My experience is very much along the lines of Dr. Drake’s.
Another way tone can serve as an indication of plagiarism: an undergraduate turns in something that reads as standard, good, clear academic writing instead of undergrad prose. Sometimes the student is exceptionally advanced, but more often than not an internet search reveals the source that was copied. And if I can’t find the source, a discussion with the student can reveal whether he/she understands, much less wrote, what he/she turned in.
Thank you all very. I still think it can be a gray area at times because of many collocations that naturally come to mind when we are formulating ideas. Dictionaries after all list/cite many collocations that we use in our daily discourse. They don’t necessarily explain their origins.
davidmich
There are also cases where this happens and it doesn’t mean anything, but obviously it’s up to the teacher.
For instance, in physics we were only allowed to submit documents that could be scanned by Turnitin (obviously). They had a super strict “no PDF” policy, because sometimes PDFs couldn’t be scanned, even though LaTeX PDFs almost always can be scanned. By that point, I almost exclusively used LaTeX for everything, but especially mathematics since it’s a billion times easier to write.
I managed to work out an arrangement where as long as I turned in the tex source as a .txt file, I could also submit the PDF. (Again, this was superfluous since Turnitin could read the PDF files, but whatever). However, the TeX files always came up with >25% matching.
Why? Because I was using a template for formatting, so a gigantic chunk of the top of the document were ligatures setting up things like the margins, the font, etc that matched pretty much every other Turnitin submission of TeX source using the standard Windows TeXWorks article template ever.
I never got called on it, because it was obvious what was going on to anybody that looked at the paper, but sometimes Turnitin will catch shit like that.
In scientific articles, for example, there are only so many ways to say mutation A causes disease B which is characterized by X, Y, and Z.
I remember seeing online comments about a self-plagiarism article where a lot of people were like “Do I really need to come up with unique ways to say the same thing in the 20 articles I’ve published on mutation A? Space is limited and I think what I’ve come up with for the first two paragraphs is concise and I want to reuse it.”
Self-plagiarism is to promote original research. You shouldn’t be publishing more than one article about why mutation A is characterized by X,Y, and Z. At the level of publication, you should be saying something interesting and new about the mutation. If you’re publishing a paper in order to verify/replicate the results of the older paper, then you cite the older paper (even if it’s your own).
I’ve recently read a large number of papers on Fuzzy Logic by Zadeh, and he never once has to repeat things from an older paper. If there’s ever an overwhelming need to directly use something previously published, he cites it.
If you really find yourself frequently needing to recycle your work, the correct response is to question what you’re writing about and the novelty of your research. That’s why self-plagiarism is treated seriously.
I guess I’m not talking about recycling work but using the same paragraph or two in the introduction to define the problem. “Mutation A causes disease B which is characterized by X,Y, and Z.” Then “In order to investigate the mechanisms causing X, Y, and Z further, we did blah, blah, blah” And then the paper would go on to describe the new work.
Personally, I think self-plagiarism is not OK, but it was interesting reading comments by people who thought it should be.
I guess it might be more of a GD question if it is ever acceptable.
Well, this depends on what you are characterizing and how deep you get into it. I agree you should not be re-presenting published data in a new article. In grad school, I was in a journal club where we would cover papers from James Rothman’s lab on membrane transport in the cell on a regular basis. Each paper would push the understanding a little bit further than the previous paper. But the intitial introductions of the papers were along the lines of “this is an important process and we need to understand it better”*. Rothman won the Nobel Prize this year for his work in this area, so it was kind of interesting that I had followed it for a while as it was coming out. But that’s off topic with regard to the OP.
I’ve wondered this too - not only for the reasons you’ve mentioned, but there just seems like something gauche in putting your own name in the bibliography.
I get what people are saying in the “You shouldn’t need to re-use your own work” but in some fields, there’s a chance you are the authority on the subject (or one of the few people actively involved in the field) and there’s only so often you can make the same points in the same way.
Incidentally, in the media, a handy way around this is a disclaimer like “This article first appeared (in a modified format, if applicable) in [publication] [date].”
This is the reason it came to mind. I worked on a rare genetic disease as a postdoc. Around 500 reported cases since it was first described about 40 years ago. Probably less than 10 primary investigators working/have worked on it and my old adviser is probably the most active.
Pretty much every paper started out “Disease B is characterized by X, Y, and Z. This is what’s known–mutation 1”. And then “Here we report new findings on mutation 2 (or new clinical case 3, or whatever).”
Well get over it. This routinely done, usually appropriate, and frequently necessary. Very often a researcher will be building a long complex case for some position over time via a succession of papers. Readers need the self-citation information in order to be able to follow what is going on. I have published a paper with the specific intent of establishing a fact that I knew I would need as a premise in the argument of a later, more important paper I intended to write. If I hadn’t cited the first paper in the second, there would have been little point to the first one, and the case made in the second would have been unconvincing (and if the argument of the first paper had had to be included in the second, it would have made it much too long for any journal to consider publishing it). Poeple undoubtedly do this sort of thing all the time.
Also, there is really noting wrong with “self-plagirism” of the sort described by dasmoocher: re-using a few sentences or even a couple of paragraphs of expository, framing material in setting up the problem or explaining its wider relevance. Research is not a literary competition concerned with coming up with new, fresh ways of saying the same thing again, but the same things sometimes do have to be said again, largely because people have not read your earlier paper where they were first explained (or course, you will be derelict if you do not give them the citation to it so they can do so).
Professional research papers are, in this regard, a completely different case from student essays. Student can rightly get in trouble for self-plagiarism because the purpose of a student essay is not really to communicate information (let alone new information) but is, on the one hand, an exercise intended to help the student to learn and practice how to express themselves effectively in this sort of medium, and on the other it is a vehicle via which the teacher can asses how much the student has learned. If a student is self-plagiarizing when they write an essay, they are not learning anything. The situation with real professional research papers is completely different.
From a college-teacher friend, here are a couple of recent instances:
when the tone & content of the writing changed from as english-second-language 20-something college student to an 1800’s germanic professor translation – very obvious change. (And did you think the professor wouldn’t recognize a direct quote from one od the ‘founding fathers’ of the field? Had it been cited as an authority, it would have helped the argument in the paper!)
lifting passages directly, without even changing verb tense to fit in, from assigned class readings. And worse, the professor was the editor of that book of readings – did you think he wouldn’t recognize plagiarism from his own book?
In both cases, the excuse given was the old ‘copying like that is considered respect in our culture’ – this despite clear verbal & written warnings against plagiarims, with examples, and despite giving papers back to be redone, with plagiarized sections marked. (“cite?”)
The journals I’m involved with have a rule requiring 30% new material, even if it is a conference paper submitted to an archival journal. In fact the submission includes a section describing exactly what is new.
And while I agree with you about literary merit, if an author has found the best way to describe a subject, often after a few review cycles, it would be dumb to not reuse it.
I’ve heard discussions of the “least publishable unit” - the minimum new stuff to get a paper accepted.
I think we are in basic agreement on this point. There are areas of science and scholarship where you can get away with a certain amount of self-plagiarism, and it is acceptable and ethically right that you should be able to.
Student essays, however, are a different matter. As is plagiarism of someone else’s work, by anyone.
Of course academics do sometimes plagiarize others works. It has happened to me. In a couple of cases I have in mind, I am actually cited, but it is in such a way that what are essentially my own words as well as my ideas are made to look like the plagiarist’s own, although my work is cited in support of them.
In another instance, I was actually a referee for a paper whose main content was essentially a rehash (with some minor evidential additions and alternative interpretations) of something I had published about 20 years before. It did mention my work, but only to quibble about some minor interpretative point. It was not made at all clear that the central facts under discussion had been discovered by me and not them. I did, however, think their alternative interpretation of the facts wsa worth publishing (although I do not agree with it), and the journal editor eventually allowed the paper to be published, but with a footnote to the title acknowledging that my “excellent” research had “opened up much of the ground that [the authors were] exploring.” I was less than fully satisfied.
Mind you, I prefer something like that to being cited in support of a view that I was, in fact, only expounding in order to very explicitly and quite vehemently argue against it. That has happened several times.
This is one of the problems I’ve had with self-plagiarism policies in schools. Think about it this way: If a student self-plagiarizes and the final product would otherwise be unacceptable, then flunk the bastard with my regards. But if the essay would be sufficient for a passing grade but for the self-plagiarism, then what that really indicates is that the student has already mastered the applicable course requirements, and if this is happening consistently in a course, then maybe the student should receive a passing grade and be admitted to the next level of study without having to endure the rigamarole of assignments that are beneath their level. Why are schools generally not willing to accept that their students are all at different levels of academic development and that some need to really bone up and learn a lot, some know most of the stuff and need to fill in a few gaps, and some know all or nearly all of the material but they learned it on the job, on grandma’s lap, in a different class, a class at a different school that was non-transferable due to school policy issues, or they otherwise are not recognized by the school as having that knowledge. I know too many stories of people who had to retake basic classes because they couldn’t get their credits to transfer to a new school - why shouldn’t these people be allowed to resubmit work?
Advisor: You need to take Advanced Psychological Techniques in Hyperbolic Topology at Victorian Hospitals 453.
Student: I learned all about that at Podunk State. It was part of Victorian Psychology 345 and Topological Studies in 19th Century Psychology 459.
Advisor: We don’t recognize those classes. Register for ours.
Instructor: In this class, you will be expected to <blah> For your first assignment, I want an essay on one of the founding discoveries in the field.
Student <raises hand>: I already wrote an essay on this. I picked Hubertus Q. Blarg and his theory of Opopome Banditry. This class is so boring, can I make a few minor tweaks for the style requirements of this school and go home? I’d rather learn something new.
Because in the case of papers, it’s not the particular subject matter, it’s the process.
For example, if I see a person has a degree in English, and I look at their transcript and see that they have take ten upper-level English courses, that means that they have most probably written ten substantial researched arguments about Literature. They are experienced, not just in Melville and Milton and Marlowe, but in a certain process and methodology. If they actually only wrote three researched arguments, and rehashed them as needed, they are missing a big chunk of experience implied by their degree.
That said, professors are usually pretty open to working with students in unusual circumstances. I had to take a Freshman Lit survey my senior year of college. When I walked in, the professor, who had taught me in upper-level classes, took my aside and suggested I come to his graduate level class for a couple weeks instead, and we would call it even. That worked well. Most professors, IME, would be open to modifying an assignment to making it something interesting or relevant for the student if it’s truly redundant. When, instead, a kid resubmits the same paper without explaining the situation, there is undeniable deception involved.
Heh, I have that beat. I had to retake a course because it was offered by a different department in college. I had taken Advanced Cell Biology from the Biology department as a MS student. My doctorate program told me I had to take Advanced Cell Biology from the Genetics department. First year level grad class, not some more advanced seminar.
I had some points taken off some exam answer in the Genetics course and when I asked the the professor about it, she told me I was incorrect and suggested I take professor So-and-So’s advanced seminar on the topic if I wanted to know more about it. I said I had taken it last semester (the Biology course had counted as the prereq) and the answer she was looking for was outdated information from the textbook and we had covered the current papers in the seminar.
You seem to suffering from the common but profound misapprehension that the purpose of education is to stuff facts into people’s heads. It isn’t. (This misapprehension, perhaps, also explains the bee you seem to have in your bonnet about memorization.) It is also a mistake to assume what once some facts do stuffed into someone’s head, they necessarily stay there very long. Just because you understood something well enough to write a passable essay about it last year, it does not follow that you still understand it now.
Because we have a number of the interested parties here already, I’ll ask these here instead of plagiarizing the topic to start a new thread:
Unintentional plagiarism: Does it exist? Assume the person knows what plagiarism is and knows generally how to avoid it in their chosen field. (Another field-specific subtlety: In Computer Science, certain algorithms essentially can’t be ‘plagiarized’ unless you’re actually stupid enough to claim you invented them. There’s only one Quicksort, everyone is presumed to know it, and you don’t have to ‘cite’ it if it appears in your code.)
Common knowledge: [del]Threat or menace?[/del] [del]Does it exist?[/del] What’s the threshold? The sky is blue. The water is wet. Everyone knows a cat is a pet. Does an advanced biology student really need to cite that red blood cells carry oxygen bound in hemoglobin? If someone uses the undecidability of the Halting Problem in an argument, do they absolutely need to cite to Turing?