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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, s
by 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 agoAgreed, 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.