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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

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.
  - lugged 5y ago
    I'm so glad I skipped PhD level and got straight to work. I would have hated that level of navel gazing.
    - da39a3ee 5y ago
      Yes, I think you showed great wisdom there. It must have been hard, since I imagine there were many top research universities trying to get you to enter their PhD programs. And after all, what have people with PhDs ever done for the world?

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.
- lugged 5y ago
  I'm so glad I skipped PhD level and got straight to work. I would have hated that level of navel gazing.
  - da39a3ee 5y ago
    Yes, I think you showed great wisdom there. It must have been hard, since I imagine there were many top research universities trying to get you to enter their PhD programs. And after all, what have people with PhDs ever done for the world?