Self-plagiarising myself on self-plagiarism

Self-plagiarisation is a practice in which I engage regularly. It’s called having a research program. In paper X, I establish (to my satisfaction) that p is the case. In paper Y, I repeat verbatim not only some of the boiler plate John refers to, but also a paragraph or two summarising my argument for p before I go on to establish (to my own satisfaction) that given p, q follows. If q is a substantial and disputable point (even given p), then I am engaged in genuine research in writing paper Y. The fact that large slabs of text appear verbatim from my own published work is irrelevant.

The issue that really needs to be addressed here is *why* people self-plagiarize. I myself don’t see anything wrong with it, but I think I have an idea as to why individuals may take the mentioned “least publishable units” approach.

When I was in college, my intermediate macroeconomics professor was up for tenure. Not that great of a professor, but not too many of my econ classes could tout that. At any rate, he was a world class publisher. He had four articles out in leading economic journals. He didn’t get tenure because the department wanted more articles than he had published. Where’s the incentive to write high-quality comprehensive examinations of a subject when the reward schedule favors quantity over quality?

So the solution should be thus: departments should favor not necessarily fewer, but higher-quality (ie non-self plagiarizing or repetitive) works by professors. There’s obviously more to the subject that I’m overlooking for the sake of simplicity, but I think this is comprehensive to what is at hand.

“It also rewards those authors who are able to break down their results into overlapping least-publishable-units over those who publish each result only once.”

yes. If this is self-plagiarism I guess most professional writers of non-fiction do the same thing. It is behavior that is economically motivated in that case, but probably the same argument can be made for academic research with its publishing requirements leading to a similar motivation.

With respect to neil’s comment, I definitely notice this within research programs more than anything. When one is reading up on a particular topic and an author is prolific within that topic, one will begin to notice many sentences and paragraphs copied verbatim, though often it is in different media; a journal article, an invited chapter, the introduction to an edited volume, a monograph covering the individual’s research program. I find it irritating, but understandable.

So I don’t know what these authors mean by clearer rules, because I got very clear rules; they were just rules these particular people don’t happen to like.

One of the main issues seems to be how much the standards vary from field to field. I work in pure mathematics, where the standard appears to be 0% reuse. I’ve never discussed it with an authority figure, but I never imagined any substantial degree of reuse was acceptable (and I’ve confirmed this feeling with several colleagues). It’s probably fine to copy a few sentences from a previous paper, but copying numerous paragraphs may open you to charges of unethical behavior, even if you cite the paper they appeared in. If you tried to publish a paper consisting of 50% previously published text, it would actually derail your career. (The one exception I know of is for material not previously published in a journal but rather in conferences in certain fields, like theoretical computer science. There, it can be reused in journal papers, but only if they are clearly labeled as revised versions of the conference papers.)

So when I saw comments like #1, I assumed the author just had really low ethical standards. It wasn’t until comment #8 that I realized there might actually be differences in the publicly articulated standards in different fields. It’s intriguing.

Do people in other fields get guidance like this in graduate school? If so, what’s considered acceptable?

(I’m the same commenter as in comment #9.)

So how do you deal with (previously-published) axioms, definitions and so on? Omit them, reformulate them each time, or cite them to an earlier paper?

If they’re simple, one just restates them on the fly. (They probably come out pretty similarly worded, and perhaps identically. In any case, the important thing is the meaning rather than the wording.) If they’re complicated, I don’t think people would object to copying a definition or theorem statement from another paper, assuming the original source is of course clearly cited.

Theorems and definitions are usually pretty short, though, typically at most a few sentences. My feeling is that copying multiple paragraphs would be really frowned upon (although you could probably get away with it), and copying multiple pages would get you in serious trouble with the journal editor.

Sorry for the comment about ethical standards; I should have written more carefully. I guess I meant that at first I thought you worked in an area with the same tacit standards and were flagrantly ignoring them, but then I realized you certainly weren’t.

I agree that there are some advantages to reusing text. On the other hand, there may be advantages to a policy against it as well. One observation is that rewriting some background sections is a very small task. (For me, at least, proving the theorems takes perhaps twenty times as long as writing them up. Rewriting 5 or 10% of a research paper will make only a tiny difference in overall productivity, especially since the background and introduction are by far the fastest parts to write.) So a correspondingly small benefit could make it worthwhile.

One potential benefit is that a newly rewritten introduction may better reflect the very latest views of the author and may be more closely tailored to the rest of the paper, compared to a single piece of boilerplate written years ago and then repeatedly reused. Another is that it encourages authors to use different examples and explanations. There’s no requirement to do so, but if you are writing several brief introductions, you’re likely to include a little more material in total than you would ever have put into a single introduction.

It doesn’t seem completely clear which effects are most important in practice.

From my perspective, the only real ethical issue is in compliance with community standards. If your colleagues expect each paper to be written from scratch, then secretly reusing text is a mild form of misrepresentation. On the other hand, if everyone agrees that reusing text is fine, then there’s of course no ethical issue.

Incidentally, what do you think of copying other people’s backgrounds or introductions? In the last year or two, there was a big scandal about this in physics. It particularly comes up for non-native speakers of English, who sometimes argue that writing background material is a real burden for them, and that if someone has already done a good job of it, what’s the harm in adapting it rather than starting from scratch? Of course, I think most people would consider it unacceptable plagiarism if it is done without explicit notice. However, should people be allowed to write something like “Most of the following section is taken verbatim from the excellent introduction to [1].”? Do you know of any fields where this is explicitly allowed? That would be a really interesting data point.