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adrian_btoday at 4:59 PM0 repliesview on HN

I do not agree that the thesis of point 2 is about plagiarism.

Plagiarism is a minor concern in research papers. Plagiarism means that the paper has 0% new content and everything in it is extracted from older works and combined.

However, even very valuable research papers may have only 1 new idea or only a few new ideas, which can be applied only together with a much greater amount of old knowledge, which might be mentioned explicitly in the paper, with proper attribution, enabling the reader to search the original sources, or the necessary old knowledge may be implicit, the writers assuming it to be known by the readers.

It is important that the writers should not imply that some old idea is new, by omitting to attribute it, but much more important is that when they mention some ideas as being old, they must also provide sufficient information about the sources of those old ideas, so that the readers will be able to access them.