EAKIN MARK E wrote:
>
> I found two articles by the same author but published six years apart. The
> articles used different data sets and drew slightly different conclusions.
> However in the introductory and literature review sections, there were
> entire paragraphs that were the same in both articles. The latest article
> did not cite the first article and the copied paragraphs were not in
> quotes. Is this common practice and/or an ethical problem? Can you
> plagarize yourself?
I don't think you can plagiarize yourself, exactly. In some cases it
may be a copyright violation if the copyright has been transferred; but
copyright violation is not always plagiarism.
Whether it is a violation of academic ethics depends, I think, on the
nature of the copied sections. The offense would lie in the padding of
one's publication list. If the repeated material is the main part of
the work, one is claiming two publications having done the work for one
(if one does not explain what is happening) If all that is repeated is
necessary "boilerplate", one is not doing that.
Thus, for instance, one would feel justly annoyed if a TV program
repeated chunks of the body of the program; but reusing the opening and
closing credits is legitimate. I don't see any problem with somebody
(say) reusing the definition of a confidence interval verbatim; but the
interpretation of the experimental results ought to be new!
It is also worth asking, though: would the author do better to write:
"The reader is referred to [3] for a recent summary of the literature
on Snorklebinder's Inexact Test."
This might be an effective way to proceed, as the reader is presumably
already off to the library. If it was actually important I would *not*
suggest sending the reader there for the *definition* of the test!
Finally, it would be silly to give a bibliographic reference to
anybody for the definition of (say) a uniform distribution. These things
pass into the public domain, and once there they can't be "privatized",
in the same way that the phrase "Let's roll!" or the pentatonic scale
should not be considered anybody's property, even if one person does
become for a time associated with one or the other and create a context.
I don't think you can plagiarize a context. [The pentatonic scale? Don
Maclean sang the words "Starry, starry night" to it. But he didn't
invent it.]
-Robert Dawson
.
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