I posted a highly-upvoted answer on Skeptics Stack Exchange based upon numerous Chronicling America database newspaper quotations, and chatted in comments about this with a psychology professor.
The professor, listing himself as sole author, then submitted an article with highly overlapping c...
@ShakeBaby he put his name and article on Stack Exchange himself (in his own answer skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/38606/… to the question I answered on SkepticsSE). I'm not adding for the first time here.
If the article is linked to the question, I don't see how omitting the name from the question actually changes much. I can see why the question should be broader, and wonder whether the appropriate action was to unlink the article as well, and simply leave the question as rhetorical rather than a specific case? In any case, I would say, no, it sounds highly unethical.
@FredDouglis But without the article, the question is very vague. And the professor himself posted the link to the article on Stack Exchange. I want to get accurate advice about this actual situation.
Well, I think the general rule of StackExchange is to be broad, not specific. Not so much "does this article violate ethical standards" as much as "if someone did X, would it violate ethical standards". I actually don't have a problem with linking to the article, but I was saying that removing the name while leaving the link doesn't accomplish much. And my comment that it seemed unethical was based on the general claim, not the specific case (I did not read the SE thread or article).
See the bottom of the page: user contributions are licensed under a Creative Commons license that requires attribution - if not attributed, this would be a no-no.
@JonCuster But is his article different enough that attribution is not required? Could he reasonably say he was merely inspired by my answer and comments, but the similarity does not rise to the level of needing a citation?
I'm not going to go over the two to determine. Ultimately it is your call. If it were a question of referencing a paper or not, that same decision should be applied to something seen elsewhere.
I edited this question to remove all identifying information. The question stands as-is and doesn't need to call anyone out specifically. Also, please do not engage in edit wars, as doing so will result in the question being locked.
@anonymous the professor's article specifically says that the database searches were conducted on "June 7, 2017" which is after I posted my answer (on June 5th by US time).
Hi all, Marco Del Giudice here. I started researching the new paper as soon as I got involved in the StackExchange discussion, i.e., June 6. For some time now, I've been following the research on color preferences and thinking of writing an update; after I posted my answer, I though that was the perfect occasion to redo the Ngram search on the new Google database. I also checked out Chronicling America and performed my own search and extraction of quotes, all on June 7th (as the StackExchange discussion was still ongoing). Details of the search are reported in the letter.
Honestly I don't see where the plagiarism charge comes from, and I'm a bit disturbed by this reaction. What happened is that we searched the same database and got some of the same hits in return. That is not plagiarism--I did not take any portion of text out of the StackExchange discussion, or lifted any original ideas from there. In the letter I acknowledged all my sources for the quotes (Chronichling America, Wikipedia, and Google Ngram). Also note the the letter is mostly about cross-cultural, developmental, and evolutionary work on color preferences.
At some point in the previous discussion (link below), @DavePhD flatly accused me of "denying" finding any hits for a certain search phrase; as I explained in my response, the difference was that I had used the 2009 Ngram database while DavePhD had used the 2012 one. To me, the tone of DavePhD's comments suggests a certain animosity, which I really don't understand (I was trying to be as cooperative as possible). skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/38606/…
Anyway: below is a link to my ASEB letter. Anyone can read it, read the StackExchange discussion, and make up their mind about whether I plagiarized anything there. To repeat, what happened was that we searched the same database and got some of the same quotes in return. If there's any stretch of text or original idea that I included in my letter without quotation, I will be more than happy to acknowledge it in a correction to the manuscript. researchgate.net/publication/…
@MDG I said, not knowing at that point that you were Del Giudice himself, "Del Giudice denies finding any hits for 'blue for girls' ". But it is true that your 2012 paper specifically said " 'blue for girls' ... not found in the corpus". You were talking about yourself in third person, and at least the physics Stack Exchange, I don't know about other SEs, has a policy against anonymous self promotion of publications.
I had no idea about that policy--anyone can say they are anyone else while commenting on the Internet, which is why I avoided the first person and provided a third-person account of what the paper was about. I guess the follow-up kind of defeated the purpose ;-)
Discussion on question by DavePhD: Wh…
Discussion on question by DavePhD: Wh…