Do you have a particular story that shows the types of negative outcomes that could happen? While it’s not impossible for me to imagine an overly sensitive academic getting angry or annoyed unreasonably, at a distillation, it hardly seems to me like it would be at all likely. I have fairly high confidence in my understanding of academic mindsets, and a single sentence at the top “this is a summary of XYZ’s work on whatever” with a link would in almost all cases be enough. You could even add in another flattering sentence, “I’m very excited about this work because… I find it super exciting so here’s my notes/attempt at understanding it more”
Generally, academics like it when people try to understand their work.
Yes. I posted the description of the aging distillation project I described above on the AskAcademia subreddit, and was met with a firestorm of downvotes and strident claims from multiple respondants that it would be plagiaristic/stealing, and that I was obviously unfit to be a graduate student for even considering it.
One important caveat is that I originally posted that I was going to “publish” this essay, which many respondants seem to have initially taken as meaning “publish in a peer reviewed journal, passing the ideas and structure off as my own.” But even after updating the OP and specifically addressing that point in numerous replies, respondants generally continued to see the idea as a form of intellectual theft and of making no useful contribution to the reader.
It’s entirely possible that my initial post grabbed the attention of a couple redditors who are a few SDs from the mean in terms of sensitivity to plagiarism concerns, and that they got so fired up about that possibility that they couldn’t really make a distinction between the scenario they had imagined I was proposing and what I actually intended to do. But I think the more likely explanation is that a lot of academics would see a thorough rewrite of a specific source in new language as a form of intellectual laziness/theft, even with proper citations, and that people almost never do this for that exact reason. Up close, it might not be plagiarism, but from a distance, it sure looks like it. You have to do a lot of explaining to show why it’s maybe not plagiarism. Even if you convince one person, they might even still feel pressured to accuse you of plagiarism, because otherwise it looks like they’re being soft on crime. And even if not, they might still think you’re a fool for provoking a potentially ugly controversy, and want to distance themselves from you.
There are probably ways to do distillations that avoid this sort of issue, but I think anybody planning to do it ought to have a carefully thought-through plan for how they’re going to avoid accusations of plagiarism. Distillation of a single source is an unconventional format. Conventional formats—the book review, the summary, etc—exist because we, as a culture, have carved out a set of generally acceptable ways for people to respond to the works of other authors. Distillations aren’t really one of them (correct me if I’m wrong and you can point to sources on things like “how to write a distillation” from the wider world). When people write academic works, they might expect a review, a piece of science journalism, or whatever, but not that some stranger will come along and try to write a “distillation” of their entire paper and publish it online. And they might be pissed off to have their expectations violated.
By analogy, it’s a person deciding that since dancing is fun and healthy and they believe in “ask culture,” it’s OK for them to walk up to strangers at the bus stop and ask them to dance. It’s a weird thing to be asked, people will be confused about your motives and get anxious, and you shouldn’t be surprised if you quickly develop a reputation as a creep even if you always politely walk away when you get rejected and never ask the same person twice. We do not have a cultural norm of asking for dances at bus stops, and we don’t have a cultural norm of writing distillations. So at the very least, you should carefully vet the proposed distillation with the original author and be super clear on why, in each specific case, it’s OK for you to be producing one.
Do you have a particular story that shows the types of negative outcomes that could happen? While it’s not impossible for me to imagine an overly sensitive academic getting angry or annoyed unreasonably, at a distillation, it hardly seems to me like it would be at all likely. I have fairly high confidence in my understanding of academic mindsets, and a single sentence at the top “this is a summary of XYZ’s work on whatever” with a link would in almost all cases be enough. You could even add in another flattering sentence, “I’m very excited about this work because… I find it super exciting so here’s my notes/attempt at understanding it more”
Generally, academics like it when people try to understand their work.
Yes. I posted the description of the aging distillation project I described above on the AskAcademia subreddit, and was met with a firestorm of downvotes and strident claims from multiple respondants that it would be plagiaristic/stealing, and that I was obviously unfit to be a graduate student for even considering it.
One important caveat is that I originally posted that I was going to “publish” this essay, which many respondants seem to have initially taken as meaning “publish in a peer reviewed journal, passing the ideas and structure off as my own.” But even after updating the OP and specifically addressing that point in numerous replies, respondants generally continued to see the idea as a form of intellectual theft and of making no useful contribution to the reader.
It’s entirely possible that my initial post grabbed the attention of a couple redditors who are a few SDs from the mean in terms of sensitivity to plagiarism concerns, and that they got so fired up about that possibility that they couldn’t really make a distinction between the scenario they had imagined I was proposing and what I actually intended to do. But I think the more likely explanation is that a lot of academics would see a thorough rewrite of a specific source in new language as a form of intellectual laziness/theft, even with proper citations, and that people almost never do this for that exact reason. Up close, it might not be plagiarism, but from a distance, it sure looks like it. You have to do a lot of explaining to show why it’s maybe not plagiarism. Even if you convince one person, they might even still feel pressured to accuse you of plagiarism, because otherwise it looks like they’re being soft on crime. And even if not, they might still think you’re a fool for provoking a potentially ugly controversy, and want to distance themselves from you.
There are probably ways to do distillations that avoid this sort of issue, but I think anybody planning to do it ought to have a carefully thought-through plan for how they’re going to avoid accusations of plagiarism. Distillation of a single source is an unconventional format. Conventional formats—the book review, the summary, etc—exist because we, as a culture, have carved out a set of generally acceptable ways for people to respond to the works of other authors. Distillations aren’t really one of them (correct me if I’m wrong and you can point to sources on things like “how to write a distillation” from the wider world). When people write academic works, they might expect a review, a piece of science journalism, or whatever, but not that some stranger will come along and try to write a “distillation” of their entire paper and publish it online. And they might be pissed off to have their expectations violated.
By analogy, it’s a person deciding that since dancing is fun and healthy and they believe in “ask culture,” it’s OK for them to walk up to strangers at the bus stop and ask them to dance. It’s a weird thing to be asked, people will be confused about your motives and get anxious, and you shouldn’t be surprised if you quickly develop a reputation as a creep even if you always politely walk away when you get rejected and never ask the same person twice. We do not have a cultural norm of asking for dances at bus stops, and we don’t have a cultural norm of writing distillations. So at the very least, you should carefully vet the proposed distillation with the original author and be super clear on why, in each specific case, it’s OK for you to be producing one.