Pacharapol Withayasakpunt

Posted on Jul 17, 2020

What do you think about double publication?

#discuss #watercooler #writing #plagiarism

As it is probably a no in some academic communities, especially in research, such as medicine. (You can do things like translating your own papers, but you have to be careful.)

It doesn't have to be exact duplicate, even minor edit, or translation, can be viewed as self-plagiarism.

It makes you have more papers than you should, at least.

What about blogging, popularizing yourself, and SEO?

Top comments (15)

michelemauro • Jul 17 '20 • Edited

Why should be a problem? different sites often cater to different audiences, so it can happen that the same content in two places reaches two disjoint set of people.

As others already brought up, there are the tools to explicitly mark the content as it is (primary source, repost, and such) so SEO is a solved problem.

Research and academia have other standards because by publishing you claim priority and ownership. If your content is made for diffusion and not for a priority claim, those are not your concerns.

Pacharapol Withayasakpunt • Jul 17 '20 • Edited

I see. It is important to delineate the purposes.

In Research and Academia, it is made primarily for cataloging for the future, therefore cannot allow duplicate by nature, also never throwaway.
- Actually, reaching the audience is not always the primary purpose. Audience should try to reach, or even buy, or translate if possible, if it matches their review criteria (for example, Systematic Reviews.)
In general writing, it is made for PR (public relations), therefore reaching the audience is the primary concern. Duplication and being viral are their nature. It can even be throwaway, or valid only for some time period, sometimes.
- Indexing and permanent resourcing are actually secondary. However, proper indexing may help reach more audience over a longer period of time.
In both, it is about the author credit, but in research and academia, it is also heavily countable as a product (i.e. having 2 always mean having 100% more than 1), therefore, the author will unduly earn more credit, and that lead to ethical concerns.

michelemauro • Jul 17 '20

Well... that's a through summary. Much more through that I could even think. You're thinking about it really deeply, indeed.

Zen • Jul 17 '20

If you have two publication online (like blog) in same content, the original content (in Google eye) is the first. The other is duplicate.

So, we often watch contents in Dev is repost from author's blog.

Pacharapol Withayasakpunt • Jul 17 '20

Via createdAt timestamp? Can it be faked / modified?

Avalander • Jul 17 '20

You can use canonical urls to tell search engines that two or more urls refer to the same content.

Zen • Jul 17 '20

Thanks.

Pacharapol Withayasakpunt • Jul 17 '20

@avalander

But if I want to set canonical url on dev.to, and link to my blog instead?

Michael Burrows • Jul 17 '20 • Edited

dev.to supports canonical URLs so you can share content without impacting SEO.

For example if you view this post of mine here.

Notice at the top of the article is says "Originally published at michaelburrows.xyz " and if you view the page source you'll see the canonical URL points to the URL of the article on my website.

When creating a new post you just need to input the canonical URL.

This tells Google who should be credited as the original source of the article.

Pacharapol Withayasakpunt • Jul 17 '20 • Edited

Actually, I am trying to do the opposite, migrating from dev.to to my blog.

I can find "Post options", but the wanted "Originally published at" does not appear.

This is another one, and I did originally publish in my blog, but forgot to put in a canonical URL.

Michael Burrows • Jul 17 '20 • Edited

Yeh, it doesn't seem to display "Originally published at" for older posts.

However if you view the source code of your article you can see the canonical URL is pointing to your website.

Grant Riordan • Apr 15 '23

Sorry for late post, when wanting to post a canonical link post , do you still need to copy and paste the article content as a post on DevTo from your blog.

But just make sure you add the canonical link ?

If you originally posted on DevTo, and then want to put these blogs on your personal newly created site. How would you do that, simply link to Dev To or copy and paste the article onto your blog making sure have a canonical link tag to DevTo ?

Sorry for all the questions. Just trying to understand the process. I want to create my own blog / portfolio site. However reach more audience through my following in DevTo too.