Repeated plagiarism allegations on student theses... Candidate Im Hye-suk "Under verification"

[Asia Economy Reporter Kim Bong-su] Im Hye-sook, the nominee for Minister of Science and ICT, has been repeatedly embroiled in allegations of research paper plagiarism.

On the 26th, Heo Eun-ah, a member of the People Power Party, issued a press release claiming, "It has been confirmed that nominee Im registered her husband’s and her own research achievements by utilizing a student's research while serving as a professor." During her professorship, in July 2004, nominee Im submitted a paper titled "Weighted Binary Prefix Tree for IP Address Search," co-authored with her student A and her husband, Professor Im Chang-hoon, as the first author, which was published in November of the same year.

The issue is that the main content of the paper explaining the "Weighted Binary Prefix Tree (WBPT)" method is virtually identical to parts of student A’s master's thesis submitted in January of the following year. According to Representative Heo, the section proposing WBPT in nominee Im’s paper is merely a Korean translation of the WBPT explanation from student A’s master's thesis, with matching formulas, definitions, and notations. Heo stated, "It appears that nominee Im Hye-sook, her husband, and the student plagiarized the research content with mutual consent, publishing it first in an academic journal with the husband as the first author, nominee Im as the second author, and the student as the third author." He added, "It is also highly suspicious that the nominee’s husband, a professor at Konkuk University, conducted joint research with a student enrolled at Ewha Womans University graduate school. We will thoroughly investigate these related allegations through the confirmation hearing."

On the same day, Kim Young-sik, also from the same party, raised similar suspicions. In September 2007, nominee Im published a paper titled "Two-Dimensional Binary Search for Packet Classification Structure Based on Length" in an academic journal (The Korean Institute of Communications and Information Sciences), which closely resembles a master's thesis submitted by a student she supervised and examined in December 2006, nine months earlier. The student who submitted this master's thesis was B, who was listed as the first author on the paper published by nominee Im the following year. The paper titled "Two-Dimensional Binary Search Based on Length Considering Rule Priority for Packet Classification" dealt with content almost identical to the paper published by nominee Im nine months later, and according to Representative Kim, the conclusion section was nearly identical except for one or two sentences. In fact, from the introduction stating, "As demands for quality assurance on the internet increase, packet classification functions in routers are becoming increasingly important," to the sentence "(Strategy) enabled more efficient searching," four consecutive sentences were exactly the same. Furthermore, nominee Im reportedly received support from a national research institute (Information and Communications Research Promotion Agency) when publishing the paper, which has intensified the controversy.

In response, nominee Im’s side stated that "there is no significant problem." A member of the confirmation hearing preparation team explained Heo’s claim by saying, "The nominee and her spouse wrote the paper seven months earlier, and student A borrowed ideas to write their own master's thesis." Regarding Representative Kim’s allegations, they said, "We will soon release an official explanation."

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