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Self-Plagiarism in Academic Publishing: The Anatomy of a Misnomer

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Abstract

The paper discusses self-plagiarism and associated practices in scholarly publishing. It approaches at some length the conceptual issues raised by the notion of self-plagiarism. It distinguishes among and then examines the main families of arguments against self-plagiarism, as well as the question of possibly legitimate reasons to engage in this practice. It concludes that some of the animus frequently reserved for self-plagiarism may be the result of, among others, poor choice of a label, unwarranted generalizations as to its ill effects based on the specific experience (and goals) of particular disciplines, and widespread but not necessarily beneficial publishing practices.

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Notes

  1. See, for instance, the muckraking work of the blog Economics Intelligence (http://economicsintelligence.com).

  2. Defined in Green (2005) as reusing previously published text without being aware that it exists.

  3. Also, when an article is reprinted in another publishing medium (an author reusing an article as a chapter in a book).

  4. The name is also implicitly attributed to all of the text and ideas in the piece, except for what is explicitly quoted or referenced.

  5. I owe this point to one of the reviewers. S/he pointed out the case of the Physical Review journals: the Physical Review Letters prints short contributions, a long version of which is expected to be published in another PR venue. Unlike in the hard sciences, social sciences journals printing concise papers are often branded as resources for graduate students and teachers. Economics Letters is introduced by its board as welcoming “[a]ll researchers… and especially young researchers and advanced graduate students”, although it has published many original, interesting papers (http://www.journals.elsevier.com/economics-letters/). The literary studies periodical The Explicator, which specializes in “explaining” aspects of literary texts within the space of a few (2–4) pages, is similarly advertised as “a must for college and university libraries and teachers” (http://www.tandfonline.com/toc/vexp20/current). Yet not only does The Explicator offer a much larger quantity of insights per page than major journals (and without the usual clutter), but it occasionally publishes quite novel, original explorations of apparently ancillary or minor but ultimately consequential issues.

  6. This point was suggested to me by one of the reviewers of the original manuscript.

  7. Although occasional mention is made of this as a cause for the proliferation of self-plagiarism, the wider import of the issue is frequently ignored. To give just one example, Yank and Barnes (2003) report that in their survey more than half of the responding editors and more than two-thirds of the responding authors believed that a cause for overlapping publication is researchers “want[ing] to disseminate their research as widely as possible”. Yet they do not include this reason in their more in-depth discussion of the findings.

  8. In a survey of editors and authors in high-impact biomedical journals, Yank and Barnes (2003) found that both these categories tend to find the publication of two overlapping articles more acceptable when they have different conclusions than when they do not.

  9. This argument holds for prior publication, not for co-submission. In the case of co-submission, the article may be novel simply because it was not yet published elsewhere. But when the article is published in the first venue, it may also become old news to the readers of the second journal. Had the latter’s editors assessed not a co-submitted article, but the already published article, they might have been aware of its contents and not judged it interesting or novel enough to merit republishing. I owe this point to C.A.

  10. This assumes a consequentialist approach to self-plagiarism. On a deontologist approach, these conditions may not matter.

  11. This was pointed out by one of the reviewers of the original manuscript. It is a well-known reality in countries with an underfunded public higher education and research sector.

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Acknowledgments

The author wishes to thank Vlad Vieru, Radu Gheorghiu, Cristina Andreescu and several anonymous reviewers.

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  1. Spriu Haret University, Bucharest, Ion Ghica 13 Str., District 3, Bucharest, Romania

    Liviu Andreescu

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  1. Liviu Andreescu
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Correspondence to Liviu Andreescu.

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Andreescu, L. Self-Plagiarism in Academic Publishing: The Anatomy of a Misnomer. Sci Eng Ethics 19, 775–797 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11948-012-9416-1

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