Comment by Artoooooor
4 hours ago
Do I understand correctly that publishing the same paper in multiple journals is considered self-plagiarism? Who in the name of the great monopoly invented such name for that?
4 hours ago
Do I understand correctly that publishing the same paper in multiple journals is considered self-plagiarism? Who in the name of the great monopoly invented such name for that?
The same morons who think that re-using something you have written before in academic work without quoting yourself is (self-)plagiarism for which you should be sanctioned?
(Yes, they are morons because no reasonable person would think this is fair. You need convoluted nonsense arguments to justify this)
If I sell a novel to Simon & Shuster, and assign the copyright to them as part of the deal, I can't sell the same novel to HarperCollins under the same terms.
I can't sell my movie to Disney AND Sony, etc.
This is the same, but the price is zero. You can take or leave the deal at that price, and you probably will because you gain sufficient academic prestige points ('impact factor', visibility, etc).
By the way, some publishers such as IEEE explicitly allow you to post free preprints, eg. at arXiv and on your own web site. Choose one of those publishers if you want the mixed strategy.
It's bad manners and a waste of people's time and attention to present previously published work as novel.
Repeating a phrase or two in a document's introduction isn't going to raise flags from any serious people, but copying data, analysis, or large swaths of text? That's a paddlin'.
I think it depends. The popular exposure to this idea, where you can be accused of self-plagiarism for a paper you write for a class, does seem stupid, because obviously your prof hasn't read your paper you wrote in another class and you're not 'wasting' anyone's time.
I can also appreciate that in a "publishing papers as research" context you're completely right.
1 reply →
That makes no sense, either people don't know about the previous work and thus it has clear value. Or they do and they can easily skip it. Beside for a lot of work it be great if you could just literally copy and paste fragments if your previous work to deepen out some reasoning.
4 replies →
plagiarism, with heavy sanctions, of self is of course ridiculous, but having as a standard that you should cite yourself when doing it is not a bad standard. As a reader, it might trigger a "where have I read this before" reaction which is akin to confusion; also having notice that there is another paper on this topic could be quite useful.
Generally, yes. Journals expect that the research is new. With most research labs (at least in CS) making their work freely available on the internet, the major value of publication is peer review. In my area, double-blind review is the norm, meaning the reviewers and authors don't know who the other is. Thus it's not clear to the reviewers if the prior research is even yours.
The expectation is you cite the previous work to clearly indicate it is not new, and that your submission for review is mostly about new research. In some situations overlap is okay, e.g. there's a conference version and then a journal version with additional results. In that case you disclose in writing what the delta is to the editor (who knows your identity while the reviewers do not). This also means in the paper you have to treat the prior work as if it is by a different group to maintain double-blind review.
The point is to make it clear what is new research. Trying to get credit for the same research multiple times, and boost citation count, is dishonest to the expectations of the community. It's also a waste of time for reviewers (who volunteer) to review same research over and over again after deciding it's acceptable. Think of it like a OSS maintainer getting pull requests for trivial changes to the code just to boost the green squares on someone's GitHub profile. It's a drain on everyone else and doesn't benefit the project.
Academics base their careers around citation numbers. You need publications and a high H-index to make it anywhere. Self-plagiarism reduces the effectiveness of that metric, which makes it harder to evaluate the actual impact of a researcher.
It should be no surprise that republishing in multiple journals was accepted in the pre-computer era, where citations were inherently harder to track (and thus less valuable as a metric).
Quoting Upton Sinclair, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it."