FYI, the actual title is "Nobody cares about your blog!" - pretty big difference from what is shown on HN
"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.
FWIW, I've run into this with preprints. I had a paper up on a preprint server, and it was under review for a while. In the meantime, I became aware of another paper that pretty clearly used my paper and an earlier closely related one (to the point that some of the language was the same), passing it off as original. When this came up, their response was pretty similar to that in the OP here: things not formally peer reviewed "don't count" and essentially don't exist (and presumably are fair game to plagiarize?).
The paper was eventually published and there's a paper trail, but I wonder how it will all play out.
How does one cite a blog in a publication? And how do you track it on Google scholar? Quite curious because this is the first time hearing about this - and as an academic it is quite interesting.
Any chance you have a link to Google scholar on the highest cited example?
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.
I did a little bit of poking around on Google Scholar, and while it shows me that I have a few dozen posts cited in academic papers, none of those posts show up as their own entry in the results.
At my school (bsc. applied computer science at fi.muni.cz about 13 years ago), we had a special course[1] where you learned that you need to cite anything important which you haven't come up with yourself and at the same time it's not trivial knowledge. Otherwise, you are basically deceiving readers (people will assume that you come up with something which you actually didn't) and you lower value/impact you make with your work (people can't follow through the sources). We were even asked to cite help menu or manual of an application as an exercise. Using google one can find similar guidelines about blogs in particular[2].
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.
You can cite anything whose veracity or authority can be established in some way.
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.
Once i was looking for a paper, to construct a list of interesting sources for a professor I was working for.
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.
You certainly should always acknowledge prior work, whatever the format even if it's just some scribbles on a napkin. If it doesn't qualify for a citation there are also acknowledgments sections.
This Carla Rossi seems to have quite the academic position, being the editor in chief of a journal and the director of a research center (https://www.receptio.eu/).
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?
>plagiarism as many publications in academia outsource a large amount of work to others (PhD students, for example)
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
They certainly do get credit, and working together is not even close to plagiarism. However, I've read plenty of papers where the "author" put front and center in news articles and the like was no more than the person managing and editorialising a group of PhD students which did the actual leg work. Everyone gets credited in some way but there is no way to know for sure that the author listed most prominently has personally read and verified all the sources.
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.
My intuition agrees with all you've written. But one possibility remains, and that is that our intuitions are wrong and the OP is purposefully lying to attack a target. The odds of this needs to be reassessed particularly in light of content-generating AI tools. Constructing years worth of plausible blog posts and comments to support your story is rather easy, now. It would be simple to copy the work of a target, insert it into a generated, plausible-looking blog, and claim IP theft. The email assertions are easy to fabricate (interestingly, if the OP can prove the existence of those emails, that would be better proof than the blog!)
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.)
Well in this specific case, internet archive validates that the content was there before the "work" by Carla Rossi.
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.
Hello!
I'm completely new to Hacker News, and did not know until just now that this conversation had been taking place here. I have been trying to keep up with developments on Twitter where I am @mssprovenance
If people have specific questions I'll try to answer them, but I do not want to speculate directly about people's motives etc.; if you look at the tweets, you'll see that I try to stick to the facts.
I should perhaps say that I am not a bot, and my blog is not monetized, so although I may earn some kudos for this episode, I have no prospect of financial gain!
My blog is not anonymous, and the world of medieval illuminated manuscripts is fairly small and close-knit, so most people in that specialist world know who I am.
The irony of the whole affair is that I am less bothered about the apparent plagiarism than about the way they treated me when I contacted them.
Hope you all had a lovely Xmas!
I can’t believe Rossi wouldn’t cite you or at least acknowledge you in some note in her publication! And to say the value of your blog is “nil” while copying your work (including your commentary) is beyond parody… Entitled academia strikes again!
Merry Christmas :), your blog is fascinating and I’ll read through some of the other posts too!
If I had to guess, I'd assume that's because properly citing would out her as not having done a bunch of the work she claimed to have done i.e. actual research.
Everything else reads like classic misdirection of someone caught red-handed.
Someone should post a link to the blog somewhere where the experts on the topic would see it. Like, if this was a machine learning blog, posting it on r/MachineLearning could destroy the offender’s academic reputation.
I wonder to what extent the assistant quoted in the post is writing things that Rossi would not? Maybe they’d agree, and maybe the lack of acknowledgment in the book speaks for itself, but I think it’s jumping the gun a bit to attribute things from this professor’s secretary to the professor herself. Presumably if you’re a professor’s secretary then part of your job when talking to journalists, etc, is making the professor and therefore the university look important.
It’s a shame the article didn’t have a comment directly from Rossi but maybe they tried to get one and failed.
That Twitter thread is above my paygrade, but NE's final sentence (addressed to three other people working in his field) is rather relevant to this discussion "If this cipher has already been discovered, let me know where so I can give credit."
I suspect the title of this article is going to get a lot of commenters who don't read the article.
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 "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.
She’s been in and around the University of Zürich since 2007[1]. No doubt she has the political capital to weather anything. Kevin Kruse got caught red handed [2] plagiarising and Princeton buried it[3].
Universities are political organisations before academic ones.
Academic community is in wide discussion about this story (it is juicy) and the response is uniform shock and horror. She’s absolutely not going to have a career in the very very near future.
It appears that the entire journal is fraudulent (stock photos for people who apparently work there).
Hmm. It looks like it wasn't buried, but investigated by two different bodies and no ill intent was found.
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.”
Lots of peer review papers refer to non peer review content. It's not wrong to refer to URI of note. Not to do so, this egregiously stinks of passing off others work.
Some software, such as gnu "parallels" requests peer review academics to cite use of their code, on an honour system. Sqlite is citable, if you search Google examples how are visible high in search return.
In my experience, journals are surprisingly (?) uninterested in these sort of things. The university will then just refer to the journal and reply that the claim of plagiarism must be fabricated as the journal would surely have done something.
I sold a line of high end r&d tools to university labs; they became engines to knock off each others work. The least ethical group of buyers I ever worked with!
The professor's "work" wasn't published through a university; She published the work as a company she directs.
"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've also had some interesting interactions between the academic world and my blog.
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.
I recently spoke at a conference, and had some interested audience members approach me after to discuss more. One said he really valued the content and asked if I had published a paper outlining the same. I replied that I had not, but I did write about it in a blog. He said, “Ah, that’s a shame,” and walked away.
It seems like the plagiarizing author was simply too arrogant to even consider a simple email outreach along the lines of, “Hi! We seem to share an interest here. Would you be willing to share what you have with me for my own work?”
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.
I suspect laziness was a factor. Too lazy to contact the blogger, maybe too lazy to record where they even got the images. They could be telling the truth about not knowing about OP's blog!
> "I regret to inform you that blogs are not scientific texts, published by academic publishers, so their value is nil!"
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.
An anecdotal observation: when an academic needs a personal assistant to manage their email it is because they have become better at the grant game than they were in their field.
> 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.
If you don’t like seeing this sort of thing, actually reach out to the organizations that Prof Carla Rossi is associated with. Let them know that this is not okay.
Nice work finding this indeed! This sounds like it could become a nice story for Coffeezilla. It's increasingly looking to me like it's an outright scam. Strange that it's for such low stakes as academic prestige, usually they go straight for the money.
I emailed everyone listed on that page with a link to the blog post.
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.
Web pages, blogs in eye of professor, are just exactly like your ancestors thinking that Native American are not human, so thier lands are open for grabs.
I don't know enough about academics to agree or disagree, but this passge gave me pause:
> 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.
Per other comments in the thread, Ms. De Santis might be imaginary and just a way to puff Ms. Rossi up. At the least, her portrait was a stock photograph on the staff page of RECEPTIO.
We're going through an epistemological crisis the likes of which haven't been seen since Europe went through the dark ages. (Disclaimer: I just wrote about this and submitted the essay on HN https://danielbmarkham.com/the-overlords-finally-showed-up/ )
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 agree with the author that nobody cares about whatever content you create, aside from your own marketing value and ability.
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).
You're conflating a lot of things here. The title of the original essay is "nobody cares about your blog" if I agree with the author in the sense he meant it, I'm not sure where the problem is. Likewise, "the author's blog comes up in the first Google results" is exactly the kind of industrialization I'm talking about.
Assuming positive intent, and that you're not a bot, thanks for the chance to clarify!
The title is a quote from the person who responded to him rudely, not a statement of his own opinion, he spends the entire article arguing against that person.
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.
Yes, I agree that the author that his work is important. I further agree that the sentiment expressed by his correspondent is common. Further, Google is just the first step in the internet repurposing machine. The tech is 20 years old. It drives newer industrial tech like the recent AI. All of it exists to gain a fractional value from thousands of sources rather than single source a work. The point here is not to research and cite a work, it's to scan and reassemble.
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.
The title here on HN should get corrected to at least include the quotation marks.
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.
Especially because lawyers should be the last thing they want involved here. It’s waived about as intimidation but is more threatening to them than the blogger. Whoever wrote that eating a pound of pride for breakfast every morning as they practice condescending sneers in the mirror. And may quite possibly be the academic assistant that plagiarized the blog in the first place gathering material for their boss.
If you care enough about something to write a blog about it, that means at the very least one person cares about your blog. And, like, that's enough. Also, once there are other people who care about your stuff, they most likely just won't tell you about it. (What's the last time you told a stranger online that you like their stuff?) So maybe there's some person out there who's just waiting to find your blog, read through all the posts, put you in their feedreader and always be excited when you put out something new, caring about your stuff quietly in the background.
I'm so sick of "higher" educational institutions pretending they're some bastions of professional knowledge. I continue to toy around with the idea of going back to school for a PhD, but then I talk to friends who are or have done that, and their experiences don't sound like anything that would be useful.
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.
From a bystander's perspective (I'm nowhere near a PhD, but have friends who are), I think there's value in learning academic rigor (which is what I think PhD does). I see it like learning to submit a high quality PR into a field of science. You learn to make sure everything you do is well-written, properly backed up, tested, verified, reviewed. There are just way too many ways for humans to come to the wrong conclusions, make unintentional assumptions, or miss alternative explanations. A highly passionate person without academic training is more likely to find themselves falling into these traps. (I'm sure there are notable exceptions). I think with all its flaws, PhD might be the last bastion, in principle, where you're trained to be insanely precise and pedantic. The reality is a lot messier than the ideal, but it's still a valuable pursuit.
I wasn't talking about humanities, I was talking about the general value of PhD in response to the parent. Don't know what exactly they study in humanities, but I guess at least some of it has to be done with high rigor and precision.
The point is that institutions are comprised of peers that validate one's work.
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.
Every system has flaws. That doesn't mean all systems are meaningless. It's easy to point out the flaws in a system; fixing them or proposing a new system with fewer flaws is much, much harder.
You have no idea, I’m only here myself to represent my boss’s condescending attitude and tone on whatever strikes his interest on HN on any given day.
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.
$10 per karma point. A bonus for every milestone of 100 and 1000 points. I trained on GPT-3 not long ago though so most of my posts these days are low effort curation of the output.
She was contacted via her email address at "RECEPTIO", the company she now directs. It's not clear whether she is still currently working as a professor, despite still using the title.
"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 title is a quote from a professor's assistant insisting that "blogs aren't real scientific publications". The (to me) blatant plagiarism of the blog author seems pretty awful, as does the insistence that the blog is "beneath their notice".
You really need to read the article. It's a quote. The blog piece is not a disquisition on irrelevancy, it's on academic theft and lack of recognition for "purloined writing"
Same, I blog as a record of stuff I’m researching because writing about it helps me organize thoughts and remember. I won’t remember for long though, so it works as a record for me as well. I think the stuff I research is really fascinating, though niche, and assume a few other people out there would be interested too. None of my local friends are as interested, so the global reach helps me chat about it with others. Finally, I also like the ethos of creating the kind of content you want to see on the Internet, so doing my little part.
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.
That could be the case for the author of the blog in question, and it would still be legitimate to take issue with someone passing off the work as their own.
Actually, quite a bit of people read my blog... Well maybe it's a lot of plagiarizing bots reading it too, but at least there is a lot of activity. It would be nice if I could make a living off of blogging without plastering ads everywhere (I don't). What's funny is that there are thousands of organic reads on my blog, but somehow the associated Twitter account has been stuck on 8 followers for the past 5 years.
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)
"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.