Subject:
Re: plagiarism and dead areas
From:
Bill Richter <richter@math.northwestern.edu>
Date:
Wed, 22 Dec 2004 21:16:05 -0600
To:
dmd1@lehigh.edu
CC:
claude@math.wayne.edu, tangora@uic.edu

   Claude Schochet <claude@math.wayne.edu>  wrote:

   2. On dead areas - I agree completely that this is a real
   problem. ... The trouble is that generally the person doing it
   means well - and frequently has no clue of the difficulty that it
   causes. Certainly it is a societal problem. 

Good, and think we agree: it's not an ethical problem.  The social (or
societal) problem I see is this: we have to agree, as a community,
that we'll be better off to get the bugs fixed.  It's really hard for
me to publish bug-fixes unless the folks who published the bugs will
admit they were bugs.  But what's in it for them?  Who wants to admit
to making mistakes?  What's needed is for us as a community to agree
that we'll all be better off when the field is up 'n running again.

I see I goofed about `plagiarism', which I thought meant me submitting
one of your papers, after white-out-ing your name and typing mine in.
That happens in the humanities a lot, but not in a small field like
ours.  But I see the AMS def of plagiarism is much more general:

   The knowing presentation of another person's mathematical discovery
   as one's own constitutes plagiarism 

That's much more common, but as you say, it's hard to prove even if
it's deliberate, and many times its an honest or semi-honest mistake.

Twice other folks took credit for my unwritten theorems, but there's
always arguments about which ideas were crucial.  And it's the sorta
thing that ought to even out.  It's bad business to steal valuable
theorem credits.  If I've shown I can create things of real value,
folks will probably want me to produce more goodies!  So the problem
(for me at least) had to do with the market value of my theorem
credits being low enough that it wasn't worth fighting over.