Hi Steemians! Lately I have been reading up on a lot of scientific posts with the steemstem-tag. I noticed that there is a lot of plagiarised content. There are also many posts which fail to clearly indicate that their methodology/examples are taken from scientific literature. Although the latter case is not as unethical as the first, the latter post type does give the appearance that the presented methodology/examples are original work which is false. In this post I will explain why citations are important and how you can improve your citations and help others.
Why citations are required
So how can the scientific community on steemit deal with these problems? Just use the same method that the scientific community uses: when facts are presented give proof/evidence or citations. More specifically, if an article is portrayed as scientific then for any fact a proof/evidence should be supplied or a citation should be given. For the steemit community it is not very important to know how to properly present proof/evidence for fact since most of the scientific content on steemit is derived from scientific literature. Thus I will restrict this post to citations. The main reasons for citations is that they uphold intellectual honesty, in the sense that the right sources are given credit, but it also counters plagiarism since most scientific content is identifiable by their reference list.
How to do proper citations
Many posts have a reference list at the end. From a scientific point of view this by itself is not very helpful. Since a scientist always wants to check the validity of any statement. A reference list does not couple a statement to a reference. So in scientific articles when a fact is presented a citation is directly given. Typically this is done as follows:
A is true [1].
References
[1] A. Man, why A is true, Journal of A 10, 19-20 (2018)
It usually differs a bit how specific scientific communities write their references. In [1] I adopted the mathematics style referencing. But this is not so relevant. What is important is that when giving a reference is that you are as precise as possible in giving the location where the fact can be found. In doing so individuals can check your work. Exact location means in the case of a book/journal that you present page numbers. In the case of long web-content it is advisable to present the relevant section. Of course, if you are you presenting a re-telling of an example or methodology from the scientific literature you should also give a reference. Preferably you should do this at the start of your re-telling.
When are citations not required
There is one part of all science which does not require a reference which is when you are dealing with terminology. For example, if I would present you the definition of the derivative then I am not required to give you a reference where the definition of the derivative can be found. Similarly, if in physics I would be talking about momentum then I can just define it without giving a reference. The only exception here is when a certain terminology has recently been introduced then you should credit its creator by presenting the reference.
There is another part where citations are not required which is when certain knowledge is considered trivial or basic. This is a slighly grey area since trivial/basic is dependent on the situation. For example, if you write an article for experts then you do not have to explain the basics and you do not have to present any reference when using basic facts. But if you are writing for a general audience it might be a good idea to present a reference for these basic facts or at least clearly indicate that they belong to realm of basic knowledge.
How can scientific content on steemit improve
All scientific authors on steemit should do citations conform to the standards of the scientific world. But besides that we, the readers, should also point out to authors when proper citations are missing or when a post is not intellectually honest. For sake of transparency this should be done in the comment section since if the author does not make the correct adjustments this will affect his/her reputation. And consequently, it will also influence the value of his/her post. By doing this, you are rewarding scientific integrity and improving the quality of the scientific content on steemit.
Sources
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