Monday, July 25, 2016

Plagiarism and a repeat invitation

I am occasionally asked whether I am not afraid that someone will steal ideas from my blog and publish them. I'm not. If the ideas get published by someone else, that saves me the trouble of writing them up myself. Hopefully they will give credit where credit is due and it won't be theft.

Moreover, I invite anybody competent who wants to coauthor a paper with me by starting with the ideas in a post, working out the details and writing up a first draft. (Check with me first before getting to work, though.) In the philosophical profession, coauthored papers count pretty much the same as single-authored, so plagiarizing would involve unnecessary risk for very minor benefit.

3 comments:

JoPo said...

I might take you up on this author someday! (Pun intended.)

Alexander R Pruss said...

Just to clarify, I'm not aware of any actual cases of plagiarism from me.

Miloš said...

Apart from plagiarism, do you have any data on how many times posts from blog are cited in philosophical articles (or books). I have seen several citations in Robert Koons's work on kalaam cosmological argument and one recent in paper ''Groupthink'' by John Hawthorne, Jeffrey Russell and Lara Buchak. That paper is anthologized in Philosophe's Annual!