Some thoughts in the blogosphere:
Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science: Will blog posts get credit?
Robin Hanson writes at the Overcoming Bias blog expressing the worry that clever ideas that appear first in blog entries will get used, without credit, by academic researchers, thus leaving the original blog posters with no credit (and, ultimately, less motivation to post interesting new ideas). I’m of two minds on this.
Yes, it would piss me off immensely to see my ideas (or even worse, my exact words) used by others without full credit.
On the other hand, ideas are cheap. I’m reminded of a quote I once saw on one of those inspirational-sayings-for-every-day desk calendars: “To have ideas is to gather flowers. To think is to weave them into garlands.” Thinking is the hard work, and one of the fun things about blogging is that I can set out my ideas without having to think hard about them. So, yes, if you take an idea or sentence you see here, please credit me, but if you can take it further (to the level that it can appear in a scholarly publication), you deserve full credit for that.
To put it another way: every now and then, I see a published article and think: “I had that idea 10 years ago but never got around to writing it up.” But I’m sure that often when I publish an article, various readers have the same thought.
0 responses so far ↓
There are no comments yet...Kick things off by filling out the form below.
Leave a Comment