Timeline for Does this qualify as "self plagiarism" or something?
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
15 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Feb 16, 2017 at 19:37 | comment | added | Nate Eldredge | It seems to me that this question would benefit from something like an AMS Culture Statement, as it's the sort of thing that could be badly misunderstood by people from other fields. Someone from, say, psychology, might be horrified that three pages of your paper are verbatim identical to your previous paper, and if they're on your university tenure or ethics committee, your claim that they are just definitions and this is normal in math might be dismissed as self-serving... | |
| Feb 16, 2017 at 19:20 | comment | added | Joël | Self-plagiarism is a completely ridiculous concern invented by people who are paid to do research but look for any way to avoid doing it. My last paper is exactly identical to itself, infinitely many times, and I am proud of this $\omega$-self-plagiarism. | |
| Feb 16, 2017 at 19:06 | answer | added | Gerhard Paseman | timeline score: 0 | |
| Feb 16, 2017 at 17:58 | answer | added | Till | timeline score: 9 | |
| Jun 1, 2013 at 11:32 | history | made wiki | Post Made Community Wiki by Kim Morrison | ||
| May 22, 2013 at 19:53 | comment | added | Delio Mugnolo | @Vidit Nanda I do not believe that quoting an older paper for its notation is any better than copying and pasting its content to the new one. A reader might easily conclude that one is simply trying to increase her/his own h-index... | |
| May 22, 2013 at 14:31 | comment | added | Mariano Suárez-Álvarez | Being referred to another paper for an explanation of notation is something I tend to not enjoy much... | |
| May 22, 2013 at 14:20 | comment | added | Paul Taylor | If you think about it, this necessarily happens as any new topic develops, so the real questions are why do you feel the need to repeat yourself and at what point does it stop? It stops when the perception is that the ideas are "generally known". This happens when other people have assimilated them and have started working on the same topic. So if this hasn't happened to you yet then maybe you are out on a limb, which could be good or bad. Or maybe your ideas are not mature enough yet for you to feel that you have written the definitive introduction. I have been there: follow my links to see. | |
| May 22, 2013 at 12:58 | comment | added | Lee Mosher | Here is a general rule which I tell my students when they need to write background material which they learned from another source, and which perhaps applies to material from ones own earlier writings. Don't be lazy: learn the old references in your heart of hearts, and then rewrite it anew the way you need it for your current paper. | |
| May 22, 2013 at 10:15 | comment | added | Vladimir Dotsenko | I had similar concerns at some point. However, most of the time it turns out that my views of many things change a bit as time passes, and apart from the notation or main definitions (which I don't think constitute self-plagiarism anyway, only for a robot reading a paper), the "background" section actually is never the same. But maybe I am too much of a perfectionist. | |
| May 22, 2013 at 9:54 | comment | added | Stefan Kohl♦ | To avoid lengthy repetitions of the same definitions, you could write at the beginning something like "We use terms and notation as defined in ...". Of course things like this are always a compromise: while you avoid repetitions, you require your readers to look up an earlier paper of yours unless they are already familiar with the matter. | |
| May 22, 2013 at 9:42 | comment | added | Vidit Nanda | If all your work is in one sub-field, it would be surprising to not see isomorphic background sections for all your papers. It's only cause for concern if you are claiming a new contribution each time or something, which does not sound like the case. I would recommend citing some of your earlier papers along with other related material at the outset of your latest background section, with a sentence like "the following definitions and results are similar to those in [5,6,8,12,16]" | |
| May 22, 2013 at 9:27 | history | edited | Worried | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
added 399 characters in body
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| May 22, 2013 at 9:03 | comment | added | Yuichiro Fujiwara | This thread on academia.stackexchange might help: academia.stackexchange.com/questions/2893/… | |
| May 22, 2013 at 9:00 | history | asked | Worried | CC BY-SA 3.0 |