Self-plagiarism: necessity or fraud

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Another problem closely related to self-citation is the movement of the same fragment of text from one publication of the author to another, or even double or multiple publication of the same article. If such a fragment is not formatted as a citation and there is no reference to it, then this is called self-plagiarism.

Let's look at the definition of the word "plagiarism". The explanatory dictionary defines it as "intentional appropriation of the authorship of someone else's work or use of someone else's work in one's works without reference to the author." That is, the key concept here is the word "someone else's." But is it possible to appropriate something that already belongs to you?

This argument is appealed to by those who believe that the concept of "self-plagiarism" should not exist in principle, it is a kind of oxymoron. Otherwise, all subsequent, corrected and supplemented editions of the same work should be recognized as self-plagiarism.

So why do authors resort to self-plagiarism? It happens that the same article is published several times, and it happens that only a small amount of text is reworked. In the most egregious cases, two articles differ only in titles. When significant, more than 50%, coincidences are found between manuscripts proposed for publication and those already albania telemarketing data published by the same author, the editor usually returns them with a requirement to rewrite the text or add citations. The main requirement for a new article is its scientific novelty in relation to previous works.

In addition, the Federal Law of the Russian Federation “On Science and State Scientific and Technical Policy” contains requirements that the main provisions of a dissertation for the academic degrees of candidate or doctor of sciences be published, and, therefore, any dissertation will contain self-citation, self-plagiarism, and references to one’s previous works.

In this case, the danger of self-plagiarism is related to the fact that dissertations submitted for defense (as well as term papers and diploma theses) are checked in the automatic plagiarism detection programs "Antiplagiat". And even if the author included his own earlier texts in the new work, these programs will show a low level of originality of the work.

Thus, there is nothing wrong with either self-citation or self-plagiarism, provided they are used in good faith and the volume of citations is in reasonable proportion to the overall volume of the work. Self-citation and self-plagiarism are normal academic practices, and only the absence of appropriate citations or (in the case of self-plagiarism) the lack of scientific novelty can be considered a dishonest act.