Here’s a self-plagiarism scenario: student turns in the same essay/project in two different courses. (Less easy to get away with today than when I was a youth, but let’s say the profs aren’t using the same online plagiarism checkers.)
It seems obvious to me that this would violate the usual norms of academic integrity, but the more I try to figure out why that’s the case, the less sure I am that it’s really a plagiarism case at heart.
Are we expecting the student to provide a citation saying “this entire paper was written by me last year for another class?” (I don’t remember an MLA or Turabian citation format for school assignments, although now I’m sure there will turn out to be several variations.)
Huh. See, to me, this seems completely natural and practical. I’d even applaud the student for his or her resourcefulness. I guess it’s a good thing I never pursued a career in academia.
The usual answer is that “it’s plagiarism because the professor says it is”; that is, plagiarism is defined by social norms, not laws, and in a class, the professor gets to set the norms absolutely.
A more complex answer is that a paper (or any other assignment) is meant to showcase your understanding of the material in that class, not of the material in a previous class, and that copying previous work does not show the progress you made recently.
(Plus, it hardly shows you off to your best advantage. You have made progress since you wrote that old paper, haven’t you?)
Here is my experience, judge it how you will. I have published three books, all with the same lightly edited introductory chapter. I saw–and still see–no reason for the second and third appearance to cite the first. The second was written with the same coauthor and after the first was out of print and copyright returned to us (yes, I understand the distinction, but wanted to anticipate the objection). The third was written when the second was out of print and copyright returned, but then I got formal permission from my coauthor of the first two books to use that chapter (again, somewhat edited). But I cannot view that as plagiarism.
OTOH, I was once a member of a committee that gave out government research grants. We were presented with an application for a grant whose CV showed 80 publications over the previous 5 years, an extraordinary number. Applicants were supposed to submit up to five publications from the previous 5 years and these were sent out to three referees. It turned out that the five publications he submitted were substantially the same paper published (without attribution) in five different journals. One of the referees wrote something like, “With 80 papers to choose from surely he could have found 5 distinct ones.” Maybe not. He didn’t get a grant and the self-plagiarism was cited as the reason (never mind that the paper was essentially trivial). So you can be accused of plagiarism yourself, but the criticism was over the inflated publication record.
I was once a member of a parents’ committee that advised the school. As such I drafted, and the committee accepted a representation to Ministry of Education. A year later, the same issue came up and I was again charged with drafting a report to the government. Naturally, I used a lot of what I had said the first time. I was accused of plagiarism by a member of the committee who hadn’t been there the previous year and didn’t realize that I had drafted the first report. It was not the kind of report in which you give citations so I could either reuse my first report or start over and I was not inclined to do that and didn’t. So I copied myself but I don’t consider it as plagiarism.
At my university it was specifically cited as academic misconduct to turn in the same paper for different classes. As snoe said, it’s still something of a grey area as far as whether it’s actual plaigarism or not. I guess it’s up to the school to define, and it can be against the rules regardless. Still, how would you properly cite it? And what if said paper was for two classes in the same semester? Which would be considered the first “publication”? It would be a sort of loopback situation.
I cannot answer the OP definitively, but it seems to me that it is best to err on the side of caution.
I wrote an academic paper some years ago, that included some quotes from a book I had written a few years before that. I gave myself proper attribution in the footnotes and bibliography. It just made sense, that no matter who researched and wrote what, if I used them, they get attribution.
There are all kinds of circumstances under which I could get into trouble for duplicating work I’ve done before.
In academia, if I try to pass old work off as new, I’ll be nailed and punished for it.
If a writer tries to fulfill a contractual obligation by essentially re-writing an earlier work, he’ll face bad repercussions, too.
I did exactly this in college, though I had permission of both professors ahead of time. I don’t know if there was any rule about it at the time. Neither professor mentioned anything.
To answer the OP’s question: every university or college has their own academic standards policy that define plagiarism so the answer may vary but…
I’ve taught at 3 different universities and each one considered the inclusion of any part of any previously written papers without proper citation to be plagiarism. Each school explicitly noted that this included the authors own previous written work (whether “journal published” or simply a paper submitted for another class). Where I’ve taught, the minimum penalty for plagiarism was failing the course (not just failing the submitted paper) with notation on a student’s permanent academic record. Maximum penalty was expulsion from the school.
At each school they further explicitly noted that a student could only submit their own previous work with advance permission from their Professor. The student would have to show me the entire paper they wanted to use (even if they only were using a small section or paragraph) and I would have to pre-approve it and they still had to cite it.
Checking for Plagiarism in 2017: For those “old school” dopers who are wondering how this works - all the schools I’ve taught at have software that detects plagiarism. I’m familiar with one called “SafeAssign”. Students no longer submit printed papers, they submit assignments electronically and I process them through SafeAssign. I get a “% of this paper from other sources” score and that determines whether I look into it further i.e: “3% from other sources” versus 90%. SafeAssign compares the submission to everything on the web plus all other papers ever submitted to it. In my experience most papers come up in the 70% “from other sources” range, so I have to examine it further.
When I click open the paper in SafeAssign, I get what looks like a Word document with each non-original text highlighted in various different colours. When I hover over the text, a pop-up appears telling me the original source, like the newspaper article, text book, a previously submitted student paper etc."Student paper submitted by John Smith, University of Toronto 2013) (The days of using your friend’s older brother’s paper are gone.) Based on that I then decide whether to pursue plagiarism.
As I tell my students, using someone else’s work in your paper is not the problem, not citing them is the problem, and this includes work you previously handed in.
And yes, I did fail a several students who submitted papers that they’d previously submitted in other courses. It’s not uncommon for a 3rd or 4th year student to pick a topic they’d written a paper on in first year thinking they’re taking a shortcut to less work. Not a good idea any more.
Same–I also made a point to get permission.
University rules are actually somewhat irrelevant when it comes to classroom conduct. The professor is free to ban things that aren’t explicitly banned by the University policies and free to ignore things that are (if the professor doesn’t report it, the school won’t know about it, and the school can’t take action on violations it doesn’t know about).
No, he’s wrong, though only in a technical sense - it’s the same case, not a new one. A claim for (defendant’s) prevailing party attorney’s fees is a counterclaim, and only exists as a derivative action to some underlying dispute. You can’t just file suit seeking attorney’s fees; you have to request them in your filings in the original suit.
Fogerty appealed the trial court’s order (entered after the jury had otherwise decided the case favorably for him) denying his claim for attorney’s fees. If he had not sought attorney’s fees during the original trial, and later filed a new lawsuit seeking attorney’s fees based on the jury’s findings, they would have to be denied. The case is styled as “Fogerty v. Fantasy” because Fogerty was the appellant at the SCOTUS stage, not because he was the plaintiff. SCOTUS lists the appellant first in its case names, while the Federal circuit courts keep the party name ordering from the original case (plaintiff first).
I say that this is a technical distinction because it is true that the merits of Fantasy’s infringement claim were not at issue on appeal. For whatever reason Fantasy did not appeal any portion of the ruling (which was almost entirely unfavorable to them).
Sure, but what does it matter? I had a sort of evolving paper on data compression that I essentially started as an essay in a programming class, and that ended up as a duly cited research paper several years later.
I never did turn the same exact paper in twice, but what I did do was flesh out the existing one as I went, with minor to extensive rewriting to accommodate requirements given by the various professors.
A lot of it was just serendipity, in that each subsequent assignment could be mostly fulfilled by the same topic and basic paper framework, albeit modiifed and expanded in each example.
I guess my feeling is that what does it matter/why is it anyone’s business if someone recycles a paper for a later class, so long as it’s not literally a resubmission of the same exact paper.
I guess it depends on the purpose of the assignment. If the purpose is to get you to learn something new, or to gain experience at doing research, recycling an old paper would defeat that purpose.
My thinking is that if one can recycle an old paper and get a good grade (I got consistent A grades on that paper FWIW), wouldn’t that show that they have sufficient mastery already without having to go through all the steps to produce an entirely new paper? I mean, if you’re assigned a research paper, and can recycle one that gets an A, doesn’t that show that you’re already good at that task?
If you had an A on a first year paper and resubmitted it in 4th year and got another A, I’d be surprised but also very disappointed by the professor or school - they are clearly not doing a good job teaching, developing assignments and/or grading.
Speaking only for myself and the school’s I’ve taught (and still teach) at and as someone who teaches both 1st and 4th year courses, the expectations of 1st versus 4th years are dramatically different.
First years are expected to primarily display “knowledge” which is basic factual understanding, typically based on memorization of facts and definitions. By fourth year they’re expected to have “evaluative” understanding. This is being able to look at new situations and interpret data and apply previous 'knowledge" to new situations to make decisions, judgments or new hypotheses on that data.
These categories are not randomly developed, they’re based on "Bloom’s Taxonomy"and have been used everywhere I’ve every taught as a formal standard to develop assessments. Bloom's taxonomy - Wikipedia
I’ve developed a couple of courses completely from scratch. The course is identified as “introductory” or “advanced” or somewhere in between and then all the assessments I develop have to show the appropriate level of expected knowledge based on Bloom’s.
I’m sure there are professors and schools that don’t follow this kind of formal procedure but I’ve never heard of a properly accredited school not doing so.
I was involved in a situation like that. I was editing a report that a consultant had been paid to prepare for an international development firm. While doing some research for editorial purposes, I stumbled upon an earlier report written by the same consultant for a different client, in which some of the same text appeared.
I reported this to the firm - they were not happy, although my guess is that the only consequences the writer faced were probably reluctance on the part of the firm to use him in the future, or more explicit contracts regarding the LOE (level of effort - how many days you can bill for) they would pay him for.
The issue wasn’t so much that he had plagiarized himself as that he didn’t acknowledge it. The firm would certainly want him to make explicit reference to his other report, because if he didn’t, the firm could end up looking like they were stealing material from a competitor.
Further, the LOE in his contract was based on writing from scratch. If he’d already done a significant chunk of research and writing, he should have said something like, “I can base this part of my report on earlier work I did on the same topic, so I will only need 1/2 day rather than 5 days to prepare that section.”
For an example in one research paper I wrote in university, I had to cite the example as originally written by me and translated into English by me. At the time, I thought the professor was being a bit too strict. Now I understand the reasons behind his requirement.
I didn’t say I recycled the same exact paper, but rather that I used the prior version as a starting point for the next iteration. So separate papers, but using the previous version(s) as a skeleton or even as the bulk of the paper.
So the original was a 500 word essay on a topic of interest in computer science my first year and I chose data compression. Second go-round was a technical writing research paper a couple of years later- I took the original paper and fleshed it out quite a bit, and added a bibliography, in-text citations, etc… Third go-round was a MIS paper on a networking concept. Took the tech writing paper, expanded it a bit more with sections on audio and video compression (MP3 music and streaming video were hot topics at the time). Final go-round was another “topic of interest” essay, and I basically chopped the research paper back into an essay.
And citing an unpublished paper is kind of a strange idea, as you can’t verify the citation. It’s a nice idea, and there are lots of examples out there of how to cite unpublished works of various sorts, but I’d think in an academic context any citation like that is the equivalent of hearsay in a legal context, and therefore something to avoid.
Yes - I get what you mean - submitting a paper on the same topic is not the same as submitting the same paper. You obviously added a lot to it and it required more in-depth thinking. The point I was trying to make is that if you submitted the exact same paper in a higher level course and did well, something’s wrong.
Also, we don’t consider “published” as any sort of criterion. If the paper or assignment has ever been submitted in a previous course anywhere and not cited, that’s it: you’re plagiarizing. We define it as a “previous work” not a previously “published” work. In addition to the entire internet, I’d guess that SafeAssign’s database must be +1 million papers submitted into courses and never actually published.
The amount of un-cited text “copied” to be considered plagiarizing is up to the professor’s judgement. SafeAssign flags text strings to about the sentence level. If you had a sentence from your old paper inserted verbatim without a cite, “Student Paper Submitted by Bump, 2014” I wouldn’t worry, a paragraph or more and we’d have a chat. Then again, if you were a first year and did that, I might give you a warning and that’s it, If you were 4th year and this was a major assignment, you should know better, so I’d drop the hammer. Plus, there is no reason to plagiarize yourself, just cite your own work!
Speaking just about academia, I can’t see why someone wouldn’t want to cite a previously written paper, because it would be to the author’s credit to have an extensive background on the topic. Showing that it was previously researched shows a depth on the subject. It should add more credibility.
Can you give an example of why someone wouldn’t want to cite a previously researched topic?