[AISWorld] Plagiarism and "Self-Plagiarism"

[Andrew Urbaczewski]

Dear colleagues,

If anything, I think all the debate around this issue by scholars around the world shows that, at least at this time, having a group of journal editors or a small group within AIS act as judge, jury, and executioner on the issue of self-plagiarism is a bit premature.

I think? we can all agree that submitting someone else's previously published paper to a journal is wrong.
I think? we can all agree that submitting an exact copy of a paper published by one journal in the past to another journal is wrong.
I think? we can all agree that taking a student's or colleague's unpublished paper and submitting it as your own without appropriation is wrong.

If we want to go down the road of setting standards and penalties for plagiarism (which I'm not sure we do, but for sake of argument let's say we do), maybe we should start with these baby steps?

Andrew

----------------------------------------
Andrew Urbaczewski, Ph.D.
Chair, Department of Management Studies
Associate Professor of MIS
College of Business
University of Michigan - Dearborn
19000 Hubbard Drive, FCS 127
Dearborn, MI 48126
+1 313 583.6302

SKYPE me at aurbaczewski

"I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty than to those attending too small a degree of it." — Thomas Jefferson





On 14 Dec, 2011, at 05:32 , Lars Taxén wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> Just a small addition to Pekkola's post.
> 
> A similar situation is when you have elaborated a theory that can be
> applied to various problems in different contexts. A certain
> contribution would then consist of a common "module" describing the
> theory, and a specific contribution for each context in which the
> theory is applied. Each paper is a significant contribution, although
> it contains a part that is the same in several contributions.
> 
> It would be nice if you could  "reuse" the theory-module by just
> copying the text and write only the specific part. However, this is
> not possible today unless you have the consent of the publisher of a
> previous contribution. To me, it does not make much sense to make
> cosmetic changes in the theory-module just to escape the copy-right
> rules.  A "modular" kind of publishing system would be much
> appreciated, I believe.
> 
> Lars
> 
> 
> 2011/12/14 Pekkola Samuli <samuli.pekkola at tut.fi>:
>> Hi,
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> just a little comment.
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> The evaluation of an article, whether it is (self-)plagiarism (agree the
>> problems with the term), should be based on the contributions of the paper.
>> As long as the contributions in two papers are _significantly_ different,
>> there should be no issue of recycling chapters/paragraphs or fear being
>> accused for plagiarism. This means that conf/workshop papers can be updated
>> to journals providing they make significant additions to our knowledge base.
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> Particularly this is an issue when constructing the systems/models/etc. For
>> example, long time ago I designed, build and evaluated systems. Publishing
>> the results of each of those phases meant that I had to recycle the ideas
>> and even text from the earlier papers. Let say the first paper(s) was about
>> design principles and features of the to-be system. The second (set of)
>> papers were more technical. To understand them and the design rationale
>> behind, I had to describe the design principles from the first (set of)
>> papers. And with the third set of papers, i.e. evaluating the technical
>> construct, I had to describe both the design principles (i.e. the criteria
>> for evaluation) and technical construct (that provided a basis to argue why
>> certain criteria were confirmed/disconfirmed). In other words, a large
>> portion of content of the third set of papers were adapted from the earlier
>> two sets. However, each and every paper still makes different contribution.
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> From this perspective, to make strict rules that x% of the text needs to be
>> new is bit strange, as a lot of content might be the same (even though
>> rewritten). My two cents is to focus on contributions and their uniqueness
>> and significance.
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> samuli
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> --
>> 
>> Samuli Pekkola
>> 
>> Professor, Adjunct Professor, PhD
>> Head of Department
>> 
>> Department of Business Information Management and Logistics
>> Tampere University of Technology
>> PO Box 541, 33101 Tampere, Finland
>> t: +358 (0)40 586 0791
>> e: samuli.pekkola at tut.fi
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
> 
> 
> -- 
> Lars Taxén, Associate Professor
> Department of Science and Technology
> Campus Norrköping, Linköpings Universitet
> Rundan 91
> SE 14645 Tullinge, Sweden
> mobile: +46 (0)73 0977864
> lars.taxen at telia.com
> www.neana.se
> 
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