Attitudes towards self-plagiarism

Question

I am planning to write several papers exploring various aspects of the same scientific question. Each of these papers must have an introduction which motivates it and explains the relationship between the problem and what others have studied in the past.

It would be fantastic if I could simply copy-and-paste the same introduction, or, at least, 90% of it. This seems to me to be ethically unproblematic. After all, I need to say the exact same things every time, and I certainly don't mind the self-plagiarism. Am I hurting the reader in any way? I suppose I might be, if the reader desired an introduction which consists of original material, but that is an odd desire, isn't it? Its the research, the stuff that follows the intro, that is original.

Sadly, I have gotten wind that the majority of the research community apparently does not agree with the sentiments expressed in the previous paragraph. This leads me here to ask a series of related questions:

1. To what extent is self-plagiarism in non-technical bits considered acceptable? I often see authors recycle paragraphs but I have never seen anyone cut-and-paste the entire section outright.

   I'd be particularly interested in learning whether norms on this vary across different scientific communities.

2. How often do scholars find themselves trying to same the same thing in different words to avoid self-plagiarism?

3. Supposing I insert a sentence to the effect of: "The introductory section 1.2 is taken verbatim from the author's earlier paper [1]." How likely are journal editors and reviewers to complain about this?

By the way, I am fairly certain they would be very likely to complain about a sentence to the effect of "We refer the reader to [1] for motivation to study this problem and a discussion of its relation to prior work."

Answer 1

Firstly, quoting any work, including your own, without explicit attribution of the quote, is going to earn you a very bad reputation for plagiarism sooner or later. Just say no.

Secondly, and to state the obvious, the introduction is there to introduce the rest of the paper. As each paper will be unique, so should the introduction be: the point is to lead the user into the paper, rather than to give a grounding in the whole subject area.

Thirdly, why not wrap up all of the things you want to say in all of the papers' introductions, into a single review paper? It would contain all of the literature review, motivations, unsolved problems, areas for future research, that you want to reference in your other papers. And then, those other papers can just briefly & concisely properly reference and quote the relevant bits of that review paper in their introduction. It won't be as brief as "for review and motivation, see my paper DOI:ABC.DEF.GHI", but you should be able to distil the review paper down to a paragraph or two for each subsequent paper, and those words will be unique for each subsequent paper, drawing only on the elements you need for that paper.

Answer 2

Typically, you will not write all of these papers simultaneously in parallel, but one after another. And each time you write a new paper related to the topic, you will have a learned a lot more, and you will have a much better idea of how to explain the setting, what are the right definitions, etc.

Therefore you have a very good reason to re-write your introduction for each paper, and tailor it for the specific question studied in this particular paper. And this way there is no risk of anyone accusing you of self-plagiarism.

Incidentally, this way you can even go as far as experiment with different ways of explaining the basic setting of your work, and see if you get different feedback... After all, your introduction is the most important part of your work from the marketing perspective, and it is not easy to get it right.

Answer 3

There is a very dangerous (for your career) issue here. If your papers are so similar that the same introduction could be repeated almost verbatim in each, it may be that the content of the individual papers don't represent a truly significant advance. As an obvious example, if you are just changing one parameter in your code and running it again, with no new analysis or insight, you will run into trouble and may even get banned from submitting to offended journals.

I realize this is not a direct answer to the question, but I think it may be useful to people interested in this question.

Answer 4

As a referee, I would not have problems with either way of referencing your previous paper. I would be more pissed off if I checked one of your earlier papers and found that a section was ripped off that without notice.

Answer 5

You should definitely cite everything you copy verbatim, no matter what. (I.e., you should say something like "the following background information is repeated nearly verbatim from Section 2 of BLAH", so the situation is unambiguous. It's not enough to cite the source without making the copying clear.)

To see why, note that there are four possible types of people:

1. People who think it is OK to copy your own text without citation, and think it is OK with citation.

2. People who think it is not OK without citation, but is OK with citation.

3. People who think it is not OK in either case.

4. People who think it is OK without citation and in fact you must not cite it.

I don't believe people of type 4 exist. This means you should always cite any text you copy (even if you wrote it in the first place). There's no way you can lose: people of type 2 require the citation, people of type 1 don't mind, and people of type 3 are a moot point since they don't want you to copy it in the first place.

In practice, I think a large majority of academics are type 2, but it really doesn't matter.

Answer 6

To what extent is self-plagiarism in non-technical bits considered acceptable? I often see authors recycle paragraphs but I have never seen anyone cut-and-paste the entire section outright.

There is no strict rule about that, apart from the fact that "the overlap between two papers must not be substantial". I think it's mostly a matter of content than size. For instance, if you were in your paper to reuse a technique/theory/tool that has been previously defined, by you or someone else. Then having a short section reintroducing the tool (for the sake of the self-containment of the paper) that is a copy/paste from another paper is OK. You found a nice and concise way to present a technique/theory/tool, there is no real need to reinvent it.

However, the introduction is quite different, because that's the part that motivates your paper, and present the results detailed in the paper. There is of course some high-level paragraphs/sentences that you can reuse (The need of general-appraoch is paramount in the context of general-problem because of general-reason), but somehow, if 90% of your introduction is the same than for another paper, then that probably means that either the 10% is not enough as a contribution alone (which doesn't seem to be the case) or that your introduction does not focus enough on why those 10% are important. If the major part of your 90% is background and related work, then move them to explicit sections.

I'd be particularly interested in learning whether norms on this vary across different scientific communities.

I couldn't speak for other communities, but something that is usually frowned upon (but many people still do it) in CS is "incremental research", where your next paper is just a small improvement of a previous paper of yours, and where your strategy from the beginning is to maximize the number of publications you can get from one idea, instead of trying to publish directly the full idea. In this context, self-plagiarism, especially in the introduction, could be seen as a blatant proof of incremental research.

How often do scholars find themselves trying to same the same thing in different words to avoid self-plagiarism?

Personally not that often, as I will mostly reuse "technical" parts, and try to write from scratch non-technical ones for each paper.

Supposing I insert a sentence to the effect of: "The introductory section 1.2 is taken verbatim from the author's earlier paper [1]." How likely are journal editors and reviewers to complain about this?

For the above reasons, I would complain about it: if your introduction is taken verbatim from another paper, then maybe the contribution of the paper I'm reviewing is not that novel. For background/related work section, I wouldn't bother mentioning that it's a copy/paste from another paper, however, I would certainly like to be directed to "full" version of the sections. Also, and that might be something field-specific, some submissions are double-blind, i.e., the reviewers are not supposed to know the identify of the authors, and obvious self-references are forbidden.

Answer 7

Imo self plagiarism is an absurd concept. Because the very name implies that you have stolen your own ideas. Which is impossible.

A lot of if not all of what gets labelled as self plagiarism should really be called academic dishonesty.

There is also a huge cultural divide here. In some countries/cultures reusing your own work is not only acceptable but is in fact encouraged. After all if I have already written an image manipulation library that utilises the gpu writing it again from scratch is absurd but updating it to support new gpu features, fixing bugs and releasing it under the gplv3 licese is of course very desirable.

If everything is properly cited (what constitutes a proper citation is again a cultural issue) I really don't see any issue with using this code for several courses if it is applicable to them.

Also if an academic institution allows students to take courses similar enough that copy&pasting things between them is viable such an institution is at least partially at fault too.

And then there is the whole semantic issue since self plagiarism is in many languages similar to theft from oneself or to self victimisation (how exactly am I a victim if I take some lsd (well eth-lad since it's better but whatever) and have a nice 10 hour long trip with some nice sensory and mental effects).

Answer 8

Recently, we submitted a paper to an IEEE Journal, the student in charge, apparently copied large parts of the text from a previous article we had in an IEEE conference.

We got a response letter from the editor that said something like this:

Every IEEE paper is checked for instances of plagiarism (including self-plagiarism), and we found that you made extensive use of copy-paste from your previous article BLA to write the current article BLA. I'm afraid I can't accept the paper with so much previously Published text.

Just a word of caution for these practices in IEEE Journals and Conferences

Answer 9

iThenticate has a white paper called The Ethics of Self Plagiarism. Within it are reasons not so self-plagiarise, namely copyright issues and the fact that some definitions of plagiarism include copying one's own work (which is contrary to other definitions).

They also go on to give guidelines on how to avoid self-plagiarism, which are helpful:

• Guideline 10: Authors who submit a manuscript for publication containing data, reviews, conclusions, etc., that have already been disseminated in some significant manner (e.g., published as an article in another journal, presented at a conference, posted on the internet) must clearly indicate to the editors and readers the nature of the previous dissemination.

• Guideline 11: Authors of complex studies should heed the advice previously put forth by Angell & Relman (1989). If the results of a single complex study are best presented as a ‘cohesive’ single whole, they should not be partitioned into individual papers. Furthermore, if there is any doubt as to whether a paper submitted for publication represents fragmented data, authors should enclose other papers (published or unpublished) that might be part of the paper under consideration (Kassirer & Angell, 1995). Similarly, old data that has been merely augmented with additional data points and that is subsequently presented as a new study is an equally serious ethical breach.

• Guideline 12: Because some instances of plagiarism, self-plagiarism, and even some writing practices that might otherwise be acceptable (e.g., extensive paraphrasing or quoting of key elements of a book) can constitute copyright infringement, authors are strongly encouraged to become familiar with basic elements of copyright law.

• Guideline 13: While there are some situations where text recycling is an acceptable practice, it may not be so in other situations. Authors are urged to adhere to the spirit of ethical writing and avoid reusing their own previously published text, unless it is done in a manner consistent with standard scholarly conventions (e.g., by using of quotations and proper paraphrasing) (pg. 19-25).