Plagiarism Archives

How to avoid plagiarism

September 16, 2009 by Roy Johnson

how to understand plagiarism – and avoid it

Plagiarism – definition

1. Plagiarism is defined as “Passing off someone else’s work as your own”.

2. It happens if you copy somebody else’s work instead of doing your own.

3. It also happens in those cases where people actually buy essays instead of doing the work themselves.

4. Schools, colleges, and universities regard this as a serious offence – and they often have stiff penalties for anyone found guilty.

5. Most people at school level call this ‘cheating’ or ‘copying’ – and they know it is wrong.

6. The problem is that at college or university, you are expected to use and write about other people’s work – so the issue of plagiarism becomes more complex.

7. There are also different types and different degrees of plagiarism – and it is often difficult to know whether you are breaking the rules or not.

8. Let’s start off by making it clear that all the following can be counted as plagiarism.

Copying directly from a text, word-for-word
Using text downloaded from the Internet
Paraphrasing the words of a text very closely
Borrowing statistics from another source or person
Copying from the essays or the notes of another student
Downloading or copying pictures, photographs, or diagrams without acknowledging your sources
Using an attractive phrase or sentence you have found somewhere

Why is this so complex?

9. The answer is – because in your work at college or university level you are supposed to discuss other people’s ideas. These will be expressed in the articles and books they have written. But you have to follow certain conventions.

10. Plus – at the same time – you will be asked to express your own arguments and opinions. You therefore have two tasks – and it is sometimes hard to combine them in a way which does not break the rules. Many people are not sure how much of somebody else’s work they can use.

11. Sometimes plagiarism can happen by accident, because you use an extract from someone else’s work – but you forget to show that you are quoting.

12. This is the first thing you should learn about plagiarism – and how to avoid it. Always show that you are quoting somebody else’s work by enclosing the extract in [single] quotation marks.

In 1848 there was an outbreak of revolutionary risings throughout Europe, which Marx described as ‘the first stirrings of proletarian defiance‘ in a letter to his collaborator, Frederick Engels.

13. This also sometimes happens if you are stuck for ideas, and you quote a passage from a textbook. You might think the author expresses the idea so well, that you can’t improve on it.

14. This is plagiarism – unless you say and show that you are quoting someone else’s work. Here’s how to do it:

This painting is generally considered one of his finest achievements. As John Richardson suggests: ‘In Guernica, Picasso lifts the concept of art as political propaganda to its highest level in the twentieth century‘.

Academic conventions

15. Why do colleges and universities make such a big fuss about this issue? The answer to this is that they are trying to keep up important conventions in academic writing.

16. The conventions involve two things at the same time. They are the same as your two tasks:

You are developing your own ideas and arguments and learning to express them.
You are showing that you have learned about and can use other people’s work.

17. These conventions allow you to use other people’s work to illustrate and support your own arguments – but you must be honest about it. You must show which parts are your own work, and which parts belong to somebody else.

18. You also need to show where the information comes from. This is done by using a system of footnotes or endnotes where you list details of the source of your information.

19. The conventions of referencing and citation can become very complex. If you need guidance on this issue, have a look at our detailed guidance notes on the subject. What follows is the bare bones.

20. In an essay on a novel by D.H. Lawrence for example, you might argue that his work was influenced by Thomas Hardy. You could support this claim by quoting a literary critic:

Lawrence’s characters have a close relationship with their physical environment – showing possibly the influence of Hardy, who Walter Allen points out was ‘his fundamental precursor in the English tradition‘ (1)

21. Notice that you place a number in brackets immediately after the quotation. The source of this quotation is given as a footnote at the bottom of the page, or as an endnote on a separate sheet at the end of your essay.

22. The note gives full details of the source – as follows:

Notes

1. Walter Allen, The English Novel, London: Chatto and Windus, 1964, p.243

A bad case of plagiarism

This video clip features the case of Ann Coulter. She is a best-selling American writer and social critic who has extremely right-wing views.

The film raises several plagiarism issues:

failure to acknowledge sources
failure to quote accurately
changing the nature of a quotation
misleading references (citations)
definitions of plagiarism
plagiarism detection software
legitimate quotation

Do’s and Don’ts

23. You should avoid composing an essay by stringing together accounts of other people’s work. This occurs when an essay is written in this form:

Critic X says that this idea is ‘ … long quotation …‘, whereas Commentator Y’s opinion is that this idea is ‘ … long quotation …‘, and Critic Z disagrees completely, saying that the idea is ‘ … long quotation …‘.

24. This is very close to plagiarism, because even though you are naming the critics and showing that you are quoting them – there is nothing of your own argument being offered here.

25. If you are stuck for ideas, don’t be tempted to copy long passages from other people’s work. The reason is – it’s really easy to spot. Your tutor will notice the difference in style straight away.

Copyright and plagiarism

26. Copyright can be quite a complex issue – but basically it means the ‘right to copy’ a piece of work. This right belongs to the author of the work – the person who writes it – or a publisher.

27. When a piece of writing is published in a book or on the Web, you can read it as much as you wish – but the right to copy it belongs to the author or the author’s publisher.

28. Nobody will worry if you quote a few words, or a few lines. This is regarded as what is called ‘fair use’. People in the world of education realise that because quotation is so much a part of academic writing, it would be ridiculous to insist that you should seek permission to quote every few words.

29. In fact there is an unwritten convention that you can quote up to 5% of a work without seeking permission. If this was from a very long work however, you would still be wise to seek permission.

30. This permission is only for your own personal study purposes – as part of your course work or an assignment. If you wished to use the materials for any other purpose, you would need to seek permission.

31. Copyright also extends beyond writing to include diagrams, maps, drawings, photographs, and other forms of graphic presentation. In some cases it can even include the layout of a document.

The Johann Hari case

A recent case which has drawn attention to subtle forms of plagiarism is that of British journalist Johann Hari. He writes articles and conducts interviews for The Independent newspaper. It was revealed that in many articles (and particularly his interviews) he had inserted quotations from the previous writings of the interviewee, or from interviews written by other journalists. In both cases the quotations were unacknowledged. .

He was criticised in particular for creating the impression that the words had been used in his own face-to-face interviews by sewing together the quotations with apparently on-the-spot dramatic context – as in “puffing nervously on a cigarette, she admitted to me that …” and that sort of thing.

When it was revealed that his prime quotations were lifted from written sources up to five years old, Hari was forced to issue an apology. He claimed that interviewees were sometimes less articulate in speech writing than in writing, and that he merely wanted to present their arguments in the best light.

This feeble ‘explanation’ ignores three of the principal issues in plagiarism. He did not produce his own paraphrases of the interviewee’s ideas, but used their words from other sources. He went out of his way to conceal his sources and create the entirely bogus impression of a first-hand interview. (Some people have wondered if his interviews actually took place.) And he used the work of other journalist, from work they had published previously, without acknowledgement.

So how exactly was Hari guilty of plagiarism?

He quoted other people’s words as if they were his own.
He didn’t acknowledge his sources.
He concealed the cut and paste origins of his composition.

A number of his essays and interviews have been analysed, and he has been shown to be guilty of systematic plagiarism. The majority of Internet comments point to the fact that he acted unprofessionally. All his previous work was scrutinised, and it has been suggested that he return the 2008 George Orwell Prize that he was awarded for distinguished reporting.

He began to edit his personal Wikipedia entry, inserting flattering comments on his own work and abilities. But to make matters doubly worse, he then resorted to something even more underhand. Using a false identity (‘David Rose’) he began making pejorative edits to the Wikipedia entries of anybody who had criticised him. When challenged, he denied all this, but was eventually forced to admit the truth and apologise.

Guido Fawkes on the Hari issue and here

Detailed analysis of Hari’s plagiarism

Plagiarism and the Web

32. The World Wide Web has made millions and millions of pages of information available to anybody with access to the Internet. But even though this appears to be ‘free’ – copyright restrictions still apply. If someone writes and publishes a Web page, the copyright belongs to that person.

33. If you wish to use material you have located on the Web, you should acknowledge your sources in the same way that you would material quoted from a printed book.

34. Keep in mind too that information on a Web page might have been put there by someone who does not hold copyright to it.

What follows is the rather strictly-worded code on plagiarism from a typical university handbook.

Plagiarism

Plagiarism is the theft or appropriation of someone else’s work without proper acknowledgement, presenting the materials as if they were one’s own. Plagiarism is a serious academic offence and the consequences are severe.

a) Course work, dissertations, and essays submitted for assessment must be the student’s own work, unless in the case of group projects a joint effort is expected and indicated as such.

b) Unacknowledged direct copying from the work of another person, or the unacknowledged close paraphrasing of somebody else’s work, is called plagiarism and is a serious offence, equated with cheating in examinations. This applies to copying both from other student’s work and from published sources such as books, reports or journal articles.

c) Use of quotations or data from the work of others is entirely acceptable, and is often very valuable provided that the source of the quotation or data is given. Failure to provide a source or put quotation marks around material that is taken from elsewhere gives the appearance that the comments are ostensibly one’s own. When quoting word-for-word from the work of another person quotation marks or indenting (setting the quotation in from the margin) must be used and the source of the quoted material must be acknowledged.

d) Paraphrasing when the original statement is still identifiable and has no acknowledgement, is plagiarism. A close paraphrase of another person’s work must have an acknowledgement to the source. It is not acceptable to put together unacknowledged passages from the same or from different sources link these together with a few words or sentences of your own and changing a few words from the original text: this is regarded as over-dependence on other sources, which is a form of plagiarism.

e) Direct quotation from an earlier piece of the student’s own work, if unattributed, suggests that the work is original, when in fact it is not. The direct copying of one’s own writings qualifies as plagiarism if the fact that the work has been or is to be presented elsewhere is not acknowledged.

f) Sources of quotations used should be listed in full in a bibliography at the end of the piece of work and in a style required by the student’s department.

g) Plagiarism is a serious offence and will always result in imposition of a penalty. In deciding upon the penalty the University will take into account factors such as the year of study, the extent and proportion of the work that has been plagiarised and the apparent intent of the student. the penalties that can be imposed range from a minimum of zero mark for the work (without allowing resubmission) through to downgrading of degree class, the award of a lesser qualification (eg a Pass degree rather than Honours, a certificate rather than a diploma) to disciplinary measures such as suspension or expulsion.

Quoted with the permission of Manchester University

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Plagiarism in essays

August 24, 2009 by Roy Johnson

sample from HTML program and PDF book

1. Plagiarism in essays occurs when you take someone else’s ideas or words and try to pass them off as your own original work. In its worst form this happens when someone is stuck for ideas and lifts a passage from a textbook, hoping that the use of this ‘borrowed’ material will not be noticed. [It is usually very noticeable.]

2. Sometimes this can happen unintentionally, because the student uses a passage from someone else’s work – but forgets to put quote marks around it. These lifted passages are easily noticeable because of the sudden shift in tone in the writing.

3. You should always acknowledge the original source of any words or ideas which you use in your own work. Any attempt to pass off work which is not your own is regarded as cheating in academic circles, and is usually severely censured.

4. You can either acknowledge any idea you use in summary form:

This is what the critic Stanley Fish has called ‘interpretive communities’ (1) as a strategy in his argument that …

5. Alternatively, you can interrupt your own argument to briefly quote a passage from the original source. As Stanley Fish suggests:

Interpretive communities are made up of those who share interpretive strategies not for reading (in the conventional sense) but for writing texts, for constituting their properties and assigning their intentions. (1)

6. In both cases you must acknowledge that original source, either in a footnote or an endnote, which is shown as follows:

NOTES
1. Stanley Fish, Is There a Text in this Class, Harvard University Press, 1980, p.169.

7. Unless you have specifically been asked to discuss or summarise other people’s arguments, you should avoid composing an essay by stringing together accounts of other writers’ work.

8. More difficult instances occur when dealing with ideas that are in the public domain. For instance, you might not know who first thought of a concept you wish to bring into play. In such a case you should simply acknowledge the fact that the idea is not your own.

What follows is the rather stringently worded code on plagiarism from a typical university handbook.

Plagiarism

a) Course work, dissertations, and essays submitted for assessment must be the student’s own work, unless in the case of group projects a joint effort is expected and indicated as such.

f) Sources of quotations used should be listed in full in a bibliography at the end of the piece of work and in a style required by the student’s department.

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Plagiarism, Copyright, and New Media

July 21, 2011 by Roy Johnson

how digitization affects creative work

Plagiarism

Strange thought it may seem, it’s not possible to copyright the title of a creative work. There is nothing to stop you writing a novel called Where Angels Fear to Tread, making a film called Gone with the Wind, or composing a musical show called A Little Night Music. In fact all of these examples have taken their titles from works of art which preceded them. You might be criticised for lack of originality; you would certainly risk creating confusion, but nobody could stop you. Copying somebody else’s title is not the same thing as plagiarism. This isn’t particularly well known, but it’s a fact.

Ideas

It’s also not possible to copyright an idea. You can have the idea for inventing invisible steel, but you can’t copyright or patent the idea itself. Copyright and patent applications are required to be detailed descriptions for the manufacture and implementation of new ideas. That is, you can only copyright the process of actually making invisible steel.

In the creative arts, it’s not possible to copyright the idea for a new series of television programmes, the plot outline for a new opera, or the concept for a new video game or iPhone app. You only have copyable rights to such a product when the thing itself has been produced. That’s why proposals for new works such as these are kept under tight wraps by production companies. They don’t want their rivals to get in first.

Music

The issues of ownership in recorded sound are increasingly complex since the arrival of digitization. But there are two fundamental distinctions to be made which affect plagiarism and copyright:

Melodies can be copyrighted
Chord sequences can not be copyrighted

In 1970 the Beatles guitarist George Harrison published a song called My Sweet Lord which went on to become a big hit. The problem was that it was note-for-note identical to a song called He’s So Fine recorded by an all-girl black group called The Chiffons. Harrison claimed that it was a case of ‘subconsciously’ copying. A court case ensued in which just about everyone’s reputation was damaged and a lot of money changed hands.

Similar cases have arisen elsewhere, but now with less frequency, since it is relatively easy to prove the similarity between two melodies, even if they have different underlying harmonic sequences.

In the case of harmony and chord sequence, the case is quite different. Any number of tunes have been written based on an identical harmonic sequence. George Gershwin’s I Got Rhythm has a relatively simple chord progression which has been a great favourite of jazz musicians because it provides a comfortable sequence on which to improvise. New songs composed to fit on top of the original harmony include Ah-Leu-Cha, Allen’s Alley, Anthropology, Lemon Drop, Lester Leaps In, Red Cross, Salt Peanuts, and Squatty-Roo.

Sampling

Sampling occurs when one part of a song or a musical performance is taken and re-used as part of a different composition or performance. This is often done using electronic equipment and software programs. The sampled portion can also be edited or played back continuously in a ‘loop’ to form the background for a new composition. This practice has been widespread in popular music for the last twenty years.

It’s currently a vexed area of copyright and plagiarism, and many successful court cases have been fought by artists claiming that their work was being used without recognition or payment. Some have been successful even though the original sample has been edited and changed almost beyond recognition.

The argument in favour of sampling invokes the concept of ‘fair use’ in copyright law. This recognises the right of one person to quote from the work of another when creating an original work. [This happens all the time in academic scholarship and research.]

Open Source supporters such as Laurence Lessig and Cory Doctorow argue that sampling and fair use should be tolerated in favour of creative expression. Detractors argue that if the newly composed work relies too heavily on the original sample for its effect (such as a recognisable guitar riff in pop music) it falls into the realm of plagiarism.

Mashups

A mashup is the fusion of two separate sources of digital information to form a new entity. The following example shows the combination of a geographic map with information on flights in and out of Schipol airport Holland to produce a real-time (and interactive) data presentation program.

In this case it’s likely that permission has been sought to use these sources of information. But thousands and thousands of mashups are created in the world of pop music where the lyrics from one song are overlaid on the instrumentals or the melody of another. These instances raise issues which the copyright laws have been unable to resolve.

Defenders of mashups claim ‘fair use’ arguments, and point to the fact that the new product is ‘original’ in that it did not exist before. Critics have pointed to unacknowledged use of material, but the court cases they have brought have rarely been successful, because the people being sued rarely have any money. Pop music mashups is a minority sub-culture in which people produce things just for the hell of it – or just because it can be done.

Film

In the realm of film, literal copying and even plagiarism are rare – for the simple reason that access to the original materials would be difficult and permission to quote expensive. Rare exceptions include Woody Allen’s Play it again, Sam which includes reconstructions and direct imitations of films featuring Humphrey Bogart and in particular Michael Curtiz’s 1942 film Casablanca.

Sometimes films include re-makes of an original story. For example, The Big Sleep was originally filmed by Howard Hawks in 1946, based on Raymond Chandler’s 1939 novel of the same name. It was re-made in 1978 by Michael Winner and the setting transferred to England. In both cases, these are ‘interpretations’; of Chandler’s original story.

In 1998 Luc Van Sant created a shot-for-shot remake of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1960 film Psycho, which was itself taken from Robert Bloch’s 1959 novel, based on a true-life Wisconsin serial killer. Although many of the camera angles and shots are very similar, the cast is different, the setting updated, and the theme music re-orchestrated. It was not particularly well-received, but nobody accused Van Sant of plagiarism: the film was seen as more of a hommage to the original.

Video

Because much video is now digitised, it is much easier to copy and ‘quote’ than a film printed on a 35mm celluloid strip. Consequently, much video footage is now used in mashups. These are often created for comic effect – with visual materials from one source counterposed with audio tracks from something entirely different.

A popular case in point is the short sequence from Joachim Fest’s 2004 film Downfall about the last days of Adolf Hitler. This has been used as the basis of any number of satirical parodies. The original video footage and the sound track of Hitler’s furious rant about the war being lost is retained – but new sub-titles are inserted with reference to anything from English football managers being sacked, Hitler’s plans to invade Ireland, his rage at having been banned from Microsoft’s arcade game Xbox. and even rants about the frequency and quality of Downfall parodies themselves. In this example (ranting about the new iPad) he finishes his rant with a request not to put the video clip onto YouTube.

What makes these clips funny is the fact that the film remains the same, but the subtitles are re-written to provide ridiculous and completely inappropriate subjects for his rantings, often focussed on trivial contemporary events. Why is this not classed as plagiarism? For two important reasons. First – the people who make these parodies don’t suggest for one minute that they have made the original Downfall footage. Second – they are not attempting to profit from their re-use of the visual material. Their object is to create fun which is freely available to anybody.

Joachim Fest has endorsed the production of these parodies on the grounds that they reinforce his original message – that people who become too powerful should be exposed by revealing their megalomania, with mockery if necessary.

Blogs

Blogging is rather like the Wild West of the Internet. Anybody can write whatever they wish and publish it to a personal blog for the rest of the world to see and read. There is virtually no control over content, no censorship, and no monitoring of who says what.

Nevertheless, bloggers are on the whole respectful and they attribute the sources of any materials quoted, with web links to the original and hat-tips acknowledging the authors. Some people break these conventions and steal other people’s news items, but they are often found out and held up to ridicule. That’s because once something is put up onto the Internet it’s easy to check its origin and the time and date it was put there. Anyone claiming an ‘exclusive’ or lifting someone else’s copy can be found out if the same material exists in an earlier published version. Even a string of words less than a sentence long can be traced via a Google search in less than a second.

It was common only a few years ago for people to deride blogging as no more than a form of vanity publishing. Now, every self-respecting business (particularly news-related publications and broadcasters) have their own in-house bloggers.

Web sites

In their earliest manifestation, web sites were specialist repositories for scientific research papers and archives of academic materials. Since the democratisation of the Internet, the Web is also now big commercial business. Some online companies exist for the sole purpose of throwing up web pages which will attract the attention of Google searches.

As a consequence of this change, an enormous amount of copyright infringement and plagiarism occurs on web sites. That’s because some people will shamelessly copy existing web pages and take already-syndicated articles to give their own sites more ‘content’. There are even programs that will automate the process. (These are called ‘page scrapers’.) Shady business companies adopt this practice to attract visitors with a minimum of effort and make money from advertising on the site.

However, they do so at their peril, because Google ranks any ‘duplicate material’ as ‘redundant pages’ and demotes them in its page and site rankings.

A similar lack of original content occurs on web sites known as ‘link farms’ or ‘portal sites’. These are sites which merely provide lists of other web sites – usually in categories with multiple sub-menu options. That is, they are empty of any original content. These too are downgraded by Google in its rankings.

Newspapers

Most established newspapers now have their own web sites, and they employ journalists to write the news items and articles that they publish both in print and on line. Copyright and plagiarism is almost never in question. Even when a newspaper uses a photograph or a short report supplied by an independent news agency such as Reuters, the fact will usually be credited and the original source named.

However, a recent case shows that there are always possible exceptions. Johann Hari was a journalist writing for The Independent. He specialised in radical issues, and in particular he wrote in-depth interviews with controversial political figures. Recently, he has been accused of breaking the journalist’s code of ethics. By comparing the text of his articles to previously published work it has been possible to show three primary instances of plagiarism.

He used quotations from other people’s work – without attribution.
He re-wrote other people’s articles, using the structure, sequence, and the arguments of the original.
He used quotations from other people’s interviews – as if the words had been addressed to him personally.

Hari at first strenuously denied these charges of plagiarism, but then it was discovered that he had adopted a false identity (‘David Rose’) and used it to maliciously edit other people’s Wikipedia entries, besmirching their reputations and boosting his own. He was suspended from the Independent, and then eventually admitted his guilt.

Magazines

The only time copyright issues occur in magazines is when one publication decides to re-print an article from another. But this is usually acknowledged, with a footnote along the lines of ‘This article first appeared in the July 2010 issue of Harper’s Bazaar‘.

However, the recent success of The Huffington Post has raised a number of copyright issues. Arianne Huffington created her online news service in 2005-2009. It offers a combination of a frequently updated digital news service with magazine-style articles written by specialists. It has been very successful, and now has versions covering Canada, America, France, Italy, Spain, and the United Kingdom.

But much of the content of the HuffPo is generated by bloggers who are not paid for their articles. They’re encouraged to contribute on any subject they wish; and their work is mingled with product placement articles and other junk journalism. There have also been recent accusations that armies of HuffPo staff are being employed to re-write other people’s original work to escape any accusations of plagiarism.

Copyright cases

Wikipedia has a useful list of copyright case law in Australia, Canada, United Kingdom, and the United States. This takes account of historical rulings and recent cases involving digital works, trademarks, photographs, peer-to-peer file sharing, definitions of originality, distribution, and even ‘what is not a sculpture’.

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Self-plagiarism – how to avoid it

July 3, 2011 by Roy Johnson

how to understand and avoid self-plagiarism

What is self-plagiarism?

Self-plagiarism is literally copying your own work. It can occur when quoting your own work without acknowledgement, or when you use the same piece of work for two different purposes.

Plagiarism is commonly defined as “taking someone else’s ideas or words and trying to pass them off as your own original work”. Most people understand the rules. If you quote from somebody else’s work, you put the words in quote marks and acknowledge the source, either as part of your text or in an endnote or footnote. Details of how to use quotations accurately are a separate issue. These conventions allow a reader to check the validity of the claims being made, the accuracy of the quotation, and to see (if necessary) how the quotation was used in its original context.

However, what if the words quoted were written by the same author of the text in question? Does this constitute plagiarism? If plagiarism is thought of as an issue of ‘ownership’, it would seem that it’s impossible to steal from yourself. But a number of cases exist where the re-use of your own work can easily become self-plagiarism.

Self-plagiarism in academic writing

It’s not normally permitted to submit a piece of work witten for one course and award as a submission for part of another. That is, a dissertation on The Poetry of Thomas Hardy written for a BA in English Literature cannot be re-submitted as part of the requirements for a separate MA course in’ Landscape and Literature’.

Even though the writing is an original piece of work by the author, academic rules forbid the re-use of material in this way. Dissertation and thesis rules normally stipulate that the material submitted for the award of a degree must not have appeared anywhere else before. Attempts to use the same material for two different purposes is sometimes known as ‘double-dipping’.

Academic authors are under a great deal of pressure to publish more and more of their research findings. This sometimes leads to the practice of publishing the same research data, with a slightly different analytic commentary. This is classed as duplicate or redundant publishing, and is severely frowned on by publishers. It is sometimes know as ‘Salami-slicing’.

The converse of this practice is known as ‘data augmentation’. This occurs when an already-published piece of work is re-published with new data, as if it were a new piece of work. This too is frowned on by the academic community and is regarded as a form of self-plagiarism.

Self-plagiarism and copyright

When a piece of work is published, copyright is automatically established, and rests with the original author. In contracts between publishers and authors, the author normally agrees to share copyright with the publisher. This means that the publisher is free to publish and re-use the author’s material (usually to the author’s benefit) and the author is normally allowed to maintain ownership of the work.

But if the author then re-cycles the work in question and publishes it elsewhere, this creates a case of both self-plagiarism and breach of copyright – since the original publisher may share copyright to the material.

Text recycling

Some parts of an academic paper may relate to research methods and procedures. The researcher describes accurately the sequence of events, the materials used, and the procedures of the research project. It’s quite likely that these will be the same in another experiment or piece of research of a similar kind.

There is therefore a great temptation to use templates of ‘boilerplate’ descriptions which can be re-used from one piece of research to the next. This is currently a contentious area of self-plagiarism, but it is worth noting that is is very easy to detect.

Citation stuffing

Academic authors are often rated according to how many times their work is quoted in academic papers and journals. Authors therefore have an built-in temptation to quote from their own work as much as possible – no matter how relevant it might be to the subject under discussion. In its worst cases, when authors articifically quote themselves for the sake of increasing the number of their own citations, this is therefore regarded as a form of self-plagiarism.

Fortunately, this is reasonably easy to detect, but it is a practice which is likely to continue so long as it is encouraged by publishers – who themselves also have an interest in their papers and journals being cited, thus enhancing their reputation.

You can perhaps see that there are very subtle links between academic honesty, accuracy of quotation, referencing, and the economics of both publishing and academic career structures. It is not the polite gentleman’s club that many people might imagine.

Internet publishing

Self-plagiarism is a very easy trap to fall into on the Internet. It’s possible to write an article, then publish it to a web site or a personal blog. Having done that, there is nothing to stop you posting the same article on another web site which aggregates similar materials. The article appears twice – with or without acknowledgement. This creates what in academic publishing is known as duplicate or redundant publication.

Unless you are a well-known author, few people are likely to complain, but it is worth noting that since Google will index the same article twice, the web page will immediately be given a lower ranking by Google, because it contains ‘duplicate material’. In terms of search engine rankings, the second instance of the article is competing against the first.

Newspaper journalists are faced with this problem all the time. But many of them now make a clear distinction between the articles they write as part of their contract with the newspaper, and the occasional smaller pieces they post onto personal blogs.

Re-cycling

Some people argue that if a piece of writing is published in a different context, for a different audience, then there can be little possibility of offence. The text may be re-edited to suit the new audience. But strictly speaking, this would still be plagiarism, unless the original source was acknowledged with a note such as: “This article first appeared as ‘Travels through Norther Italy’ in Atlantic Monthly Vol XII, number 28.”

Commercial publishing

One newspaper or magazine will occasionally reprint and article which has already been published elsewhere. The publisher usually does this fully conscious of the fact – and the article is likely to be followed by a note to its original source: “This article first appeared in Weekend magazine July 2010. The author may even be paid twice, but would not be accused of plagiarism, because no attempt to conceal the original source is being made.

Books which go out of print are occasionally re-printed by a separate publisher who see further commercial potential in the work. In such cases there will be an acknowledgement on the page listing publishing details – such as ‘First published by Acorn Books 1992’.