Avoiding plagiarism,
self-plagiarism, and other questionable writing practices: A guide to ethical
writing
SELF-PLAGIARISM
When plagiarism is conceptualized
as theft, the notion of self-plagiarism may seem impossible. After all, one might ask: Is it possible to
steal from oneself? As Hexam (1999)
points out, it is possible to steal from oneself as when one engages in
embezzlement or insurance fraud. In
writing, self-plagiarism occurs when authors reuse their own previously written
work or data in a ‘new’ written product without letting the reader know that
this material has appeared elsewhere.
According to Hexam, “… the essence of
self-plagiarism is [that] the author attempts to deceive the reader”.
Although in scholarly and
scientific writing there are some situations in which some forms of text reuse
are acceptable, many other instances in which text and/or data are known to
have been reused violate the ethical spirit of scholarly research. The concept of ethical writing, about which
this instructional resource revolves, entails an implicit contract between
reader and writer whereby the reader assumes, unless otherwise noted, that the
material was written by the author, is new, is original and is accurate to the
best of the author’s abilities. In this
section we review some of the most common instances of self-plagiarism and
provide guidelines to avoid these pitfalls.
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The available literature on self-plagiarism is concerned with four major problems: The publication of what is essentially the same paper in more than one journal, but without any indication that the paper has been published elsewhere (i.e., redundant and duplicate publication), the partitioning of a large study which should have been reported in a single paper into smaller published studies (i.e., salami-slicing), copyright infringement, and the practice of text recycling.
We now examine these issues in more detail.
