Let’s say you publish an academic paper about Topic X, and your paper includes a few paragraphs about a related side issue, relevant to your research. Years later, you’re working on an academic paper about Topic Y, and your few paragraphs about the related side issue are just as relevant as they were years ago. If you lift your own passages, word for word, without attribution, have you committed plagiarism?
According to my wife, who wrote far more academic papers at a much higher level than I, yes, it’s plagiarism. You should properly cite your first paper, even if it was unpublished.
According to Fogerty v. Fantasy, Inc., no you haven’t. To make a long story short, singer John Fogerty wrote a song called The Old Man Down the Road. His former record company, Fantasy Records sued him for plagiarism on the grounds that it sounded like an earlier song that Fogerty wrote for Creedence Clearwater Revival, Run Through the Jungle. The jury ruled in Fogerty’s favor. Fogerty later sued Fantasy Records to recover his legal costs to defend himself. It went all the way to the US Supreme Court, which ruled in Fogerty’s favor in a precedent-setting decision.
Not exactly what you’re talking about but singer John Foggerty of Creedence Clearwater Revival fame was sued for plagiarizing himself.
A guy by the name of Saul Zaentz owned the publishing rights of the entirety of the CCR song book which consisted mostly of songs Foggerty wrote.
When Foggerty released The Old Man is Down the Road from his solo album Centerfield, Zaentz thought it was too much like the Creedence hit Run Through the Jungle and sued him.
Foggerty eventually prevailed in court.
On edit: Damn, ninja’d hard by cochrane.
I’m pretty sure I’ve heard of it being an issue in some scientific papers before. Here is a recent-ish article on the topic (including issuing the possibility of copyright violation).
According to the majority opinion, preventing infringement is not the only purpose of copyright law, nor is it the most important one.
[QUOTE= The majority opinion of the SCOTUS]
Creative work is to be encouraged and rewarded, but private motivation must ultimately serve the cause of promoting broad public availability of literature, music, and the other arts. The immediate effect of our copyright law is to secure a fair return for an author’s creative labor. But the ultimate aim is, by this incentive, to stimulate artistic creativity for the general public good.
[/QUOTE]
I appreciate the responses about copyright law, but I’m more interested in how the issue is viewed in academia.
Right, in scholarly writing you are expected to attribute properly even if it means citing yourself – so you do not misidentify your old research as your new research.
Okay, please pay attention to this—plagiarism and copyright infringement are two different things
John Fogerty was not sued for plagiarizing himself. He was sued for copyright infringement.
If this doesn’t make sense to you or you don’t understand the significance of the difference, I’m happy to respond to questions.
Which is why there soon was a Fogarty song Vanz Kanz Danz with the chorus:
*Vanz can’t dance, but he’ll steal your money,
Watch him or he’ll rob you blind. *
Along with the song Mr. Greed.
Original title was** Zanz Kant Danz**, but he changed that under threat of another lawsuit. But it’s said that in live concerts it often sounded more like Zanz than Vanz.
In 2014, when news came of Zaent’s death, Fogarty responded by posting a like to the song video.
nm
You can plagiarize yourself but this can be viewed in a range of ways depending on the research community. In some cases it is seen as being as bad as plagiarizing others, for others it is viewed as being simply lazy and in other cases it is viewed as being no big deal and in fact quite sensible. In general, it is best to cite your own work and avoid any hassles unless you know for certain that in your research area it is common practice. Also, ensure that the publication you’re submitting to is okay with it.
COPYRIGHT HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH PLAGIARISM.
It’s entirely possible to plagiarize the Hell out of something without violating copyright. For example, you can copy a novel’s setting, character types, plot, and whatever props and set dressing you want as long as you don’t use the same names and you re-write everything in your own words. Utterly unoriginal tripe like that is perfectly safe from copyright lawsuits, but it damned well is plagiarism in every reasonable sense of the term. Copyright allows people to own specific expressions of ideas, not ideas themselves, and plagiarism is all about copying the abstract ideas.
Similarly, there is no such thing as a license to plagiarize any more than there’s a license to cheat on your spouse: If you have all of the relevant permissions, it’s perfectly honest and, therefore, no longer plagiarism.
Finally, and I’ve seen this many times, too many to count, so please don’t ask for examples or I’ll bury you in the damned things, acknowledging copyrights and giving credit does absolutely jack shit when it comes to copyright law. If it was legal, it’s just as legal without the acknowledgements, and if it’s illegal, the acknowledgements don’t make it any more legal.
People really, really want copyright law to align with what they consider to be dishonest, and people always consider plagiarism to be dishonest. That’s where the “ALL COPYRIGHTS ACKNOWLEDGED” nonsense comes from: People think that getting on the right side of plagiarism customs (and that’s all these are, customs) means they’re on the right side of copyright law, and that simply is not how it works. It’s never worked like that.
I would think that if you wanted to repeat a certain section you wrote verbatim, it would carry far more authority if you cited where it was from originally. If some analysis is relevant in two different situations, it’s more likely to be accepted.
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I think there’s a section of the Illuminatus! Trilogy about a fellow called Markov Chaney that was repeated verbatim when the character reappeared in another book by one of the co-authors. But that was fiction, and presumably whoever wrote that bit was the one that reused it. Similarly, the first half of the prologue of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is identical to the prologue up to the last line of So Long and Thanks for All the Fish. But that’s intentional, given how the “not” was removed from “This is not her story”.
At my school, it is considered plagiarizing and cheating.
May be technically, but no.
Not the least bit uncommon for people to devote their life to a niche research topic and write a bunch of papers on similar themes. People generally like to quote their own papers since it may help raise the “importance” score some egos depend on.
Wasn’t the Fogerty v. Fantasy case a follow-on to the infringement case, that didn’t even consider the factual question of infringement, let alone self-infringement?
An earlier case (Fantasy v. Fogerty ?) was settled by a jury in Fogerty’s favor NOT on the grounds that self-infringement is OK, but on the basis that “Run Through the Jungle” and “The Old Man Down the Road” were completely different songs.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
But returning to OP’s question, what if the “passages lifted word for word without attribution” never did describe original research, but were explanatory, or summaries of another’s research? Surely then no self-citation is needed?
Plagiarism saves time …
Yes, you’re right. The case that went to the Supreme Court was on the question of whether Fantasy had to pay Fogerty’s legal fees on the original case. And they really are different songs (pretty obvious to me when I listen to both of them).
It is self-plagiarism, yes. It can vary in seriousness - you could be talking about duplication of a sort of boilerplate introductory paragraph of a paper you’ve published before, prior to the scientific results. This is wrong (IMHO) and something to be avoided, but no one’s going to be that arsed and indeed I see it a fair bit (usually with non-native English speakers).
OTOH, if you’re talking about publishing the same results twice with no citation to the earlier work then that’s duplicate publication and (usually) serious misconduct, high risk of being shown the door anywhere good as it is absolutely flagrant behaviour (and trivial to spot in the information age). Even in the humanities, with the sort of example you give in your OP which may be more of a grey area as ‘results’ don’t have the same meaning, it seems well out of line just to lift passages of text like that.
Sometimes PhD students will publish the introduction of their thesis as a review article (so no primary research - a survey of the field). I have a colleague who insists that they re-write the text, on the basis that it would be self-plagiarism to lift text from one publication (a PhD thesis) into another. This is an extreme position, though, as the differing publication status of a thesis and a paper means that most people would not draw that distinction IME.