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I do not know what they were, and as a publication Byline Times does not rule out plagiarism (and I/we have written that explicitly in our major piece looking at The Times' reporting). However, many academics we spoke to, such as Cambridge's Prof Colin Talbot, did see them as minor and believed they were consistent with data handling errors. My point is to get away from what we personally might believe about the issue. You are more sceptical and are entitled to be. The issue is that the anomalies are potentially explainable due to major (rather than minor) data handling errors in relation to a corpus of qualitative data related to Memon - in which the coding and categorising of his participant interview passages could have got mixed up with that of Memon's leading to research outputs around that body of work to be systematically flawed. Now the only way to know either way whether there was deliberate plagiarism or honest error (my report on The Times' story btw does not class these as minor - they were serious, although as I've said there is real disagreement among academics about this - see prof Jason Stanley's essay for instance) is to look at the original transcripts and records etc. Journalists can't do that. The formal investigations did. The fact that there have been four, none of which concluded plagiarism or data fabrication, none resulting in retraction, is at least worthy of fair and accurate reporting in itself. Instead, we find repeatedly journalists mischaracterising, misreported and suppressing what the formal investigations found, replacing it instead with their own opinions - many of which are rooted in basic misunderstandings about scientific publishing and how qualititative research works. (A 32 interview data set in qualitative research is large, for instance - you said it was small. It really isn't, and entirely unlike a journalist doing interviews. It's large because transcripts are broken up systematically into segments, each of which is coded and categorised ideally on a spreadsheet, or even more ideally using proper software, so that they can subjected to proper analysis and comparison. If that isn't done with due care, that's where serious errors can come about, especially if multiple datasets end up being mixed together). We also find that articles about the issue only interviewed selected academics who believed the anomalies were definitively plagiarism or fabrication, but did not speak to the many academics who disagree and see them as explicable due to errors. Both his PhD thesis and the papers that had these errors all had the same kind of errors around the use of Memon, with similar types of problems. We don't find similar types of errors across the rest of his body of around 30 odd papers. That is why we have reported that it is possible that these errors may have happened due to qualitative data handling problems related to a particular body of material around Arday's handling of Memon. That possibility, which many academics consider plausible even if others don't, was never given any credence by the press - despite it being consistent with the formal investigations. It would have been right and fair to properly acknowledge this possibility rather than pretending plagiarism was the only explanation and assuming (without evidence) that every investigation was somehow compromised (and/or then inaccurately reporting them, which is what The Times did). It remains bizarre that what the formal investigations have found still remain not properly reported at all, and it hasn't caused journalists to pause to wonder if maybe they have got it wrong.