Allow me to rephrase, and boost my tally of articles
Scholars are passing off old work as new to drive up publications counts. Rebecca Attwood writes
Pressure to publish is pushing many academics to plagiarise large volumes of their own work by "dressing up" their old research to appear as if it were new, a study has found.
Researchers using text-matching software have highlighted the phenomenon of "self-plagiarism", in which academics recycle sections of their previously published work without proper citations.
Scholars who engage in the practice, which undermines academia's pursuit of original knowledge, can gain an unfair career advantage over their more honest colleagues, the researchers say.
A pilot study by Tracey Bretag and Saadia Carapiet from the University of South Australia found that 60 per cent of authors in a random sample of 269 papers from the Web of Science social science and humanities database had self-plagiarised at least once in the period 2003-06. Self-plagiarism was defined "quite generously" as occurring when 10 per cent or more text from any single previous publication was reused without a citation.
"The truth is that if these authors had self-cited in each case, it is unlikely that the editors would have published their work because they would have seen that it had all been published before," Dr Bretag said.
Dr Bretag, who presented a paper on her research last week at the Joint Information Systems Committee's Third International Plagiarism Conference at Northumbria University, believes academics need clearer rules. "I think we ask more of our students than we do of ourselves," she said.
"This issue underpins everything we do as academics. Are academics here to churn out paper after paper saying the same thing over and over again? Academic work is supposed to be original knowledge creation. But as long as you reward this behaviour, it is very hard to change it."
Her findings were likely to represent only the tip of the iceberg, she said, because the study ignored dual or duplicate publication, in which identical articles are printed in different journals. A number of recent studies in medicine and health sciences have found dual-publication rates of about 3 per cent.
John Barrie, chief executive of iParadigms and the man who developed the technology behind Turnitin, the plagiarism-detection software, described self-plagiarism as a "huge" problem.
"Academics receive tenure based on their publications - it is publish or perish. That system creates this massive conflict of interest," he said.
"Anybody who has done any research knows it is very difficult to do. You just can't crank out five, ten papers a year unless (...) you have a research team of 20 people."
This month sees the launch of CrossCheck, an anti-plagiarism system for academic journals created by iParadigms to help publishers verify the originality of submitted work. It will cover 20 million journal articles from major publishers including Elsevier, Nature Publishing Group, Oxford University Press and Sage.
Liz Smith, the head of journal development at Elsevier, said: "Self-plagiarism does happen - it actually happens frequently, I think. We see redundant publication, when the same data are given a different slant, and we've had to withdraw papers that have turned out to be duplicates or near duplicates."
CrossCheck will help editors to spot many types of ethical infringement, she said. "It doesn't matter whether you are duplicating someone else's text or your own, if it is in the CrossCheck database, or on the web, it will be picked up."
rebecca.attwood@tsleducation.com.
Readers' comments (7)
04 Jul 2008 10:57am
Perhaps we can put things into context by using more approriate language. The OED has defined plagiarism as '..to take and use as one's own the thoughts, writings, or inventions of another.' (OED 1987). Excessive recycling of one's own work may be wrong for a range of reasons but it is not plagiarism in the sense of stealing the ideas of others. Taken to their logical conclusion, the allegations made in this article would require subsequent editions of a text to fully reference all repetition from the previous edition. There is also the concept of developing one's own work, which often requires a certain degree of repetition to create a meaningful narrative. An agreed guidance code regarding the extent of necessary referencing in these circumstances would be more useful than the throwing around of the word plagiarism.
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04 Jul 2008 3:25pm
This is hardly a recent phenomenon. I have worked with several academics over the last 30 years who were adept, nay compulsive, 'recyclers' and you can find numerous ones in the literature if you look. A favourite has always been the translation in a foreign language journal. Perhaps these researchers may care to repeat their work for samples from the past.
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04 Jul 2008 6:19pm
Having recently completed (as a mature student) a PhD I have to say that I found (compared with my first degree 30 years ago) the vast majority of academic research to be rather pointless. Individual academics can't be blamed - they're just playing the RAE game. It hardly takes an investigation of the type reported here to conclude that the average academic won't generate 3 or 4 genuinely new ideas each year - most of the great thinkers of history were lucky to achieve this in a lifetime. Obviously, honest referencing is important but let's be honest that isn't really the point. Rather than pointing the finger at a few who play the game unfairly, the academic community should be brave enough to stand up against the game itself. Universities survived for centuries generating research only when it was thought appropriate, get rid of this accountant driven madness.
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05 Jul 2008 4:33pm
The problem is not that people repeat themselves but that anybody (or any government, or any funding body) thinks that counting publications (or citations) is a good way to judge research quality (or even quantity).
I repeat myself with variations all the time because I keep finding ways of improving, expanding, qualifying, etc. what I have previously written. Mostly I now do this on web pages where it's the same page that gets modified, but I don't see why if I am asked to contribute a conference or journal paper I should not offer a new, improved version of what I previously wrote.
If people try to assess the worth of what I have done by counting anything then that is just an indication of their stupidity.
As for how research should be evaluated, that's a long story, but the most important part of the answer is that we should evaluate researchers in terms of their originality, scholarship, clarity, depth, ability to synthesise, ability to come up with theories that have many and diverse implications relevant to a lot of interesting questions, ability to find flaws in previous work and to remedy them, ability to communicate, ability to inspire others, ability to find important new facts that have previously not been noticed, ability to improve research methods, ability to create new experimental and mathematical tools, and many more.
Slightly different answers are needed for the humanities and creative arts, but the general point is that researchers should be evaluated by the content of what they achieve not by either the number of presentations nor the number of admirers they have.
Aaron Sloman
University of Birmingham, UK
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09 Jul 2008 12:29pm
It's easy to repeat oneself by accident. Imagine (for a fairly trivial example) that I've written three papers on flower imagery in Jacobean poetry. Now I'm writing a paper on flower imagery in Jacobean drama. Although the research is new, I may use the same phrases to identify the flowers which grew in various parts of the UK during the period, may have similar summaries of scholarship, etc. Often this is accidental -- without actually having my earlier work in front of me, I might start a sentence "The rose ..." and in thinking how to describe it for the new paper actually have my earlier description emerge from my memory.
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12 Jul 2008 11:59pm
Vita padding is not really self-plagiarism, but it is really pretty irritating. I am a political theorist and can think of several people in my field who regularly include entire sections of already published papers into other, subsequently published works. OK, fine, if you've said it well once and are expanding or extending the argument, that seems fine (although noting the earlier version at the point where you are lifting from it, rather than just generically in the 'acknowledgments' seems appropriate).
My beef is with colleagues who publish exactly the same paper again and again and again. This, I imagine, is because their work is so important or insightful that it simply demands to be repeatedly re-printed. I can think of one egregious example (not unique, and not the most egregious) of a colleague who published a paper as part of an invited symposium in the journal Political Theory . He then allowed it to be published in an edited volume that reproduced the symposium in its entirety. He subsequently reprinted the paper in a volume he himself edited out of a conference at his home University. And he then included the paper in a collection of his essays. Each of the latter three appearances were brought out by different presses - Sage, Cambridge UP and Princeton UP.
The original paper is certainly smart enough. It hardly is earth shattering, however. The author is an established academic (Full Professor at an elite US University) and so has no need to publish or perish. This strikes me as entirely inappropriate behavior, but I know of no one who would say so out loud.
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16 Jul 2008 9:43am
Having just checked the publication list of the political scientist mentioned above, it should be noted though that in all publications following the initial Journal Special Issue, it is correctly mentioned that the chapter is a reprint of an earlier publication. Isn't it also, at least to some extent, the responsibility of journal/book editors and publishers to make sure that they publish *new* work, rather than re-fried arguments?
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