Self-plagiarism

Actually, splat is unavoidable, given the way academic papers generally are written. First, we have John’s comment that there is always boilerplate sections (lit review, methodology in empirical papers, portions of case descriptions). Second, articles always exist in previous semi-drafts, such as conference papers and key-notes, that normally are publicly available. I think the problem here is basically a too anal view on the text. It doesn’t matter that boilerplate portions of a text is recycled, as long as they are connected to original ideas.

A different way of putting this point is that disciplines are in many ways like ongoing conversations, and there can be a lot of redundancy in conversations.

Don’t most journals have guidelines for resubmissions and prior publications? It’s astounding how much of this takes place in medical research.

Well, I guess that John Emerson’s point is a main reason why only publications in journal articles tend to be given serious weight. I presume that most academics would think that the chapter in the anthology, and the book, is either more or less loosely based on a published article, or deemed too lightweight to be published in a journal. This logic is self-reinforcing, too.

hey, have you seen that Guinness ad?

The answer may vary from discipline, but isn’t a relevant question how many of the people who should have read a paper when it first appeared, e.g. because they’re working on the same topic, did read it? In an ideal world the answer would be “all of them.” In the real world (except maybe in some hard sciences?) it’s usually “less than all” and in my discipline of philosophy it’s often “a lot less than all.” Even if a paper appears in the most prominent possible journal many people writing on the same subject won’t have read it. So re-presenting its main idea along with some new material in a follow-up paper increases the number of people exposed to the idea, not by 100% perhaps but potentially by quite a lot. Ideal writers might never repeat themselves, but then ideal readers would never benefit from repetition. And in the real world many disciplines don’t have ideal readers.

Clueless’s post above (9:37 am) reminds me that years ago, probably while we were still in grad school, a friend mentioned that the optimal publication strategy was generally believed to be maximizing the number of papers per idea. He was going to try the dual of this strategy, minimizing the number of papers per idea. In particular he was aiming to overcome the apparent minimum of 1 (idea per paper).

I wrestle with this. One problem not mentioned is if you tend to rewrite similar material for very different audiences. I am often writing articles from the same set of original findings for both technical and non-technical audiences. So a lot of the data description and findings are close to identical but the intro, explanation, and the decsription of methodologies varies a lot. I’ve decided to copy some material verbatim because I like the way I wrote it the first time and think rewriting it would make it less clear.

Slightly off-topic, but here’s a vote for keeping “boilerplate” stuff firmly in papers. I’m also a mathematician (as #1), and my current pet hate is authors who do one of the following:

i) Write “It is well-known that…” as an excuse not to give a reference. Well, it’s not well-known to me, now that I’m reading your paper 20 years later. If it’s really “well-known” then surely there must be a good reference?

ii) Write “The following has a short proof, see” and then gives a reference to a paper in Russian in some obscure Japanese journal (okay, I exagerate). If it’s a short proof, and the best reference is really obscure, then would it really hurt to give the proof (obviously noting that it’s not original)?

I guess it comes down to if you view papers as giving very technial, incremental additions of knowledge (in which case maybe background isn’t needed) or if papers should be more self-contained, widely read pieces of work. I tend towards the latter view: many papers in maths are more important (IMHO) for the techniques they demonstrate than the actual results they prove: anything to improve readability, and to give a guide as to where this work is coming from, can only be a good thing.

I do wonder, however, if journals perhaps don’t help in their quest for short papers. I feel a bit of pressure to put a single solid result in a paper and send it off, even if I might really have a result and a half. This keeps the paper shorter, and the hope is that I can work the half-a-result into a full result, and publish it later…

From memory, Jack Higgins was caught reusing chapters from his own work again in subsequent novels. It only came up because he changed publishers and the old ones pointed out they owned the rights to the new chapters.

Now that is genuine self-plagiarism because it is deliberately deceptive, and passes something off to the reader.

In the cases which you find distasteful, the academics here are gaming the system, but it is fraud rather than plagiarism – trying to create a false CV with inflated publications.

Mind you, it could also just be narcissism.

I think this is the reference for the HIggins stuff, though its not on the net and I’m not at a library: Steinhauer, Yvette, Jack Higgins: If He’s Said It Once, He’s Said It a Thousand Times’, Age Good Weekend, 24 June 1988, 51–55.

The Guinness ad affair is one of my favourite running jokes here, or probably anywhere on blogs.

I think that a new write up of the same work, comingled with new work, makes it a sufficiently nuanced issue, that it isn’t necessarily plagiarism in many of the cases being discussed. In my field, “in Russian, in a Soviet journal” is a real possibility. If Landau did something, and I would find that result terribly useful, but no one’s translated it, it might just be that it got rehashed as part of another paper, which did get translated and saves my bacon. Very quickly it becomes very problematic to claim that every accomplishment should have its 15 minutes of journal time once and only once, when it might be needed 20 or 100 years later, in a different language, by people who are not initiates into the lingua franca that prevailed at the time of original publication. To me, this last is actually the best defense against charges of self-plagiarism. On a road trip this summer I learned that my boss, who got her PhD 30-odd years ago, doesn’t seem to have internalized that fluid dynamics is no longer a part of physics — it was left to the engineers and other non-physicists well before I was born. She and her contemporaries often seem to forget that we don’t necessarily know the things they knew at the same point in their education. (On the other hand, she knows crap all about nanotech, so I’ll call it square.)

What we need is a better definition of self-plagiarism, but this is very difficult to do because it requires some tough calls with not enough information about what others, let alone posterity, will eventually find useful. Though, given that eventually all journals will be online for the sake of space, delay time, and expense, this will become less of an issue.

Plus, it’s like saying that you only get to do one version of the Aristocrats…

I often self plagiarize.

I have to admit I have occasionally found splat to be a pleasant surprise–I was thinking I would have to read a whole paper, and as it turns out, only the last half-page of it contains any new information at all.

As regards the exposure comments, I have the impression that in physics now, journal publishing is nearly an afterthought with respect to actual work–needed for promotion decisions, but for nothing else. Everything important gets communicated via preprints. I’m not a physicist, though–this is just what I heard.

After the distribution-to-cost ratio and its sheer immediacy, this is the main reason I moved to web publishing and one of the main reasons I’d like to see more academics move to web publishing. I write short pieces that are all somewhat connected but I loathe repeating myself. Behold the power of the URL! Don’t copy, somewhat revise, and re-publish a previous proof, a previous study, or the first third of your think piece on Donald Rumsfeld’s relationship with Sammy Davis Jr. — just link to it and move on.

BS.

There is no such thing as splat. If it is your writing and your ideas – re-furbrishing, re-publishing, massaging, changing etc. are your right for having done the original work/idea/data collection in the first place. See, e.g. mickey mouse.