[Asia Economy Reporter Kim Seul-gi] Singer Hong Jin-young (35) has been embroiled in allegations of plagiarism in her master's thesis, but Hong Jin-young's side denied the claims, saying "There is no problem."
On the 5th, Hong Jin-young's agency stated in an official position, "Hong Jin-young sincerely participated in the research and writing process of her master's thesis in the Department of Trade at Chosun University titled 'A Study on the Trends of the Cultural Content Industry through Hallyu.'"
Earlier, Kukmin Ilbo reported that Hong Jin-young's thesis showed a plagiarism rate of 74% according to the plagiarism detection site 'Copykiller.' According to the report, out of 556 sentences in Hong Jin-young's thesis, 124 sentences had 6 matching words in identical sentences, and 365 sentences were suspected of plagiarism.
However, Hong Jin-young's side explained, "Regarding the suspicion that the plagiarism rate exceeded 74%, we convey the opinion of the professor who was in charge of reviewing Hong Jin-young's master's thesis at that time," adding, "According to the professor, the thesis review took place in 2009, when it was common practice to include many footnotes such as citations and references, and a thesis had to have many citations to pass the review."
They further explained, "The Copykiller system has been mandatorily used by universities since 2015 as a system to filter out plagiarism exceeding 50%. Since the thesis was reviewed in 2009 before this system existed, the plagiarism rate would inevitably appear high when checked now."
They continued, "There may be misunderstandings, but we convey the reviewing professor's opinion that it cannot be considered plagiarism, and we have once again confirmed with the artist herself that aside from citations and references, Hong Jin-young did not plagiarize any research content in the thesis."
The agency emphasized again, "This verification method has a temporal error, and we state that this thesis is Hong Jin-young's original work and that there was absolutely no plagiarism of other theses."
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