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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
by Artoooooor 3mo 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?
- bborud 3mo agoThe 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)
- MengerSponge 3mo agoIt'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'.
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- rowanG077 3mo agoThat 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.
- vladms 3mo agoMany forums have/had policies about not doing cross posting (in different categories). I find this similar. Yes, maybe from the "plagiarism" angle is not very relevant, but I would prefer not to have a system in which people try to "flood" repositories (journals, etc) with the same thing over and over. People looking for new information, people reviewing will get most of the burden to "keep things clean" while for the poster that is not a problem.
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- Dylan16807 3mo agoIf they don't know about the previous work, they won't know to go there for more. If they do, it doesn't mean they instantly recognize it and know to skip. Just mark it, it'll take seconds.
- MengerSponge 3mo agoThe reasons for not marking it are ignorance and fraud. Both are terrible looks for an academic.
- _the_inflator 3mo agoI disagree. I think you are contradicting yourself. If a previous work has been copy and pasted, and a novel reader doesn't know, wouldn't the reader benefit from the option to actually read the previous work as a whole? All credible authors I read mentioned quotes from earlier works. In fact, that is on the one hand an ego boost as a prolific writer, and also helps sell more copies in case of being purchasable. Most credible university profs in Germany from the 1990th for example always referenced their former work and mention changes of the context, or in case of a theory, modifications. Books for example, are reprinted and it has been mentioned whether changes to the content has been done. Personally I really see no problem, leaving the decision, whether you copied something or not, to the reader.
- xp84 3mo agoI 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.
- MengerSponge 3mo agoCourse credit is not the same as professional certifications. You can apply past expertise/work to as many different certifications as you can manage. Submitting previously graded work for a new course wastes your own time. It also wastes the professor's time, because they assigned that writing for you to develop a specific skill, and you're trying to not practice whatever they're trying to teach you. If you have a perfectly matched essay to the assignment, you should talk to the professor about how the assignment can be adapted.
- xp84 3mo agoI see where you're coming from, and perhaps because I'm absolutely not cut out to be in academia, that's where my bias comes from -- I'm inclined always to view education as a means to an end, and that's certainly far from accurate. The interesting thing is that in coursework context, plagiarism of any type is merely a massive self-own, since you are (probably) paying money and then purposely cheating yourself of the learning that you paid for. To me, I feel like it needs a different name than plagiarism in the academia or professional world, where you're taking ideas from others and slapping your own name on them for clout or for money. In this case, a real victim exists and you also stand to gain from it if not caught.
- bborud 3mo agoI am flabbergasted. How self-absorbed does one have to be to be offended by someone re-using sections of a paper one has done earlier in a later paper? No, seriously. If I write 5.000 words on a topic and then re-use 500 words I myself have written earlier without attribution because they are appropriate to the current article, how do you make that «bad manners». I meant what I said about people who can’t see this without help earlier.
- bawolff 3mo agoI mean, i dont know how things work in academia, but if i was reading a fiction novel, and it turns out half of it was copied from some other novel i already read, i would feel a bit cheated. So i could imagine the same thing applying to academic works.
- jubilanti 3mo agoHow about you take that stick out of your ass and stop assuming that norms which have existed for generations are, what, just some kind of mass mental illness?
- bborud 3mo agoYou do understand that you look somewhat ridiculous when engaging in the very behavior that the accusation of wooden matter up one’s rectum implies? You are arguing my point for me by way of self-parody.
- MengerSponge 3mo agoIf it's a new article it should say something new. You can save your reader's time and your own effort by quoting some of those words, or by citing all of them. That trims almost 500 superfluous words from your paper, and what's left will be better, which respects your reader.
- fsckboy 3mo agoplagiarism, 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.
- robotresearcher 3mo agoIf 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. This is the same, but the price is zero. You can take or leave the deal at that price, and you'll probably take it for sufficient academic prestige points ('impact factor', visibility, etc). By the way, some publishers such as IEEE explicitly allow you to post preprints for free download, eg. at arXiv and on your own web site.
- galleywest200 3mo agoNobody gets royalties for published papers.
- jubilanti 3mo agoPublications are the coin of the realm in academia.
- robotresearcher 3mo agoCorrect. Hence "the price is zero". Author still normally transfers copyright to the publisher. That's what gives the publisher the right to distribute copies and charge for them. By default they do not.
- simongr3dal 3mo agoI think plagiarism in academia is mostly concerned with morality, not so much legality, i.e. copyright law isn't really what we're considering here.
- jubilanti 3mo agoBecause if not, people will game the system and submit the same paper to dozens of journals at the same time, and journals are for publishing new, original work. And because in a class, you are being evaluated based on your ability to produce new, original work. Do you also get angry at a track and field meet, when you show up with a motorbike and get kicked out for violating the rules? But I don't expect someone who writes that much of an aggressively pompous yet uninformed statement to understand. Chesterton's Fence much?
- yreg 3mo agoThis comment is also very aggressive.
- dotancohen 3mo agoThe first paragraph was fine. It would be a valuable viewpoint if the rest were removed.
- whack 3mo agoThis is a curious phenomenon that I've started to notice. People often post extremely aggressive comments... but it is still socially acceptable as long as their aggression is directed towards an abstract figure, or a specific person who "isn't in the room". Whereas if someone replies to that aggressive comment with an equally aggressive comment, that is far less socially acceptable. Once I noticed it, it's blindingly obvious. It's like going to a dinner party and complaining about your boss being a moron vs calling another guest at the party a moron. But for the longest time, I viewed internet forums as a place where everyone is "equally abstract" - and where the focus is on the exchange of ideas, not your personal relationship with the people behind the ideas. Hence why it took me an embarrassing amount of time to figure out this most basic of concepts
- StableAlkyne 3mo agoAcademics 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."
- iracigt 3mo agoGenerally, 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.