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Comment by anchpop | Hacker News Reader

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?

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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.

>Now maybe they did spend some time learning it and looking into, but there is no way to know for sure

Why are you so concerned on this ? Isn't the goal of a paper is to communicate information?

>It only proves that they have copy and paste.

Yes they copy paste but it doesn't prove that they don't really understand it.

They may very well found your definition is the best way to describe it.

As long as the reader of the paper understand what being communicated, imo it should be fine?

I can understand if its a school assignment where the goal is specifically to prove that the author know their stuff.

For a scientific paper, requiring a concept to be described in different way for the sake of it seem to be inefficient and wasting time.

"We thank the anonymous reviewers for constructive feedback that we used to improve the article." Standard phrase, credit where credit is due, no need to make some definition worse just to not trip off a plagiarism filter.

Unless this very phrase does the tripping off. Having to rephrase it would be pretty ridiculous though (and illustrates your point).

No, it's important to gauge how competent the researchers are, i.e. how trustworthy the remainder of the paper is. The problem with review process is that the reviewers typically cannot reproduce the work itself -- take a physics experiment for example. So they can only do a smell test, and getting basic concepts wrong is a rather bad smell.

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