[AISWorld] Plagiarism and "Self-Plagiarism"

[Bhattacherjee, Anol]

>From a policy perspective, I agree with Alan Dennis' suggestions, with minor changes to his points #2 and 3.


1.  Drop "self-plagiarism" from our vocabulary.  Rationale: The term "self-plagiarism" is self-contradictory, like self-collaboration or self-communication.  Plagiarism (copying from "others") requires two parties, which is not the case with copying from self. On the contrart, as Ned pointed out earlier, adding the prefix "self" creates a dangerous opening for some Deans/administrators to censure/dismiss even tenured faculty by associating them with the grave academic violation of plagiarism.  Some in the community said that it does not matter what you call it - I think it does, not just for definitional clarity but also to avoid unintended consequences.  More appropriate terms may be "double-dipping" (with a negative tone, which I prefer) or "reuse" (with a positive tone).



2.  Disallow and penalize double publication or simultaneous double-review (I added "double-review") of the same or substantively similar manuscripts at multiple journals, but allow (changed from Alan's "encourage") journal publication of conference papers with proper disclosure of their provenance.  But we should not dilute the value of conferences by publishing only abstracts or weaker papers, which can also hurt conference attendance.



3.  There should be no penalty for reusing portions of text from one's own prior manuscripts on areas that are inconsequential to the main theses or contributions of the manuscript, such as theory, methods, etc., but as a rule of thumb, such overlap should not exceed the majority (say 50%) of the previous manuscript.  (Alan said that we should "encourage" reuse, but "encourage" may send the wrong signal that it is fine to copy and paste from prior papers).


Anol Bhattacherjee
Professor, Information & Decision Sciences
University of South Florida
4202 E. Fowler Ave, CIS 2083
Tampa, FL 33620-7800

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