“Nobody cares about your blog”
mssprovenance.blogspot.com
mssprovenance.blogspot.com
"The title of my blog today is a quotation from an email I received yesterday from Noemi De Santis of RECEPTIO, the Research Centre for European Philological Tradition."
It's all about how an academic plagiarized from the blog of this person, and then the academic's secretary completely dismissed it with statements such as - "I regret to inform you that blogs are not scientific texts, published by academic publishers, so their value is nil!"
Ironically, a long blog post I wrote in 2015 has over 50 citations (more than most of my papers as an academic, amusingly) according to Google Scholar, so clearly others don't feel the same.
Any chance you have a link to Google scholar on the highest cited example?
I would make a BibTeX @misc entry with the author, title, and URL. Similar example without even a URL: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Qiskit/qiskit/master/Qiski.... Here's how that shows up in Google Scholar: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cluster=82533882547072366...
Websites are easy as per that criteria.
The one I find annoying is when people cite like this. According to XYZ [1].... It establishes where the idea comes from, but sometimes lacks details that are needed to reconstruct the idea.
[1] Personal correspondence
It was a paper on a very relevant topic that would really be of interest. It had been cited in a dozen different papers, or so. But I could not find the cited paper anywhere!
I realized I could find the author of the cited paper, and just email them. They said "Oh, that was a conference presentation, it was never published as a paper anywhere, only presented orally at the conference."
Fine. Except... most of these citations didn't cite it as a conference presentation. Most of the citers, I am pretty sure were not at that conference. They just copy and pasted the citation from other papers, thinking the same as me, oh, that seems a useful cite. The first couple times it was cited, it might have actually been cited as a conference presentation at a particular conference on a particular date, but that wound up omitted from future copy pastes.
I don't think this was a particularly unusual occurence. Many citations are... unreliable.
A citation to something with an actual URL is pretty good.
Depends on the publication and the style guide they use. The ones I’m most familiar with are MLA & APA and they both have formats for how they want blogs cited.
I’m not sure how a blog would make the leap into being indexed as part of Google scholar though, unless it was first cited in a more traditional academic paper that fell into their domain.
Google scholar tracks citations by itself in some mysterious way, I have not contributed to that at all.
I understand it would look bad if your publication is citing only few blogs, but in such case the actual problem is that you need find existing publications or books in your area as well. Deciding that you won't cite a blog while you are using it for your work is not a solution to that.
I haven't used google scholar, but is the problem with limited knowledge of the tool that one don't know how to do it? Or is the tool itself limited? This makes me wonder whether the tools which doesn't easily allow one to track citations properly are part of the problem. This was definitely not a problem with bibtex[3]. Either way, that is not an excuse to basically commit an academic fraud.
[1] https://is.muni.cz/predmet/fi/VB000?lang=en [2] https://www.research-integrity.admin.cam.ac.uk/research-inte... [3] https://jonas-moennig.de/how-to-cite-a-website-with-bibtex/
Perhaps the automatic plagiarism detection used (if used) didn’t include blogs in its corpus, so it wasn’t flagged.
But still the author should have known that unattributed copying is word theft.
Both undergrads and postgrads are taught this on week 1. Professional/career academics are expected to abide by this as well.
The paper was eventually published and there's a paper trail, but I wonder how it will all play out.
It feels a little like a wild west to me.
https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/search_result?query=majid.info...
The blatant plagiarism Rossi has committed here not only casts doubt on her own previous publications, but also on the works by the organisation she's representing. The way her secretary defends the plagiarism she committed reads like someone who's been caught, couldn't think of an excuse, and started denying until they could come up with a better excuse ("blogs don't have scientific value") for Prof Carla Rossi's plagiarism. The sheer nerve to call a blog scientifically meaningless when the author has brazenly put her name on someone else's work!
It's possible that Rossi didn't know about the plagiarism as many publications in academia outsource a large amount of work to others (PhD students, for example) and stick the name of the researcher managing the project on the front. Perhaps the person answering the email was (or knew) the person who plagiarised this blog and is trying to prevent her boss from finding out.
Regardless, I wouldn't trust Prof Carla Rossi, nor her journal "Theory and Criticism of Literature and Arts", nor receptio.eu until this problem has been dealt with. As far as I can tell this blog is an excellent source of information, but if these publications have copied online sources verbatim before, who knows what other, lesser websites have also been copied and restated as scientific fact?
It's a scary prospect because AI invalidates most of our heuristics about fraud and plagiarism, and therefore our intuitions can't be trusted. (e.g. we can no longer rely on the heuristic "geez, it could be a con but who would bother to put in so much damn work for such a small benefit?" argument.)
(It's also interesting that this is basically a fundamental trade-off of higher productivity. I would wager $10k that within the next 2 years startup land will get caught with its hand in the AI sock puppet cookie jar more than once.)
In general, even if AI can produce years worth of plausible blog posts, this doesn't live in a vacuum and sites like archive.org help to date if the content is recent or not.
Do you have a source for this claim? PhD students get credit for the work that they perform, their names are on the papers so I'm not sure where you're getting the idea that they aren't getting credit or that this is somehow plagiarism
An overworked or overconfident PhD student could have plagiarised an article or log post, pretended it was their own work to hit the deadline and still get co-authorship on the publication, and convince the "author" that the magnificent work was all their own, "infecting" their coauthors without their knowledge. This is very easy if you have a good standing within your group and make no suggestion that you need to resort to plagiarism. Needing access to physical resources like rare books makes it even easier to hide your lies because validating such work takes a lot of effort.
During several plagiarism cases that have hit the national news here researchers had coauthored papers with convincing liars, expanding upon earlier work or taking a made up data set and applying real, proper methodology to it. Often the coauthors had to find out through the papers that their publications were at risk of retraction when a liar had been found out. I don't believe researchers are on the habit of checking every single line of text their coauthor writes for matches online because not plagiarising is the norm.
Just wanted to say I’m sorry this happened, and hope you get a true, useful response in the end.
Merry Christmas :), your blog is fascinating and I’ll read through some of the other posts too!
Everything else reads like classic misdirection of someone caught red-handed.
I think a thorough examination of Rossi's scholarship would be in order.
It’s a shame the article didn’t have a comment directly from Rossi but maybe they tried to get one and failed.
Lot of actual academic work happening on Twitter, blogs and sites like MathOverflow.
On topic: It seems like the author was directly plagiarized, and it sounds like the perpetrators are handwaving lawyers at them. If I were them, I'd write to the head of their faculty or their dean; I suspect the university wouldn't want to be associated with potential plagiarism (and I suspect their lawyers would recommend getting the citation approved).
The university and the journal. They both have an interest here.
"RECEPTIO is an independent, non-commercial research centre under private law (run by the International Philological Society), whose members do not receive any pecuniary benefit from their research activities."
The "Nobody cares about your blog" statement, in this case, is not a dismissive, if accurate, statement about an anonymous blogger, or low viewership blogs in general.
It's a self-serving excuse written by a person who cares a lot, obviously, because all their images came from the blogger in question's site.
Universities are political organisations before academic ones.
[1]https://www.rose.uzh.ch/de/seminar/wersindwir/mitarbeitende/...
[2] https://philmagness.com/2022/10/kevin-kruses-plagiarism-scan...
[3] https://www.dailyprincetonian.com/article/2022/10/princeton-...
It appears that the entire journal is fraudulent (stock photos for people who apparently work there).
The author of the content that was one of the allegations said:
>Bayor, who Magness had accused Kruse of plagiarizing, has previously told the ‘Prince’ that the accusations against Kruse were “politically motivated” and that “there is not a story here.”
It's from the article.
One time someone copy pasted a bunch of my blog posts, ran them through a thesaurus badly, and published the result in trash journals under their own name. For example: [1] was turned into [2]. Even stranger was they apparently then machine generated a gibberish paper, referencing many of these badly plagiarized papers, and put my name and a coworker's name on it as authors [3]. Without our permission, obviously. Actually, that's what led me to the badly plagiarized papers.
A different time, some researchers did work extending something I published in a blog post[4][5]. Opposite to the experience in this article, they actually went a bit far on credit: they asked me if I wanted to be listed as an author on their paper! I hadn't done any work on their paper, so I declined. My understanding is that this request was triggered by some third party, an advisor or a referee, concerned that just citing the blog post wouldn't be enough credit because a blog post wouldn't be seen as a real publication.
[1]: https://algassert.com/2016/04/24/eves-quantum-clone-computer...
[2]: https://www.questjournals.org/jses/papers/Vol3-issue-5/A3501...
[3]: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/337832721_Unconditi...
"Nobody Cares About Your Blog"
Which would both avoided the awkwardness (to put it mildly— academic integrity can be fragile… unless it’s a blog you plagiarize? Anyway…) and resulted in a higher quality work by the plagiarist who might have obtained access to more portions &/or higher resolution images.
Placing arrogance as some flavor of pride— the overly proud and prideful of the world are in some circle of a Venn diagram that overlaps significantly with the set of people that make the world a shitty place at times.
An academic publication is just a blogpost that got signed off as “not totally wrong” by someone who barely read it. It feels like the biggest supporters of the system are its leeches who produce no value yet benefit from the clout.
Their Research integrity office can be found here: https://www.research.uzh.ch/en/procedures/integrity.html
> But honestly Monica, the web is considered 'public domain' and you should be happy we just didn't 'lift' your whole article and put someone else's name on it! It happens a lot, clearly more than you are aware of, especially on college campuses, and the workplace. If you took offence and are unhappy, I am sorry, but you as a professional should know that the article we used written by you was in very bad need of editing, and is much better now than was originally. Now it will work well for your portfolio. For that reason, I have a bit of a difficult time with your requests for monetary gain, albeit for such a fine (and very wealthy!) institution. We put some time into rewrites, you should compensate me! I never charge young writers for advice or rewriting poorly written pieces, and have many who write for me... ALWAYS for free![22][23]
Yep, remember that? Cooks Source (lack of apostrophe in the original) copied an article about cooking, which lead to the discovery of massive copyright infringement on the part of Judith Griggs, the editor of that now-defunct publication.
So, two things:
One, it looks like Judith Griggs was right. This kind of thing does happen a lot in the academic world.
Two, this kind of thing probably happens a lot in that particular attempt at a journal or book or academic blog or whatever that pathetic excrescence is officially called. Get the copies now before they use copyright claims to make it impossible for people to notice how often they violated copyright.
Finding their email addresses is mostly straightforward, it's on their institutional pages most of the time. Note that one of them is deceased since 2021, which does make me wonder how relevant this list is now.
https://fr.receptio.eu/operationalstaff
There's a Noemi, who seems to also moonlight as a stock photography model elsewhere:
https://www.westend61.de/en/imageView/HOXF02297/portrait-hap...
(Some staff pictures might have been swapped by mistake, which... still says something, perhaps?)
The bookshelf behind many of the "staff" appears to be itself from a stock photograph:
https://www.eclectuals.com/literaryservices
The attorney himself might be a stock photo - they might have kept the original Italian description in the ALT tag:
https://static.wixstatic.com/media/494184_29da2642a38540ef8e...
Who knows what's going on.
> This precipitated a correspondence with Noemi De Santis, who explained "I am Professor Rossi's secretary, who is not aware of our correspondence. I manage her mail account."
I'm surprised a professor would have a secretary handle their correspondence. That does sound like an entitled environment.
I agree with the author that nobody cares about whatever content you create, aside from your own marketing value and ability. At the same time, we've created huge industrial systems to harvest your thoughts and reassemble them in return for eyeballs on some site somewhere. Your individual value is nil
Personal authorship and ownership of art and ideas is one of the key concepts that created the modern world. I have no doubt that folks are harvesting this guy's blog, and many more like it.
I don't know where we go from here. Should be an interesting ride!
I wouldn't say that's the author's contention, very much the opposite from the way he passionately defends his work and authorship, as well as all the work he puts into researching very niche topics.
On top of that, citing previous work is one of the most important parts of research, and plagiarism can be a career ending move. In this case the author's blog comes up in the first google results for that research topic so it doesn't seem to be a side-effect of some emergent industrial system that would strip and remix knowledge with no regard for its authorship as much as wilful scientific misconduct (allegedly).
Assuming positive intent, and that you're not a bot, thanks for the chance to clarify!
My understanding of your point, and the industrialization that you spoke of, is that it would strip or muddy authorship, you can't take this blog as an example of that when it's original research that comes up prominently along with its author in the medium the author intended. The stripping of the authorship was done willfully (allegedly) by a human, not by some algorithm that'd prop-up derivative content with unclear chains of authorship over original research.
It's great to have a traditional view of authorship and scholarship. I support that view. The internet engine of commerce does not support this and views such as those debated in this essay far outweigh those older ones.
I emailed every member of the Board of Directors / Scientific Committee of RECEPTIO (https://www.receptio.eu/scientificcomitee) whose email address I could find, with a link to this blog post.
Hopefully someone will take some action.
Through PubPeer, many other scholars will become aware of this possible problem, and the book author gets the option to provide a reply
Those mail responses sound like they actually care a lot, maybe not about doing proper work or research, but certainly about getting caught red handed.
What a terrible behaviour.
Nobody cares about your blog. They will just read if it's interesting and discard otherwise, but no-one will judge.
I can read a research paper right now (and I do read research papers when they're helpful to the situation at hand). I can write an article, make a video, or share some interesting thing I learned in a professional manner without ever submitting it to a journal. I don't need a PhD to pursue learning as much as I can about the field of Computer Science, and I highly doubt a PhD will offer me any significant advantages in this pursuit. Especially after my experience getting a B.S degree (pun fully intended).
I can't wait for the day when we recognize that educational institutions don't actually signify any more authority than a random person that's devoted years of their life to studying a topic.
And it especially sickens me that this author was dismissed by a "professional" at one of these institutions that was plagiarizing their work. These "professionals" are the same as every other person out there, and the dumb degree really adds nothing.
Nobody cares about your degree.
And yes, I know that there are good professors/researchers out there. But man I'm really sick of these institutions that pretend they hold some higher level of scrutiny to their work. The more I learn about them (and try to replicate the results in their research papers), the more I realize that this whole establishment is rife with shoddy work just like any corporation out there.
In theory, yes, you should. In practice - not necessarily.
It's the validation that's important - confirmation from (ostensibly) equals that the work is rigorous and original.
In contrast, anyone can go down a delusional rabbit-hole and present it to the world as „truth“, when it's anything but; and then try to pass themselves off as an independent academic. That's just not going to work in Science.
He can’t be bothered to comment himself but nonetheless has the XKCD “There’s someone wrong on the internet!” complex so I get stuck posting here. I’m safe writing this since he also makes me cherry pick any replies to read back to him, doesn’t do it himself.
All in all I guess it’s not so bad though, better than writing condescending & mild legal threats to bloggers whose work you boss ripped off.
"RECEPTIO is an independent, non-commercial research centre under private law (run by the International Philological Society), whose members do not receive any pecuniary benefit from their research activities."
I blog because I'm forgetful AF and want a record of how I solved problems in the past to refer to later.
If other people get someone out of it too, that's gravy.
However as with any code I published I would be fairly annoyed were someone to lift it and present it as their own without either first contacting me (which is trivial) or citing me.
I have found a lot of references to things I have done on google scholar et al and I am flattered to have been included.
I don’t understand why anyone would risk being caught out like this. Citing is trivial and indicates you have done research and then built on someone else’s work.
Nobody cares about the Twitter account perhaps.
As we get into more innovations such as ChatGPT and "AI" Personality, Image (Stable Diffusion), and Music generation (Technically which are somewhat scripts that literally scrape the internet and prior works to smash together "new" derivative Frankensteinian works) we're looking as a grim future of content theft, and the agricultural mining of independent intellectual work, which will mean that individual independent thoughts and works will become worthless the minute they are published online. Eventually, brilliant minds will go quiet, and then suddenly "AI" will begin to falter, and that's when people will know they should have bookmarked your old (now gone private blog)