<p>
Yeah, thanks for setting us all straight. That capitalization did it for me.</p>
<p>In my kid’s High School, they consider recycling/double dipping equivalent to plagiarism. In fact, they call it plagiarsm and the punishment is expected to be the same.</p>
<p>Apparently scientists have submitted the same or highly similar papers to different journals for many years. </p>
<p>[When</a> is self-plagiarism ok? - The Scientist - Magazine of the Life Sciences](<a href=“http://www.the-scientist.com/blog/display/57676/]When”>http://www.the-scientist.com/blog/display/57676/)</p>
<p>Well, I don’t know. If it is a refreed journal, one of the criteria refrees are supposed to look prior to recommending publication is that the work is new and has not been published before.</p>
<p>I guess I’ve learned something here today. Thanks Amesie for bringing it up. Without reading the expectations and policies of many fine universities and colleges, it didn’t seem so bad on the surface, but given the written policies, and your own reasoning, after thinking it over, I guess it is really cheating to do this and the student should be punished accordingly. So sad.</p>
<p>Is it unethical to recycle your “why college x” essay for college y? Lol.</p>
<p>This is interesting to me, as many scientific papers and articles seem to significantly overlap with others involving the same authors. Never would have known it was wrong to submit the same paper in two classes without getting consent from the instructors. Thanks for point this out to us–don’t know how widely known this is among university students and certainly among parents. My classes did not lend themselves to using any papers for more than one class so it was moot for me anyway.</p>
<p>I recently took English Comp 1 followed by Comp 2 with two different teachers. A lot of the essay prompts in the two classes were similar (picking a social issue I was interested - problem/solution essays etc). In fact just for comp 2 I had to choose and research 2 separate social issue problem/solution essays. When you think of it in that context it is fairly obvious (to me) that regurgitating the same work is not what was expected of me. I had researched the subjects in depth that I was interested in for comp 1, so really had difficulty coming up with stuff I was equally interested in for comp 2. </p>
<p>Never crossed my mind that it would be ok to present the same essays in 2 seperate english classes, same would apply if I was in another class that required an essay (really hope my essay days are over).</p>
<p>In terms of scientific publications, the American Chemical Society has a statement on ethics in publication that prohibits multiple submissions or re-submissions of a paper accepted in its journals or elsewhere, and also prohibits plagiarism, including what they call “self-plagiarism,” i.e, duplicate publication.</p>
<p>See
pubs.acs.org/userimages/ContentEditor/1218054468605/ethics.pdf
and particularly items B8 and B13.
The words used to describe repeat publication are “improper,” “not acceptable,” and “should not.”</p>
<p>It’s pretty clear where the chemists stand. The physicists have a similar viewpoint, and in fact run submissions through the professional equivalent of turnitin. The life sciences may operate differently.</p>
<p>The issue with scientific publications is complex and varies from one field to another.</p>
<p>One of the stranger customs in some fields is that you can make an oral presentation about work that you have not yet published, but if someone describes your talk in the news media or on the Internet, this could be regarded as “prior publication” and make it impossible for you to publish your work in a scientific journal.</p>
<p>I had a job where I attended scientific meetings and wrote summary reports of those meetings, which were published on the Internet by the entities that sponsored the meetings. Sometimes, scientists would choose to present unpublished work at those meetings – which was acceptable (and was done only at meetings where no representatives of the news media were present). It was crucial to omit the unpublished work from the sponsoring organization’s summary report to avoid causing publication problems for the authors.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>I am beginning to think that people are making it more complicated than it is to diffuse the focus. What QuantMech posted is pretty standard in the physics community as well.</p>
<p>
How nice for you. Obviously, I can read what the rule is. I’m beginning to think that some people just don’t understand an honest difference of opinion on whether a rule makes sense. Maybe they don’t teach that in epistemology class.</p>
<p>THis is what I read from the ACS article -
</p>
<p>This merely says you have to acknowedge the source, not that you can’t do it. I understand that this implies (I guess) that the student should tell the teacher about the duplication. As I’ve said countless time, I understand that there is a rule against this.</p>
<p>But this does not prohibit this “self plagiarism”. It merely says that you should quote yourself. Which renders the rule silly in my opinion. Which I am allowed to have, BTW.</p>
<p>I believe that there are valid reasons to prohibit the theft of someone else’s work without attribution. Your own work? I don’t see it the same way. The fact that anybody could see these two things as even close is bizarre to me. The former is intrinsically morally wrong, the latter is “improper” and “not acceptable” because, by definition, the rules don’t accept it.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association, 6th edition, 16.</p>
<p>
You can call a banana a pickle, but that doesn’t make it one.</p>
<p>And the term “self-plagiarism” doesn’t even make sense. What makes this complicated is that some folks are trying to make two different things the same. They aren’t. While there may be good reasons to prohibit the practice of double-dipping, it is not the same at all as plagiarism, and it’s absurd to claim that they are ethically comparable.</p>
<p>Here’s a thought experiment: Over the summer, a student reads James Joyce’s Ulysses. He’s so taken with it that he writes an essay about the religious thems in the novel. He puts it in a drawer. In the fall, he takes a class on Joyce–and turns that essay in as his first paper. What, if anything, is unethical about that?</p>
<p>
Or what about this - THe student’s teacher reads the paper and is so taken with it he/she submits it to a contest, where the student wins first prize. And then the contest officials publish it in their collection of papers from the contest. And then a journal or magazine is so taken with it that they ask to reprint it. And then the student uses a portion of it for their college essay.</p>
<p>My God. By now, after what, quadruple or quintuple dipping, the student certainly deserves capital punishment.</p>
<p>I can see the other side’s point, at least to some degree.
Certainly people can at least see some ambiguity in this rule.</p>
<p>General comments for my friends who have posted recently:</p>
<p>I agree that the idea of “self-plagiarism” is an oxymoron.</p>
<p>I am pretty certain that the American Chemical Society does not permit authors to repeat their own published work, even if they cite it. Very short summaries, yes, to place the new material in context; re-listing of earlier results in tables along with new results, again yes; but the “whole cloth,” no. I read the ACS rule as saying that you do not need to cite phrases such as “The solution of the time-dependent Schroedinger equation for the molecule in an applied field of frequency omega” while in the humanities world, stringing together this many words without change would appear to require a citation.</p>
<p>One element that bears closer scrutiny: several journals refer to “journals of primary record,” or some equivalent phrase. They mean that work should appear only once in a “real” research journal. This permits re-publication (with permission) in collections of work. The status of conference proceedings is less clear. Some conference proceedings are issued to only the 100-200 people who attended a particular conference. In that case, one doesn’t want to bury the work, by publishing the results only in the conference proceedings–so some kind of work-around, permissions, excerpting, different emphasis, etc. has to be worked out.</p>
<p>It is relevant to this particular discussion that journals with which I am familiar require a “Transfer of Copyright,” so that the journal owns the copyright to the article, once it has been accepted. This prevents republication, because the author is no longer the copyright holder.</p>
<p>A while back, a question was raised about my statement that a student who uses the same paper for more than one course is gaining an advantage over other students in both courses (and in their other courses, as well). </p>
<p>Here is why I think so: I am assuming a situation in which students are willing to put an unlimited amount of work into all of their courses, and the quantity, depth, and quality of work that they can do is limited only by overall time constraints. I am also assuming that time constraints are in effect–that is, even if the students begin work immediately when the paper is assigned, there is not as much time as the students would really “like” to devote to the paper(s). In this case, Student A, who submits a single paper for two courses, has in effect twice as much time to work on the paper as Student B, who is writing two different papers for the two courses. Alternatively, Student A could spend 1.5 times the amount of time on the paper, and have 0.5 times the amount of time to distribute among other time-stressed courses.</p>
<p>There are at least some students and some colleges where this scenario applies.</p>
<p>On the other hand, if you assume that students only care about “credentialling,” they would still be affected by Student A’s action. Student A is receiving twice the credit for the same “work.” Student B (who in this scenario, only cares about accumulating credits toward a degree) would feel gypped, I’d think.</p>
<p>With regard to the case where a student has written a paper on his/her own, and put it in a drawer, I see nothing whatever wrong with obtaining credit once! With a lot of Ph.D. programs, the student has to state that the thesis has not been submitted for “any other degree or qualification.” Otherwise, one thesis could be used to collect multiple Ph.D.'s–as if anyone would be helped by that!</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Okay, let’s complicate the issue even more. Suppose the student writes the paper in the summer, with no idea that he will be assigned a paper on Joyce in the Fall. How does he not gain an unacceptable time advantage over the other students, who didn’t already write a paper and now must fit it in with the rest of their schedule?</p>
<p>Or what if a student does EC research in a lab over the summer. Are they allowed to use that for a science class paper during the regular school year? That doesn’t seem fair timewise either.</p>
<p>I don’t think this is all as crystal clear as people think.</p>
<p>bovertine, I agree that the student does gain a time advantage in the case you mentioned; but I don’t have any problem with that. It seems to me that this case is distinguished by several circumstances:<br>
First, a single “element” of credit is being sought for the work.<br>
Second, other students would (generally) also have the opportunity to work in advance in the summer. Admittedly, this would be harder for some students than for others. Is it possible for a student to take two 40-hour-a-week jobs in the summer? (If two could be found in current economic conditions?) That student would be at a disadvantage in terms of working ahead. But there is a distinction between this case and the original “double-dipping case” in my opinion. That is, the time-disadvantaged student knows that he/she is time disadvantaged and can plan around that fact. In the double-dipping case, the disadvantaged students do not know in advance that they will be disadvantaged. So they cannot adjust their class schedules, work arrangements, or other plans to accommodate that situation.
Third, in the specific case that you mentioned, there is no guarantee that the student’s paper will fit the requirements of the course, even if the student is planning to enroll in a Joyce seminar. (This seems less important to me than reasons #1 and #2.)</p>