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> the authors plagiarized my definition and explanation almost word for word (from my confidential review). Is there any way the authors could have kept your d

by MikeUt 5y ago

> the authors plagiarized my definition and explanation almost word for word (from my confidential review). Is there any way the authors could have kept your definition, and somehow credited you, even anonymously? Because rephrasing definitions is the pinnacle of wasted effort, and leads to confusion - you are asking them to say what you said, but without using your words.

sunshineforever 5y ago
Yeah. How can you plagiarize a definition?
- WastingMyTime89 5y ago
  I was pondering the same thing until I realized the person you are replying to is somewhat stretching the meaning of definition to mean a multiple paragraphs long explanation of a complex concept which was as I understand it lifted verbatim.
  - slapfrog 5y ago
    Even if you only copied a typical one-sentence dictionary definition verbatim without attribution, that would still clearly be a clear-cut case of plagiarism...
    - WastingMyTime89 5y ago
      Hardly. Plagiarism is passing someone else idea or work as your own. Most terms especially technical ones have precise agreed upon definition. Calling quoting them plagiarism is stretching the notion to its limits. Thankfully there is no philosophical conundrum to be had when people are lifting complex explanations.
      - slapfrog 5y ago
        If you want to quote a dictionary's definition, you should cite the dictionary you're quoting. If you're passing the dictionary's definition off as your own, word for word, that is plagiarism.
      - eesmith 5y ago
        The "precise agreed upon definition" is not mapped to a precise agreed upon sequence of words. I find it hard to think of any technical terms which have a fixed, well-specified phrase for the definition, much less ones which, if re-used, don't require attribution. I mean, there are definitional terms like "one meter is the length of the path traveled by light in a vacuum in 1/299 792 458 of a second" or "the discriminant of the quadratic equation is b^2-4ac". Re-use those quoted definitions and no one will blink. But, what's "evolution", or "electron spin", or "aromaticity"? Even something as well-defined and concrete as "cosine similarity" has many different variations: Wikipedia: a measure of similarity between two non-zero vectors of an inner product space. It is defined to equal the cosine of the angle between them, which is also the same as the inner product of the same vectors normalized to both have length 1 SciKit-learn: the normalized dot product of X and Y: K(X, Y) = <X, Y> / (||X||*||Y||) towardsdatascience.com: the cosine of the angle between the two non-zero vectors statology.org: For two vectors, A and B, the Cosine Similarity is calculated as: Cosine Similarity = ΣAiBi / (√ΣAi2√ΣBi2) uchicago.edu: For vectors, it is the cosine of the angle between those vectors. datadriveninvestor.com: Cosine similarity of two vectors is just the cosine of the angle between two vectors While certainly equivalent, these definitions show some creative choice in how they are worded, and thus if copied, should be cited. (I agree that the creativity level is quite low for some of these, and I believe several people might come up with the same description, but that's a different issue than re-using someone else's definition without attribution.)
        WastingMyTime89 5y ago
        > (I agree that the creativity level is quite low for some of these, and I believe several people might come up with the same description, but that's a different issue than re-using someone else's definition without attribution.) It's funny because I actually find your exemples to be supporting my point more than yours. All of these sentences are translation in plain English of the absolutly perfectly defined and commonly accepted definition of cosine similarity. SkiKit-Learn is even just writing the formula. uchicago.edu and datadriveninvestor.com even use exactly the same words. I mean, if you came to see me complaining someone was plagirising for writing "For vectors, cosine similarity is the cosine of the angle between those vectors.", I would find that laughable.
da39a3ee 5y ago
I agree with this. You sound expert and provided a definition. I don't think we should expect serious professionals to mess around altering the words to make it look like it didn't come from the source that it did come from. In fact wouldn't that itself be plagiarism? The usual approach here is to use a phrase like "as suggested by one of our reviewers".
- pottertheotter 5y ago
  I think this is the cause of some of these weird terms that this HN post is discussing. I have a PhD and found it incredibly frustrating to write research papers because there was an expectation in my field to add a ton of background. That meant I had to spend a lot of time to rephrase bits and pieces of other papers where the authors had worked hard to word something very well. The professors didn’t like me quoting from other papers. I had to come up with my own way to say something very specific.
  - petschge 5y ago
    I write papers too and hate finding a new way to say "my X is a Y that does Z". Especially if it is your tenth paper on the topic and you should even sound like the previous nine times. But about three sentences into the introduction (where you explain all the background) you start going into "there is also Y's that do Z backwards". Which Y's you compare and connect with is important and says alot about how you think about your X. It might even be a new way of looking at it. So telling other people how you think of it can be important. And another 5 sentences in you start referencing previous work on the topic. At this point you are crediting other and you get to chose whom to credit how much, with the benefit of hindsight. You refer to papers that are useful to people new in the study of capital letters. What you write here helps them much more than a mere list of papers or a google (well google scholar or ADS or pubmed or what ever) result list, because you can provide a good order to read them or which aspect of X's are best explained where. You also name papers that might be useful to practitioners in the field because they have a particular technique or a good explanation of it. So it is very much worth while of providing the background that others expect at the beginning of your paper. Even if it requires rewriting that first paragraph several times.
atrettel 5y ago
That is a good question that I do not have a good answer for, unfortunately. The review process for this journal is supposed to be blind, so crediting me would only reveal me as a reviewer. An anonymous acknowledgment is better than nothing, if the authors only copied a short definition without my permission, but they copied an entire paragraph from my review without my permission. That's just inexcusable. I can understand to some degree why they did not understand the concept well, since you may not encounter it even in a graduate-level course on the subject, but what they did was just inexcusable and really poor judgment.
- anchpop 5y ago
  I don’t understand what the problem here is actually. If you plagiarize on an assignment for school, that’s bad, because the goal of assignments is to test your knowledge and plagiarism makes it a less effective test. But here the goal (I think) is to produce an informative and accurate paper. You told them the definition - what would have been gained by rephrasing the definition you told them? Especially if they’re nonnative english speakers, it seems likely that any rephrasing would have made the definition less understandable and possibly less accurate. I guess the fear is that they don’t actually understand the definition, and anyone reading the paper will incorrectly believe that they do, improving their reputation in a way they don’t deserve?
  - atrettel 5y ago
    As I have said in another comment, the authors did not just copy my short definition but my entire paragraph-length explanation of the concept. I might have let the short definition slide but an entire paragraph is just inexcusable. I agree that this is not a school assignment, so the nature of plagiarism is a bit different. But you hit the nail right on the head. We should be worried that they are pretending to know something that they really do not. They copied my explanation nearly word-for-word. Doing that does not prove that they actually understand the concept. It only proves that they have copy and paste. Now maybe they did spend some time learning it and looking into, but there is no way to know for sure. The only way to prove that they really understand the concept fundamentally is to make them explain it themselves in their own words. And that is precisely what they should have done.
thisrod 5y ago
> Is there any way the authors could have kept your definition, and somehow credited you, even anonymously? It's not uncommon for the acknowledgements section of a paper to thank an anonymous reviewer for, e.g., suggesting the authors further investigate a detail that turned out to be important. But in this case, where the authors couldn't write their own explanation of a technical term, maybe it's a bit premature for them to be writing technical papers.
lugged 5y ago
Also found this a super weird complaint. It's not a, its b. Ok b. Hey, you copied my answer? ???

by MikeUt 5y ago

sunshineforever 5y ago

Yeah. How can you plagiarize a definition?

WastingMyTime89 5y ago
I was pondering the same thing until I realized the person you are replying to is somewhat stretching the meaning of definition to mean a multiple paragraphs long explanation of a complex concept which was as I understand it lifted verbatim.
- slapfrog 5y ago
  Even if you only copied a typical one-sentence dictionary definition verbatim without attribution, that would still clearly be a clear-cut case of plagiarism...
  - WastingMyTime89 5y ago
    Hardly. Plagiarism is passing someone else idea or work as your own. Most terms especially technical ones have precise agreed upon definition. Calling quoting them plagiarism is stretching the notion to its limits. Thankfully there is no philosophical conundrum to be had when people are lifting complex explanations.
    - slapfrog 5y ago
      If you want to quote a dictionary's definition, you should cite the dictionary you're quoting. If you're passing the dictionary's definition off as your own, word for word, that is plagiarism.
    - eesmith 5y ago
      The "precise agreed upon definition" is not mapped to a precise agreed upon sequence of words. I find it hard to think of any technical terms which have a fixed, well-specified phrase for the definition, much less ones which, if re-used, don't require attribution. I mean, there are definitional terms like "one meter is the length of the path traveled by light in a vacuum in 1/299 792 458 of a second" or "the discriminant of the quadratic equation is b^2-4ac". Re-use those quoted definitions and no one will blink. But, what's "evolution", or "electron spin", or "aromaticity"? Even something as well-defined and concrete as "cosine similarity" has many different variations: Wikipedia: a measure of similarity between two non-zero vectors of an inner product space. It is defined to equal the cosine of the angle between them, which is also the same as the inner product of the same vectors normalized to both have length 1 SciKit-learn: the normalized dot product of X and Y: K(X, Y) = <X, Y> / (||X||*||Y||) towardsdatascience.com: the cosine of the angle between the two non-zero vectors statology.org: For two vectors, A and B, the Cosine Similarity is calculated as: Cosine Similarity = ΣAiBi / (√ΣAi2√ΣBi2) uchicago.edu: For vectors, it is the cosine of the angle between those vectors. datadriveninvestor.com: Cosine similarity of two vectors is just the cosine of the angle between two vectors While certainly equivalent, these definitions show some creative choice in how they are worded, and thus if copied, should be cited. (I agree that the creativity level is quite low for some of these, and I believe several people might come up with the same description, but that's a different issue than re-using someone else's definition without attribution.)
      - WastingMyTime89 5y ago
        > (I agree that the creativity level is quite low for some of these, and I believe several people might come up with the same description, but that's a different issue than re-using someone else's definition without attribution.) It's funny because I actually find your exemples to be supporting my point more than yours. All of these sentences are translation in plain English of the absolutly perfectly defined and commonly accepted definition of cosine similarity. SkiKit-Learn is even just writing the formula. uchicago.edu and datadriveninvestor.com even use exactly the same words. I mean, if you came to see me complaining someone was plagirising for writing "For vectors, cosine similarity is the cosine of the angle between those vectors.", I would find that laughable.

da39a3ee 5y ago

I agree with this. You sound expert and provided a definition. I don't think we should expect serious professionals to mess around altering the words to make it look like it didn't come from the source that it did come from. In fact wouldn't that itself be plagiarism? The usual approach here is to use a phrase like "as suggested by one of our reviewers".

pottertheotter 5y ago
I think this is the cause of some of these weird terms that this HN post is discussing. I have a PhD and found it incredibly frustrating to write research papers because there was an expectation in my field to add a ton of background. That meant I had to spend a lot of time to rephrase bits and pieces of other papers where the authors had worked hard to word something very well. The professors didn’t like me quoting from other papers. I had to come up with my own way to say something very specific.
- petschge 5y ago
  I write papers too and hate finding a new way to say "my X is a Y that does Z". Especially if it is your tenth paper on the topic and you should even sound like the previous nine times. But about three sentences into the introduction (where you explain all the background) you start going into "there is also Y's that do Z backwards". Which Y's you compare and connect with is important and says alot about how you think about your X. It might even be a new way of looking at it. So telling other people how you think of it can be important. And another 5 sentences in you start referencing previous work on the topic. At this point you are crediting other and you get to chose whom to credit how much, with the benefit of hindsight. You refer to papers that are useful to people new in the study of capital letters. What you write here helps them much more than a mere list of papers or a google (well google scholar or ADS or pubmed or what ever) result list, because you can provide a good order to read them or which aspect of X's are best explained where. You also name papers that might be useful to practitioners in the field because they have a particular technique or a good explanation of it. So it is very much worth while of providing the background that others expect at the beginning of your paper. Even if it requires rewriting that first paragraph several times.

atrettel 5y ago

That is a good question that I do not have a good answer for, unfortunately. The review process for this journal is supposed to be blind, so crediting me would only reveal me as a reviewer. An anonymous acknowledgment is better than nothing, if the authors only copied a short definition without my permission, but they copied an entire paragraph from my review without my permission. That's just inexcusable. I can understand to some degree why they did not understand the concept well, since you may not encounter it even in a graduate-level course on the subject, but what they did was just inexcusable and really poor judgment.

anchpop 5y ago
I don’t understand what the problem here is actually. If you plagiarize on an assignment for school, that’s bad, because the goal of assignments is to test your knowledge and plagiarism makes it a less effective test. But here the goal (I think) is to produce an informative and accurate paper. You told them the definition - what would have been gained by rephrasing the definition you told them? Especially if they’re nonnative english speakers, it seems likely that any rephrasing would have made the definition less understandable and possibly less accurate. I guess the fear is that they don’t actually understand the definition, and anyone reading the paper will incorrectly believe that they do, improving their reputation in a way they don’t deserve?
- atrettel 5y ago
  As I have said in another comment, the authors did not just copy my short definition but my entire paragraph-length explanation of the concept. I might have let the short definition slide but an entire paragraph is just inexcusable. I agree that this is not a school assignment, so the nature of plagiarism is a bit different. But you hit the nail right on the head. We should be worried that they are pretending to know something that they really do not. They copied my explanation nearly word-for-word. Doing that does not prove that they actually understand the concept. It only proves that they have copy and paste. Now maybe they did spend some time learning it and looking into, but there is no way to know for sure. The only way to prove that they really understand the concept fundamentally is to make them explain it themselves in their own words. And that is precisely what they should have done.

thisrod 5y ago

> Is there any way the authors could have kept your definition, and somehow credited you, even anonymously? It's not uncommon for the acknowledgements section of a paper to thank an anonymous reviewer for, e.g., suggesting the authors further investigate a detail that turned out to be important. But in this case, where the authors couldn't write their own explanation of a technical term, maybe it's a bit premature for them to be writing technical papers.

lugged 5y ago

Also found this a super weird complaint. It's not a, its b. Ok b. Hey, you copied my answer? ???