4 ms·

Half the plagiarism violations are "self-plagiarism", which I assume means copying from your own previously published works. Hardly seems like such an ethical

Half the plagiarism violations are "self-plagiarism", which I assume means copying from your own previously published works. Hardly seems like such an ethical problem to copy from yourself except of course if you're paid by the word.

jules 13y ago
Exactly. A research group will build an experimental setup and then do several experiments with it. In each paper you need to describe the experimental setup, so it makes sense to write that description once and use it in several papers while only changing the parts of the setup that you changed for the new experiment. Another case in which this often occurs is in the introduction. Each paper has a one or two paragraph introduction to the field. For instance papers about breast cancer maybe have an introduction that goes "Breast cancer occurs in X% of women over N years old, etc etc". Since a researcher's papers are most times in the same field, it makes sense to reuse those paragraphs in several papers. They may call this "self-plagiarism" but in my opinion there is nothing unethical about this.
- omnisci 13y ago
  Agreed, you write the same stuff over and over again. This isn't "plagiarism", it's "I've been working on the same topic of 20 years and there is nothing new to report about it in this portion of the paper, but here something new". That is the point of a paper. Either way, I agree with everyone else in this thread as well. The system of publish or perish is 1. dumb 2. old 3. not moving science forward. It's become more of a "I need xyz papers published this year" instead of "I'm curious about xyz and how it solves abc". That isn't science, it's a career/ego metric. Good news is that there are groups (like myself, science exchange, figshare etc) who are working to fix that. It's a matter of time, but a social change to science is starting.
aidenn0 13y ago
It increases the amount of crap out there, plus it pads the CV
- ChuckMcM 13y ago
  This is a huge issue. When you slog through 5 papers someone has written and keep getting a deja vu feeling it really sucks.
  - sliverstorm 13y ago
    Not to mention when your deja vu is of deja vu.
- joe_the_user 13y ago
  Sure but crap as such isn't an ethical problem. In fact, theoretically it would be the job of publications, not authors, to prevent crap from being published. Plus, if the competition wasn't so gruesome and that evaluation criteria weren't shallow, the pressure to pad one's CV wouldn't be so great. "Holy ethical violation batman, the slaves are slipping out of their manacles and they certified on their honor they would not do that"
  - weland 13y ago
    Yes, it is. It's an ethical problem because making researchers sift through more crap just so that you can pad up your CV is slowing down further research into your field. I know it's an oversimplification, but the essence of it is true: curing cancer is already hard enough. It shouldn't be made any harder by ambitiously exceeding your dead tree quota. Sauce: abandoned an academic career :-)
    - joe_the_user 13y ago
      Uh, by the token, a badly designed desk which makes things harder for researchers is an ethical problem. I wouldn't minimize the problematic quality of having a bunch of crap in research or what-all else. But the thing is that, as you know, the academic world puts extreme pressure on people to both follow the rules and to makes themselves look good. When any violation of a rule-set can be called an "ethical violation" when it's really not that, it cheapens the whole concept of ethics. Which isn't surprising given how monumentally unethical it is to set up system. Essentially, I can't help seeing people with a lot of power engaging in seriously unethetical things and happy to blur the lines between that and people cuts corners in response to pressure (and that stuff winds up being more pressure on people which doesn't actually stop the corner-cutting).
michaelhoffman 13y ago
It's an ethical problem when you certify that you haven't done exactly that.
- k__ 13y ago
  It would also be bad if you get your Bachelor with one of the papers, the Master with the next and they are the same.
  - josephlord 13y ago
    Why? If you the quality is sufficient to be a Master's thesis surely you should be awarded the degree.
javert 13y ago
I felt a little uneasy reading this in the article. I write CS conference papers that are all in the same area, so obviously, some of the background information (which is a pretty small part of the overall paper) is basically copied from paper to paper. And that part is the most polished. I don't feel uneasy because I'm doing anything remotely unethical---I'm not. I feel uneasy because it sounded a bit like the description in this article was over-broadly defining self-plagarism.
- pyoung 13y ago
  Is this an issue with conferences? My guess is that conferences would prefer to have interesting topics, and probably wouldn't care as much if the material was partially recycled. I have known people who presented early results of a study at one conference, and the final results at another. They were upfront about it, so it wasn't unethical, but I guess you could accuse them of resume padding. Personally, I would prefer a bunch of really interesting presentations at a conference with some recycled material, rather than a bunch of boring presentations that are all original (although if you attend a lot of conferences with the same people, you might prefer the latter I guess).
  - anonymousDan 13y ago
    I really don't view this as resume padding. Think of it in terms of the agile methodology - you don't want to spend a year of your life working on an idea that the rest of your community thinks is irrelevant or has a major flaw. So you publish your preliminary findings in a workshop, garner feedback, and then publish the full work later on in a conference. Seems like a sensible approach to me.
    - javert 13y ago
      I agree, that is the smart approach.
  - javert 13y ago
    The conferences I submit to don't care if some of the background material (which is sort of boilerplate---but it is nonetheless necessary to state your assumptions) is similar across papers. Really, you couldn't do it any other way. I will say that academic (i.e., scientific) conferences should never include "recycled" or "old but interesting" material. There has to be some new research results. Otherwise, it's not science. The point of these conferences is not to entertain, it's to push forward the scope of knowledge.
craigyk 13y ago
It's funny that self-plagiarism is the offense he cites most. One of the things that drives me crazy about the current system is how much time is wasted in that largish section called the Introduction. On the one hand, it's my favorite section to write since it provides the most leeway for prose over the dry, wanky obfuscation that are the remainders of most papers… but still, every time I write one, I wish I could just include a damn link to any one of the N review papers out there, or even a wikipedia page.
Kliment 13y ago
A major issue is that you assign copyright to many publications, meaning that it's infringement to reuse an image in another publication. The rest of the problem is basically one of passing off already published results as new ones. Of course, because reviews take for fucking ever and can be hit by unexpected obstacles, you will not know the publication order of your articles in advance, so properly referencing parts of the work as already published while it's in pre-pub limbo is difficult. Arxiv helps a lot there, but there are still many traps.

jules 13y ago

Exactly. A research group will build an experimental setup and then do several experiments with it. In each paper you need to describe the experimental setup, so it makes sense to write that description once and use it in several papers while only changing the parts of the setup that you changed for the new experiment. Another case in which this often occurs is in the introduction. Each paper has a one or two paragraph introduction to the field. For instance papers about breast cancer maybe have an introduction that goes "Breast cancer occurs in X% of women over N years old, etc etc". Since a researcher's papers are most times in the same field, it makes sense to reuse those paragraphs in several papers. They may call this "self-plagiarism" but in my opinion there is nothing unethical about this.

omnisci 13y ago
Agreed, you write the same stuff over and over again. This isn't "plagiarism", it's "I've been working on the same topic of 20 years and there is nothing new to report about it in this portion of the paper, but here something new". That is the point of a paper. Either way, I agree with everyone else in this thread as well. The system of publish or perish is 1. dumb 2. old 3. not moving science forward. It's become more of a "I need xyz papers published this year" instead of "I'm curious about xyz and how it solves abc". That isn't science, it's a career/ego metric. Good news is that there are groups (like myself, science exchange, figshare etc) who are working to fix that. It's a matter of time, but a social change to science is starting.

aidenn0 13y ago

It increases the amount of crap out there, plus it pads the CV

ChuckMcM 13y ago
This is a huge issue. When you slog through 5 papers someone has written and keep getting a deja vu feeling it really sucks.
- sliverstorm 13y ago
  Not to mention when your deja vu is of deja vu.
joe_the_user 13y ago
Sure but crap as such isn't an ethical problem. In fact, theoretically it would be the job of publications, not authors, to prevent crap from being published. Plus, if the competition wasn't so gruesome and that evaluation criteria weren't shallow, the pressure to pad one's CV wouldn't be so great. "Holy ethical violation batman, the slaves are slipping out of their manacles and they certified on their honor they would not do that"
- weland 13y ago
  Yes, it is. It's an ethical problem because making researchers sift through more crap just so that you can pad up your CV is slowing down further research into your field. I know it's an oversimplification, but the essence of it is true: curing cancer is already hard enough. It shouldn't be made any harder by ambitiously exceeding your dead tree quota. Sauce: abandoned an academic career :-)
  - joe_the_user 13y ago
    Uh, by the token, a badly designed desk which makes things harder for researchers is an ethical problem. I wouldn't minimize the problematic quality of having a bunch of crap in research or what-all else. But the thing is that, as you know, the academic world puts extreme pressure on people to both follow the rules and to makes themselves look good. When any violation of a rule-set can be called an "ethical violation" when it's really not that, it cheapens the whole concept of ethics. Which isn't surprising given how monumentally unethical it is to set up system. Essentially, I can't help seeing people with a lot of power engaging in seriously unethetical things and happy to blur the lines between that and people cuts corners in response to pressure (and that stuff winds up being more pressure on people which doesn't actually stop the corner-cutting).

michaelhoffman 13y ago

It's an ethical problem when you certify that you haven't done exactly that.

k__ 13y ago
It would also be bad if you get your Bachelor with one of the papers, the Master with the next and they are the same.
- josephlord 13y ago
  Why? If you the quality is sufficient to be a Master's thesis surely you should be awarded the degree.

javert 13y ago

I felt a little uneasy reading this in the article. I write CS conference papers that are all in the same area, so obviously, some of the background information (which is a pretty small part of the overall paper) is basically copied from paper to paper. And that part is the most polished. I don't feel uneasy because I'm doing anything remotely unethical---I'm not. I feel uneasy because it sounded a bit like the description in this article was over-broadly defining self-plagarism.

pyoung 13y ago
Is this an issue with conferences? My guess is that conferences would prefer to have interesting topics, and probably wouldn't care as much if the material was partially recycled. I have known people who presented early results of a study at one conference, and the final results at another. They were upfront about it, so it wasn't unethical, but I guess you could accuse them of resume padding. Personally, I would prefer a bunch of really interesting presentations at a conference with some recycled material, rather than a bunch of boring presentations that are all original (although if you attend a lot of conferences with the same people, you might prefer the latter I guess).
- anonymousDan 13y ago
  I really don't view this as resume padding. Think of it in terms of the agile methodology - you don't want to spend a year of your life working on an idea that the rest of your community thinks is irrelevant or has a major flaw. So you publish your preliminary findings in a workshop, garner feedback, and then publish the full work later on in a conference. Seems like a sensible approach to me.
  - javert 13y ago
    I agree, that is the smart approach.
- javert 13y ago
  The conferences I submit to don't care if some of the background material (which is sort of boilerplate---but it is nonetheless necessary to state your assumptions) is similar across papers. Really, you couldn't do it any other way. I will say that academic (i.e., scientific) conferences should never include "recycled" or "old but interesting" material. There has to be some new research results. Otherwise, it's not science. The point of these conferences is not to entertain, it's to push forward the scope of knowledge.

craigyk 13y ago

It's funny that self-plagiarism is the offense he cites most. One of the things that drives me crazy about the current system is how much time is wasted in that largish section called the Introduction. On the one hand, it's my favorite section to write since it provides the most leeway for prose over the dry, wanky obfuscation that are the remainders of most papers… but still, every time I write one, I wish I could just include a damn link to any one of the N review papers out there, or even a wikipedia page.

Kliment 13y ago

A major issue is that you assign copyright to many publications, meaning that it's infringement to reuse an image in another publication. The rest of the problem is basically one of passing off already published results as new ones. Of course, because reviews take for fucking ever and can be hit by unexpected obstacles, you will not know the publication order of your articles in advance, so properly referencing parts of the work as already published while it's in pre-pub limbo is difficult. Arxiv helps a lot there, but there are still many traps.