Avoiding plagiarism
In college, plagiarism is a dirty word. Most schools threaten expulsion for this offense, regardless of how it occurred. In the word of writing, plagiarism is also a huge concern, as it can cost firms and authors a lot of money for copyright infringement. The problem is that plagiarism is not always intentional, though that matters very little in realms of legal and public opinion.
You’ll hear the word “internalizing” a lot when dealing with plagiarism. Interalizing means that you read something, converted it into your own understanding, and then adopted it as your own. You don’t remember that you read it somewhere else, so when you use it, you have no idea that it’s actually plagiarism. I’ve seen this happen many times with published authors. I’ve also seen it in other venues: television shows that have almost the exact same plot and outcome, even stand up comedians who use the exact same jokes with the exact same punchlines. What can you possibly do?
People often ask me, “what do you think of such and such a JavaScript book?” I always reply the same way: “I haven’t read it.” Some may think it’s stupid not to read your competition, I see it as a matter of self-preservation. If I don’t see that book’s examples and explanations, there’s no way I can internalize it and there’s no way I can write it, have it published, and open up myself and my publisher to copyright infringement cases. The most I will do is scan the table of contents for competitor’s books. From that, I can get a good idea of the topics without risking the internalization of the methods in which these topics are covered.
When it comes to writing technical books, you need to be able to trust that you know what the best examples are, the best way to describe something, and the best way to tie points together. There’s no need to look for inspiration elsewhere.
Disclaimer: Any viewpoints and opinions expressed in this article are those of Nicholas C. Zakas and do not, in any way, reflect those of my employer, my colleagues, Wrox Publishing, O'Reilly Publishing, or anyone else. I speak only for myself, not for them.
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8 Comments
Nicholas,
Interesting point of view, but I have a question. Where can an author get the initial, original information? Where is the root of the knowledge? Specifications only? I am in doubt. And when one is reading specification it is also a kind of internalizing. Yes the more I am reading technical books, the more I like specifications. But it’s only because every so often the people writing the books don’t spend enough time to "internalize" the subject they are writing about properly. On the other hand the plain fact is that nobody have enough time now (and which is more important just too much intellectual power) in the rapid and unceasing technologies evolution process, to reinvent all the wheels by oneself. There are always some interesting and better ways to do things, to present things, to explain something. Of course when one writing a book it means he or she have something to talk about, some original or just well explained ideas. But there is always some sort of internalizing present during the process of gaining knowledge. If not books, then articles, blog posts, just casual phrases which you’ve heard from colleagues during solving some real world problems at your workplace. Well my idea is let’s internalize!!!
, just internalize it right and be sure you understand the ideas properly. If I don’t have a feeling that the subject I’m talking about is expressed in my own ideas, so probably I don’t understand it deeply enough. I need to "internalize" i.e. to convert information into my own inner perception level to understand things. 
. So my question is: what is your source of information?
Of course plagiarism matters for publishers but I think it doesn’t matter for readers at all. A reader doesn’t care where you got your ideas as long as what you are talking about is true. On the contrary, the more an author “internalizes" ideas expressed regarding the subject, the more it is beneficial for his readers. How an author can be sure he or she explains things properly or just competent enough if he or she hasn’t read ALL available materials about the subject? In my opinion without some sort of "internalizing" no progress is possible.
Maybe I am wrong or just mixing different concepts slightly but my main point is: there is not too much plagiarism in the venue of IT technical books, there are too many incompetent writers. With the exception of you of course
Alexei on October 28th, 2006 at 9:30 am
Plus, as we all know, you can barely read.
Jeny on October 28th, 2006 at 3:01 pm
Alexei – there’s a difference between learning something and internalizing it. Internalizing it means that you think it’s your own. The natural way we learn is to take some information and put it into some sort of form that makes more sense to us. This is what I do when I write. Internalizing means that I took someone else’s description/example/etc. and somehow managed to forget that it came from that other person, claiming it as my own. This is not acceptable and is plagiarism.
Where do I get my information? From lots of specifications, yes, but also from my own experience. I’ve been developing for the web for about ten years and have been exploring the limits of a browser-based experience for almost as long. Combining specs with experience provides a lot of information. And yes, I’ve gone back and read ECMA-262 several times to figure things out.
Of course, I do read blog posts and articles, but in that case I try to give credit where it’s due. That’s the difference. If I use the same wording, the same example, the same description, I am legally (and some would argue morally) bound to cite the source and give the author credit. The difference between articles/blog posts and books is that the former is not in competition with me for sales. It would look weird to be reading a book and have it cite something from a competing book, wouldn’t it? To prevent myself from needing to do that, I just don’t read the other books. Make sense?
Nicholas C. Zakas on October 28th, 2006 at 11:46 pm
Yes, Nicholas. Thanks for clarifications.
Alexei on October 29th, 2006 at 12:20 pm
This is exactly the reason why I haven’t opened Pro. Ajax, or any other book, for a new chapter in Beginning JavaScript. The last thing I want to do is use someone else’s words, whether I know it or not, to describe code, concepts, etc. It’s the safest route, as far as I’m concerned.
Jeremy on November 3rd, 2006 at 10:51 pm
It’s interesting that you start with an academic analogy, but suggest a solution that’s thoroughly un-academic. While students need to be on guard against plagiarism (which is usually more the result of laziness than accident), serious thinkers and researchers in any field need to read widely, expose themselves to vast quantities of information and a wide variety of different ideas, and then come to their own understandings. The idea, of course, is that in order for us to get anywhere as human beings, we need to understand what’s come before and build on it. (I’d quote Newton’s "shoulders of giants" here, but it’s well known that he used that comment as an ironic attack on the dimunuitive stature of an opponent.) While I agree that authors need to be cautious and honest in order to avoid plagiarism, I’d argue that the root of all knowledge is "internalizing and expanding." (See: .NET’s relationship with Java.)
In my opinion, the best way to defend against plagiarism is to have something that you *really* want to say. For example, I doubt you’ll be seduced into copying someone else’s JavaScript text if you have your own brilliant ideas to contribute (which undoubtedly you do). However, you just might learn a few new tricks or a betting coding practice, and if you improve your work as a result, the whole community benefits. This applies to complimentary texts as well–I know I’ve learned a huge amount of information from leading security authors like Bruce Schneier. Although I’ll never write a comparable book, the security knowledge I’ve gained definitely enters my programming books (as I’m sure Bruce would want). After all, it’s a supreme compliment to any writer when his work can be useful and improve the overall standard of discourse in a field. Obviously, Bruce doesn’t want me to copy his book, but the defence of ignorance–I may write on security, so I won’t read it–seems dangerously counter-productive.
That’s from the author’s perspective, but what about the reader? Just think–how would you feel if you went to have open heart surgery tomorrow and the doctor confided to you that he wasn’t sure if his practices were the best because he refused to read other people’s research on the subject? It’s a silly example, but it has a point–as a reader of technical books, I want the one from an expert who’s learned from the community, not just the projects that he may have created to suit his own idiosyncratic vision. My conclusion: if you want to write the best book, don’t be afraid to be exposed to ideas–just be honest in your writing, ask critical questions ("where does this book come up short?" and "what is a reader wondering right now" and "what about..?" work great), and don’t get lazy!
Matthew MacDonald on November 8th, 2006 at 9:56 am
Matthew – you make some very good points, though I can’t agree 100%. If you wanted to write the best murder mystery book ever and then went out and read 100 of the best murder mystery books that currently exist, I’d be shocked if there weren’t aspects of some of those books in the final result. Take the case of Kaavya Viswanathan, the Harvard student turned author whose book was widely acclaimed as brilliant…until it turned out that it was brilliant because it contained situations and writings from several other well-received books. Then, she lost her book deal and all printings were pulled from the shelves.
I would also argue that there is a difference between people who want to learn about a topic to use it in their daily life (your surgeon example) versus people who want to learn about it so they can write about it. Certainly, using new techniques in your work is very important, and I hope to help people to do that through my writing. When I was first learning JavaScript, I read all the books on the topic that I could find, but I learned even more through experience building applications and discussions with other developers, ultimately arriving at a book outline that I thought was both unique and informative…explaining what I I knew.
I’d also like to point out that learning from the community isn’t relegated to books. You can learn many interesting things from conferences, other developers you work with, and even people who leave comments on your blog.
The medium for information transmission is people, not books (books are just an extension of people).
And as I said, I don’t ignore other books on the topic. I do scan over the table of contents to see what topics are covered. If I were writing about a complementary technology, perhaps HTML or CSS, I would definitely dive into all the JavaScript books out there. Your example is completely valid, I would love it if someone quoted me in a book on a complementary topic. However, if you were writing a book in direct competition with the one from which you got the ideas, how does that make you look? I’ve seen it happen before, with an author’s outline proposal look eerily similar to a book already on the market, including the order of topics and the examples being used. I think readers are savvy enough that they read more than one book on a topic when they want to learn something and also that they’re savvy enough to pick up things that are too similar (that’s how Viswanathan got caught, afterall).
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not paranoid that when I read something I turn into a manic plagiarist who has no control over what’s being typed. However, I prefer to keep my reading to articles and blog posts, coupled with conversations with intelligent programmers and attending conferences, for topic-specific information. At least that way, it’s fairly obvious to me where I got the information. Reading an anthology of information, it’s easy to lose track of where you learned something (or did you come up with it on your own?).
Nicholas C. Zakas on November 8th, 2006 at 1:33 pm
I’ve also seen "eerily similar" books–in fact, I remember browsing through one in a bookstore that had a large part of the text from one of the ASP.NET quickstart tutorials. I didn’t need to have my computer handy to recognize the word-by-word transcription, and I’m sure it wasn’t just "internalization."
In the case of Viswanathan, I’d point out that her publisher called her excuse was "deeply troubling and disingenuous" and argued that it was "inconceivable" that the nearly identical passages in her books could have been anything other than deliberate out-and-out theft. (Read them on Wikipedia, and I think you’ll agree–I know I do.)
As for writing the greatest mystery novel of all time, perhaps reading 100 mystery novels would suffocate you with other people’s ideas–or perhaps not. (It certainly worked for poets like Milton and Keats, who preceded their work with expansive reading campaigns that greatly enriched the works they eventually produced.) Either way, it’s up to you, the author, to find that unique thing that you want to say, to learn everything there is to know, and then find the missing piece that isn’t already out there.
From my perspective, "internalization" is really just another word for "learning"–it’s what we all need to do, and it certainly can’t excuse plagiarism. Lazy authors are in danger of regurgitating anything they learn without adding value, whether it’s pages from a book, notes from a conference, someone else’s code from the Web, and so on. I’m sure you’ll agree that the plagiarized books you’ve seen haven’t been particularly good books anyway–usually, they’re just shabby copies and the author has no real idea of what the reader actually wants. I’m still convinced that "accidental" plagiarism seldom is.
Matthew MacDonald on November 8th, 2006 at 3:12 pm
There is a very fine line between internalizing and learning. As I said in a previous comment, learning involves taking something and applying it in a context that makes sense to you. Internalizing applies something in the same way in which is was presented to you without your recognition. Both are fairly common, only one is plagiarism.
Undoubtedly there is intentional plagiarism, I have no doubt about that. But whether intentional or not, the damage is still the same. Viswanathan’s case was strange, and I don’t think we’ve been heard everything that really went on (lots of stuff about a packaging company and everything else), however, it just accents my point that plagiarism will most likely be surfaced if/when it occurs.
And lazy authors do make for bad books, and I certainly don’t consider myself lazy. I do, however, know my own mind. I have a certain knack for remembering facts without remembering where I picked them up. I can recite quotes without knowing who said them or what book they’re from or whether it was Yoda or Mr. Miyagi who said it. Sometimes, I tell stories to the friend who told it to me first. I have trouble like that. I do admit that it’s a bit extreme, but the best I know how to keep my mind in check is not to expose it to examples and descriptions that are written by the competition because I, perhaps moreso than others, am more prone to internalizing. This is my defense mechanism to cover myself.
That being said, before I ever wrote my first book, I had read nearly every book on the topic. Part of the reason I decided to write it was because they all seemed to stop at the same place and I wanted to go further (it turns out, other people wanted to as well). After that, other books started appearing that went further as well. I like to think that I helped spur that, but I know that it was really the popularity of Ajax that caused other authors to start writing again. But the thing is, they were only covering topics I had already written about (I know because I looked at their tables of contents), so I had no reason to read how they represented the techniques that I felt I had already explained in the most appropriate way possible.
The bottom line is, I trust myself to know what is best when writing. I don’t stop learning or exploring the technologies that I write about, I just try to avoid competing books that cover the same topics. I stick to specifications, knowledge bases, blog posts, articles, my own experience, and discussions with other developers. Is it possible to internalize that stuff? Of course, but I’ve found it far less likely to happen because these sources are more specific and topical than an entire book on a subject.
Nicholas C. Zakas on November 9th, 2006 at 12:26 am
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