Good Enough to Copy-Not Good Enough to Reference. Best Practice in Research and Writing

 

It has become apparent to us that within the last few years or so many of the themes of this blogsite have served to inspire a number of people with a springboard with which to imitate some of our content and ideas.

An inevitable part of increasing popularity it seems is that some people, who appear to be struggling to formulate original ideas of their own, and some of whom seem to lack in-depth historical knowledge, have seen fit to poach themes, thoughts, theories and original research from this blogsite, and then attempt to imitate the content of our articles for their own gain. The attitude seems to be, ‘it’s only a blog ´so I can pinch ideas and themes ´la-carte’. The theories and ideas within ‘Porthkerry Castle and the Legend of Castle Rock’ for example seem to be a particular favourite.

(Image credit, Trinity College)

As a result, with the most blatant cut and paste offenders, we have on a number of instances have had the necessity to take legal advice. This is not something that we have enjoyed doing and we feel sad that it has come to this, but we have worked dammed hard to make this blog, and our books a continuing success. We also have many more plans for the future that involve our work, so will come down hard on anyone who is brazen enough to copy and paste our work or poach our ideas and research in whole or in part.

We feel that it needs to be stressed that the vast majority of articles on this blogsite are original compositions-i.e., ideas, themes and theories that no one (to our knowledge) has composed or published before. Our writing was inspired by the dissertation process that we undertook in university, i.e., a research project encompassing original ideas and theories.

Because our work is free to read does not make it OK to copy our ideas and themes. Trawling through Google, and in particular our blogsite, and pinching our ideas and content does NOT constitute proper original research. Asking questions, examining primary sources, thinking critically and formulating theories does. This is what we do.

The very first thing that was stressed to us in university in regard to writing was the seriousness of plagiarism (an expellable offence) and proper academic practice in regard to research and referencing. We appreciate that not everyone has studied history at a high level but the moral message should be obvious to all-theft is theft, and theft is morally wrong.

We do not copy the ideas and work of others. We respect other people’s hard work, themes and intellectual property.

There are many themes that we would love to write about, for example, we would love to write in-depth about the (alleged) Battle of Stalin Down, the enigma of Bovium Roman Fort and the fascinating character that was Iolo Morganwg to name a few, but we realise that to do so would be to tread a very well-worn path and essentially be emulating the industry and work of others, which if done without citation or credit is utterly ignoble, and even if references are given there is zero (to us at least) merit in regurgitating the work and ideas of others. That is not what this blogsite and our books are about. As stressed, most of our articles are research driven and are original in composition as we are academics, historians and researchers.

Even if we do choose to write about a well-worn theme, which we occasionally do, we will only do so if we feel that we can add something new or update it and will give anyone whose ideas, work or theories we have used full credit.

Ultimately, intellectual theft amounts to bad practice and is ugly, ignoble and dishonest.

We of course have no problems if people wish to share our articles on social media etc and are always humbled that people find our work interesting, all we ask is that we be given credit for our compositions. 

Although we still do publish history articles on this blogsite we no longer feel that we can post extensive and well researched articles for free or provide history on your doorstep as once we did and instead tend to save most of our ideas, of which we have many, some populist and some more esoteric, for written publications.

So, if you dear reader happen to be 'on the make' and are reading our blogsite with the ignoble intention of mining it for new ideas and themes then be warned, we will catch up with you.