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Does Self-Plagiarism Exist? By Larry Kahaner

posted Sep 19, 2011 8:12 AM by Jacqueline Lara   [ updated Sep 19, 2011 8:46 AM ]

Can people steal from themselves?

    Everyone knows that plagiarism - stealing written words from others is wrong - but what about self-plagiarism? Is there even such a thing?
Hoping to drum up business for itself, a company called iThenticate is promoting the ethics and perils of self-plagiarism in a new white paper which you can download for free from their website. The company makes the point that self-plagiarism occurs when authors reuse their own material without citing it as older work. They even bring in an opinion from the American Psychological Association which asserts in the 2010 sixth edition of their publications manual: “Whereas plagiarism refers to the practice of claiming credit for the words, ideas, and concepts of others, self-plagiarism refers to the practice of presenting one’s own previously published work as though it were new.” I don’t know the details, but I would guess that the APA has had a problem with journal authors presenting older work as new research.

    Using a large database of scholarly articles, the company can run checks on written work to see if it bears resemblance to past articles. This is similar to companies that collect student papers and check them against those sent by teachers who suspect a student of buying a term paper from a mill. 

Credit: Essay Advantage
  
    iThenticate also notes that in some cases an author has sold or given the rights to their work to a publisher and no longer retains copyright to it. In this case, when an author uses his or her older written work, it is not only unethical, but a breach of copyright law. This is a different issue altogether.
  
     I’m more interested in the case of an author presenting old work as new without the added twist of copyright infringement. To me, this is a serious ethics violation because readers expect that an author’s material is new unless told otherwise. In my own work, I have used past writings but have always been careful to cite myself and let the reader know that it was previously published.

   
    Certainly, authors can and should use their own material but, once again, good ethics demand transparency. The APA publication manual states: “The general view is that the core of the new document must constitute an original contribution of knowledge, and only the amount of previously published material necessary to understand that contribution should be included, primarily in the discussion of theory and methodology.”

    For most authors and writers this is overly stringent – which it should be because we’re dealing with scientific inquiries. For those of you who write for your companies, a simple note that work was previously published should be enough. I wouldn’t worry too much about recycling Powerpoint slides either, but as a matter of courtesy, let the audience know that they may have seen some of them before. If nothing else, it keeps people from wondering “haven’t I seen this already” before they tune out thinking that there’s nothing new for them to learn.

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Larry Kahaner has been a business journalist for more than 20 years, a former Business Week Washington correspondent, and the author of many books about business ethics including: Values Prosperity and the Talmud: Business Lessons from the Ancient Rabbis; Competitive Intelligence: How to Gather, Analyze, and Use Information to Move Your Business to the Top; and Say It and Live It; The 50 Corporate Mission Statements that Hit the Mark, (co-author).