個人在科研職業活動中的行為表現

    Some types of bad practice seem to do their best to avoid giving credit to other workers. Others, however, which are strangely more common and subtle, seem to arise from the fact that we all would like to be credited with something innovative. Thus often one sees: "similar work has been done before by X, but in that work they did not consider Y" in a context where: the work concerned is very new, interesting, has great potential, etc...; the author developed it independently; the author finds that someone else has also developed this, and already published it. There then emerges the temptation to find some differences between the author's and the already published work, and to claim (implicitly!) that these are substantial. I think this happens so much that a significant minority seem to accept it as acceptable practice. Well it isn't. Don't say this: "Smith et al (06) have published a new crossover operator based on similar notions to ours, but our formulation is much more general and we consider more realistic problems." Say this: "Smith et al (06) have independently published essentially the same idea. In their case they test a form. of it suitable for bin-packing problems, while in our case we adopt a straightforward generalisation of the operator that enables us to apply it to constrained spanning tree problems."

     試著翻譯一下。寫文章時容易犯的一個錯誤就是鄙視他人的科研結果，或者說弱化別人科研結果的重要性......因此人們經常說：“X曾經做過類似的工作， 但是他沒有考慮到Y”。如果我做的工作，別人已經發表過了，或者非常類似的idea。那么我很可能會找出某些不同出來，并且聲稱這些不同時非常重要的工 作。......所以，不要說：“Smith 等人(06)已經發表過一篇新的交叉操作的文章，文中的觀點跟我們的觀點非常類似，但是我們的公式更具有一般性，而且我們考慮了更加真實的問題。”  而應該這么說：“Smith 等人(06)已經獨立發表了本質上一樣的觀點。他們的實驗表明這個觀點適用于裝箱問題，而我們則采用了操作器的直接推廣，這個推廣使的它可以用到約束生成 樹問題上去。”