the plagiarized passages, a listing of the fragments in page order, and bibliographic details of the potential sources identified.