You’ve probably come across phrases like "we have measured for the first time..." in almost every one of her papers, or the classic line "Since the discovery of high-Tc superconductivity..."—those staples that have been hanging around forever. And don’t get me started on the closing paragraph, where co-workers and anyone with even the slightest influence on the research get a repetitive shout-out.
If you were to run this through a plagiarism checker, you’d definitely get a list of red flags. But is it really plagiarism? Or is it that fancy term, "self-plagiarism"?
Hold on a second.
When you’re doing experimental physics, there’s the hands-on work in the lab, the data analysis, the modeling… and then comes the writing. The awkward English? That’s just the packaging. The science? It’s there, buried under the prose—sometimes clear, sometimes not, but the writing itself isn’t the science.
That’s a whole different game in the humanities, though. In fields like social science the arguments, the phrases, the words are the science. Every word, every sentence matters.
So here a plagiarism-check could discover laziness, lack of work-ethics, plagiarism. In natural sciences you might want to dig deeper.
In a world of instant reactions and drama-culture, it’s worth taking a moment to pause.
And really, you should. Inhale. Like, four times a minute.
(And don't forget to exhale.)
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