I would like to know if and how you sanction an author who has plagiarized. Recently, we had a clear case of plagiarism in an article submitted for a supplement. Would you ever consider another submission from that author? I do not see any policy statements addressing this issue and wonder how you have been handling this situation. My initial reaction has been, “One strike and you are out”.

Jeff Susman
Editor, The Journal of Family Practice
_________________________________
An option open when the authors' explanations fail to satisfy the editor is to report the matter to their institution(s), letting the authors know that you are doing this. One journal banning the authors from submitting leaves them open to submit to all other journals, so it is far from an effective sanction. Banning or blacklisting is also problematic due to the possibility that some of the authors may have been innocent parties, and it opens you to potential legal action.

The Committee on Publication Ethics has produced flow charts for various problems editors may have, including plagiarism. See:
http://www.publicationethics.org.uk/flow-charts/cope-flowcharts-optimal.pdf/download

Matt Hodgkinson
Senior Editor, BMC-series journals
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I suggested last year in a BMJ article http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/full/333/7568/594 about a serial plagiarist—Asim Kurjak—that without public exposure of the plagiarist (thief), s/he will be encouraged to try to get away with recurrent plagiarism. Unfortunately, academic institutions (like the University of Zagreb in the instance that I documented) and journals generally don’t have the guts to do that, so plagiarism continues to be one of the many things that are rotten within medical academia.

I’ll leave it to my Croatian friends to provide WAME with more information about the disgraceful attempts by the academic establishment in Zagreb to sweep this matter under the carpet and shoot messengers rather than deal with unpleasant truths.

Iain Chalmers
_________________________________
The reaction, “One strike and you are out” at first glance seems reasonable to me. I imagine it would depend upon the degree as well!

Sam Sussman
__________________________________
I was sharing with Dr Susman earlier that in journalism, most, if not all, publishers immediately dismiss reporters and writers who are found to have plagiarized, no matter what the explanation has been. Publishers generally take plagiarism very seriously and don’t extend second chances.

Kimberly Fradette-Taylor
Publications Manager, American Society of Nephrology
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In my opinion, we lack legal tools against plagiarism in medical academia (and many other places). We followed some rules.

-If needed, create a special group to be sure about the problem.

- Stop the publication of the article.

- Ban any further articles from the author.

- Notify the institution and/or the medical ethics authority

I understand that any banning could be problematic, but I consider that all authors are responsible for the entire content of an article. In 2004, we had an article involved in a plagiarism controversy and a few months later, one of the coauthors submitted another article that we found suspicious of the same problem.

I consider that a "zero tolerance" policy is the best tool against plagiarism.

Rodolfo R. Soca
Former Director, 16 de Abril
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Until now, no complete study of what is plagiarism  has been carried out with access to all the possible cases, and by multitudes of authors (guideline of 300 or 400 pages). For example, some authors copy whole sentences of old articles they’ve written. For example, in an article published in BMJ 1997;314:334 (1 February) and titled “Meta-analysis of trials of prophylactic antibiotics for children with measles: inadequate evidence” a sentence was extracted  (“The studies suggest that routine antibiotic treatment might reduce the risk of developing pneumonia.”) and used in an article published in Pediatrics 2002;109;312-315 (Why We Need to Know Whether Prophylactic Antibiotics Can Reduce Measles-Related Morbidity) with an adjunction: He noted that.

Is this plagiarism? A meticulous critical reading will enable us to conclude that it is self-plagiarism.To define plagiarism, a committee of experts must identify what is legal and what is not, with a study of all the cases. This guideline would be published by all the medical journals with free access, and only after that will we be able to establish the plagiarists.

Hnid Karim
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We recently published a corresponding letter in the Lancet entitled "Rules of the game of scientific writing: fair play and plagiarism" (Lancet. 2007 Feb 24;369(9562):641)

(available at: http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140673607603079/fulltext).

I, for one, believe that our response as Editors and Reviewers to plagiarism should largely depend on who made such a faux pas! A part of that letter reads

“... in science and medicine, we have found that when a non-English-speaking author writes his or her Methods and Results sections, he or she might insert phrases and even sentences from a previously published article simply because he or she is disinclined to sacrifice quality and accuracy for want of linguistic expertise. Plagiarism of scientific text, as defined by the use of others' word-for-word phraseology in a manuscript to convey the desired implication, might thus warrant reappraisal in articles originating from a non-English speaker in a developing country with limited access to professional editorial assistance. We strongly urge reviewers and others to ignore such faux pas, since we are not sure that they would fare any better if they were to write a similar article in their own second language.”

F. Habibzadeh
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The problems are not confined to Croatia. The American Journal of Obstetrics & Gynecology eccentrically chose to launch its new look format in January 2007 with an edition that included a major review by Kurjak. The AJOG's “Specific Inappropriate Acts in the Publication Process” document cites penalties for acts of plagiarism in the AJOG. It doesn't seem to matter so much if the act occurs in someone else's pages.

Jim Neilson
Co-ordinating Editor, Cochrane Pregnancy & Childbirth Group
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Iain Chalmers is correct. When editing Public Health Reports, I was lucky that an attentive reviewer found some obvious plagiarism during the review process. I not only explained to the author that I was rejecting the manuscript because of the plagiarism, but I copied her department chair on the e-mail. Next, I received an angry telephone call from the author's lawyer husband, threatening to sue. I suggested he do just that, for not only would he lose, but the plagiarism would be broadly known. I never heard another word.

Anthony Robbins
Co-Editor, Journal of Public Health Policy
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I was looking at this very helpful flowchart. I think I know where plagiarism and duplication ends, but I'm still not clear on when 'plagiarism' begins.

    * A duplicate sentence that notes a source is poor scholarship, but doesn't feel like theft to me. I'd probably talk to the authors and ask them for proper citation via quotation or a rewrite.

    * A short duplicate paragraph or part of a paragraph sounds more problematic and sounds less like mere sloppiness. Depending on the situation, I might reject the piece or talk to the author.

    * Substantial sections in the introduction from another paper. I'd reject the manuscript on those grounds. I would probably inform the institution.

    * Any duplication in the results section. I'd reject the paper and possibly inform their institution. On the other hand, if it was just running a descriptive analysis in preparation for a substantively different analysis that was the main point of the paper, I'd have to think hard about it. There are a limited number of ways to say you ran descriptive statistics on 10 variables and reported them in Table 1.

    * I have written before that I do not know what constitutes plagiarism in a Methods section. This is particularly true with SELF plagiarism when one is working with a large datasets that were developed to have multiple studies done from them. I am currently starting data collection on a relatively small project that will probably lead to 4 or 5 different papers. How many ways can I describe the protocol and sample? How many ways can each variable by described? Do we want everything in quotes or is referring to the original source okay?

The core notion of plagiarism is theft of intellectual property. This is more difficult to detect in paraphrasing an argument without citation than in copying something word for word. However, it is no less problematic (and sometimes more so). I find those instances more troubling than using the same words to describe how to compute a variable across multiple papers.

Nancy Darling
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"The core notion of plagiarism is theft of intellectual property."

This is certainly the way many treatments of the subject begin, and how the metaphorical origin of the term 'plagiary' is often explained: the Roman poet Martial refers to a poet who is both 'thief' (fur) and 'slave-kidnapper' (plagiarus).  This is the point of view of "legalists" or "dualists" to use William Perry's nomenclature, who, I suggest, try to see the issue in terms of legal concepts of right and wrong.

From another point of view, that of "allusionists," the issue is tied up more with the problematics of writers who perforce must use words, phrases, metaphors, and allusions of others if they are to connect effectively with a readership that expects them. A broader, non-pejorative term, drawn from the same etymology, would be "plexis," the interweaving of thoughts and phrases into an new work, the 'originality' of which must be interpreted in light of complex literary and cultural inter-connections.

The NIH’ Office of Research Integrity itself is less interested in plagiarism—except in the most egregious cases unless coupled with fraud and or ethical violations of a deeper nature (for example, transgressing the confidentiality of the review process, or misrepresenting old observations as new observations).  None of these issues have to do with plexis at all.

In my own experience, most scientific 'plagiarism' results from poor training in the skills of writing—including the art of skillful citation—rather than an attempt to defraud the scientific community. In these cases, it seems to me that the most useful approach by editors is to require skillful amendments when possible before publication, or, otherwise the publication of appropriate 'errata'. This would require less covering-up, blacklisting, etc, and more transparency in the process.

By separating the embarrassment of bad writing from the charge of moral turpitude, we would also encourage both 'whistle blowing' and a greater appreciation for and practice of the fine art of writing science. Of course the most blatant cases would still require dramatic action, if fraud is not actually involved, on the basis of the appeal to the legalist argument. Where to draw the line? May I suggest that if less than 10% of the text is involved in problematic plexis, that we invoke 'errata'. Re-presentation of one's own methods can often be handled by a self-citation by the author, and as a non-serious copyright violation by the journals. Similarly, it is rarely important to reproduce the methods of others in detail—and we ought to encourage authors to make use of the convention of "as described by so-and-so". 

John R. Rodgers
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If any organizations (such as NIH’s Office of Research Integrity) are interested in defining a guideline on plagiarism, I invite WAME to release an article about what is plagiarism and what is not plagiarism, and it will be the first work done by WAME published by many journals of medicine. If WAME can’t, I invite Rodgers, John R, and Nancy Darling, and all WAME members who feel able to make a decision on plagiarism, to cooperate and to do this work.

Hnid
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Dr Karim should be more careful (or less disingenuous) in his assessments, and get matters into proper perspective.

He asks whether my use of a passage previously published in an article in the BMJ in an article in Pediatrics constitutes plagiarism. Nice try, Dr Karim, but you omit to mention that I attributed the passage directly to the previous author by placing it in quotation marks. The full sentence from my text reads:

Quote begins:

He also noted that "the studies suggest that routine antibiotic treatment might reduce the risk of developing pneumonia or sepsis (P=.0004)", but decided that this conclusion was unreliable after post hoc exclusion of 2 studies with control group complication rates which he felt were unusually high.

Quote ends.

The examples of plagiarism I used in my article about Asim Kurjak were gross thefts of large passages of unattributed text and data. It is these forms of gross plagiarism about which more determined action is needed. Arguing the toss over a phrase reused here and there is displacement activity and constitutes fiddling while Rome burns.

Iain Chalmers
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Plagiarism is defined in the WAME Publication Ethics Policies for Medical Journals, at http://www.wame.org/resources/publication-ethics-policies-for-medical-journals#plagiarism :

"Plagiarism is the use of others' published and unpublished ideas or words (or other intellectual property) without attribution or permission, and presenting them as new and original rather than derived from an existing source. The intent and effect of plagiarism is to mislead the reader as to the contributions of the plagiarizer. This applies whether the ideas or words are taken from abstracts, research grant applications, Institutional Review Board applications, or unpublished or published manuscripts in any publication format (print or electronic).

Plagiarism is scientific misconduct and should be addressed as such (see prior section).

Self-plagiarism refers to the practice of an author using portions of their previous writings on the same topic in another of their publications, without specifically citing it formally in quotes. This practice is widespread and sometimes unintentional, as there are only so many ways to say the same thing on many occasions, particularly when writing the Methods section of an article. Although this usually violates the copyright that has been assigned to the publisher, there is no consensus as to whether this is a form of scientific misconduct, or how many of one's own words one can use before it is truly "plagiarism." Probably for this reason self-plagiarism is not regarded in the same light as plagiarism of the ideas and words of other individuals. If journals have developed a policy on this matter, it should be clearly stated for authors."

The Office of Research Integrity also has a useful discussion:

http://ori.dhhs.gov/policies/plagiarism.shtml

Margaret A. Winker
Deputy Editor, JAMA
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Would a central, worldwide list with concerns listed about researchers be viable? I've been frustrated before at our inability to share our concerns about certain authors with other journals. A Wiki editable by all members of WAME might be one option. There would be all sorts of legal issues, I realise.

Matt Hodgkinson
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Please note that certain forms of plagiarism that have been discussed in this thread would not be characterized as scientific misconduct by ORI. Their definition clearly states, in part: “ORI generally does not pursue the limited use of identical or nearly-identical phrases which describe a commonly-used methodology or previous research because ORI does not consider such use as substantially misleading to the reader or of great significance.”

In the past ORI has had at least two cases of plagiarism that did not qualify as scientific misconduct by ORI’s own definition.

I tend to disagree with ORI’s position, particularly  with respect to instances where the misappropriated phrases describe previous research (as opposed to methodology). Nevertheless, I think these exceptions are especially applicable in cases where the author is not proficient in English and, therefore, I am sympathetic to Vassel and Habibzadeh’s sensible letter in the Lancet: http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140673607603079/fulltext).

I agree that blatant plagiarism should be fully exposed regardless of who the author is, but at the same time I believe that there should be a certain degree of flexibility and editorial discretion with respect to borderline cases stemming from authors who are not fully proficient in English.

Miguel Roig
________________________________
The very concept of ‘self-plagiarism’ seems to me to be dubious. It implies that it is possible to steal words from oneself. Unless an author has transferred the ownership of his/her words/property to someone else—a publisher for example—they remain his/hers, to do as s/he wishes. If a whole article, or most of a whole article is republished by the original author, one expects reference to be made to the earlier publication. But is anyone aware of any examples of a publisher suing an author for using sentences or paragraphs which the author has used in a previous publication?  For those of us who have been refusing to assign copyright in our work for decades, this is not an issue, but I suppose it might be for others.

Iain Chalmers
_________________________________
Perhaps not quite what you are describing, but a list of egregious offenders already exists: http://www.famousplagiarists.com/scienceandmedicine.htm.

Miguel Roig
_________________________________
We thank Iain for pointing out the difficult position of a journal that takes the role of a whistleblower in a small academic community. After the publication of Iain's article in the BMJ, the BMJ and CMJ were called in a Rapid Response to look at Prof. Kurjak's articles in their own journals. Although under enormous pressure from the leaders of the Zagreb School of Medicine and accusations that we (the CMJ) were behind Iain's article in the BMJ (can you imagine someone telling Iain and Fiona what to do?!), we strictly followed the COPE Ethics Flowchart. We also asked the Ethics Committee of WAME and the COPE to help us in assessing Prof. Kurjak's articles published in the CMJ. We thank them for their expertise—without their objective opinion, we probably would have been  accused of conflict of interest. We are, at the moment, in the final stages of collecting responses and informing relevant bodies, and we will make the final outcome public according to the COPE Ethics Flowchart.

Ana and Matko Marušić
Editors in Chief, Croatian Medical Journal
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I agree that self-plagiarism is problematic. 

1. But we should not, as I suggested earlier, imbed ourselves with the notion that plagiarism involves 'theft' in the common-sense meaning—it is clearly a metaphor used by poets to describe their feelings when someone else claims credit for the inspiration of the poet's personal muse. Merton gives examples of cryptoamnesiac self-plagiarism—writers who had entirely forgotten about an earlier publication and published what they thought was a new one. This would be hard to do today. Many use the term "borrowing," and it is certainly possible to borrow from oneself. This might not be a good credit card policy....Novelists do it all the time. How many arch-villains in the early Robert Ludlum novels had a white streak in an otherwise head of black hair?!?  Poets used to (perhaps still do) do it all the time. An early poem that seems unsuccessful is reworked, so that parts show up in a new poem. In such cases, a value-neutral term("plexis") seems useful to me.

2. Plagiarism issues are not strictly related to copyright issues, although the two may overlap. One may copy freely a work with lapsed copyright, but one may still not claim authorship of "Moby Dick". Copyright is a legal concept; plagiarism is literary. However, if one claims a copyright violation, in some cases one might have to prove plagiarism.

3. Another Chalmers (Alan) reproduced chapters nearly verbatim from one book (“What is this thing called science?”) in a new book on the philosophy of science (“Science and its Fabrication”). Was this self-plagiarism? Or was it essentially a new edition of book with everything thrown out, including the title, except for this one chapter? I was irked, but is this really different from changing the title on a new edition of an old textbook?

4. Self-plagiarism of data stands as fraud of a different sort entirely. In this case, the issue of who holds the copyright seems irrelevant.

5. Authors who trot out old data in a work that is ambiguously a review of their own work may verge on self-plagiarism of data; one wonders how the reviewers and editors allow such sleaze, but I suspect some are as desperate for publications as are the authors. I recently read a paper in PNAS (USA) that reproduced data shown previously in three other journal articles of lesser impact factor, without a clear indication that the data were the same. One had to go to the original to realize this.

John R. Rodgers
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I agree that the ‘self-plagiarism’ label is inappropriate, but the act of re-using substantial portions of already published text without proper attribution to its earlier publication is ethically problematic (at least for me) as it violates the implicit reader-writer contract: That the writing is original, new, and accurate. Of course, there are always exceptions, such as the re-use with only minor modifications of certain portions of a very complex methodology section. However, not all methodology sections are that technically complex that they cannot be rewritten and/or made even clearer. By the way, at least one journal cautions against the use of previously published methods sections as templates for writing these sections in new publications (Academic Emergency Medicine) http://www.saem.org/inform/aempub.html:

4. Methods: Methods are reported that were not actually used. This most frequently occurs when an author has published similar methods previously and has devised a template for the methods which is used from paper to paper. Reproducing the template exactly is self plagiarism and can be misleading if the template is not updated to reflect the current research project. Other errors in the reporting of the methods include lack of details or omitting some methods (ie, some results do not relate to or could not possibly be obtained by the described methods).

_________________________________
Where does this idea of an implicit reader-writer contract come from? Are you sure that you’re not unconsciously thinking of a journal-writer contract? As a reader reading a message that you have read before in the writings of a particular author, do you feel cheated? Bored, and maybe even annoyed; but the victim of a broken contract, really?!

I have been trying for years to get certain messages across to readers and audiences, professional and lay, using a variety of media. It’s a depressing business. It is clear to me that some of these messages do need repeating—again and again—albeit using slightly different formulations in the hope that my communication will become more effective. For example, I intend to go on writing and speaking about the (sometimes lethal) failures of clinical researchers to review systematically what is known already before embarking on new research. And I will continue to draw attention to the scandal of biased under-reporting of research; and the distortions resulting from conflicts of interest. Do you really expect me to dream up new phraseology every time I write about these failures of the scientific community while they continue to be so widely ignored? If so, I fear I will have to disappoint you. It is simply not a responsible use of my time.

I think you may be looking at the situation through an editor’s eyes (which is not unreasonable, given that we’re both writing on the WAME Web site). But this may mean that you are not acknowledging sufficiently that, to have some chance of having an impact, an important message may need to be published in more than one place, in more than one way, and repeatedly. Journals may not like that (one only has to consider the millions of pounds made from selling ‘exclusive’ reprints); but the interests of journals are not the only interests that should be taken into account when assessing how to improve communication in and of science.

Iain C
_______________________________
I also agree—the notion of “self-plagiarism” is a highly dubious concept—you cannot "steal" your own ideas. It's like calling driving your own car "self-carjacking".

The argument made on the "implicit reader-writer contract" is interesting and certainly valid. However, most, if not all, acts of “self-plagiarism” will occur in the context of review or opinion pieces (do readers really have the expectation here to read something original?), or perhaps in the discussion section of an original paper. If a researcher publishes an opinion or line of argument he should be allowed to repeat this opinion or line of argument where appropriate, even using the same words. (To cite copyright law here is also dubious; I would think that even if the researcher has signed away copyright to a publishing company it is, in the vast majority of cases, probably still “fair use” to repeat an argument—his own argument— using the same language.)

I have seen dozens of cases where researchers have used the same or very similar language across different papers to make a point. I have never come across any review or opinion article where an author has quoted himself using a direct quote from an earlier paper. That would look very odd and self-promotional.

So I think "self-plagiarism" should be seen in context and issues such as

- Purpose and character

- Nature of the copied work

- Amount and substantiality

- Effect upon work's value

have to be taken into account. (These criteria all happen to be yardsticks for "fair use.")

In practice, I can think of few cases where self-plagiarism is an actual problem, and I have never heard of any legal or disciplinary cases where accusations of "self-plagiarism" have played a role.

There is a continuum here—the most extreme case of "self-plagiarism" is called duplicate publication, and we all agree that this is problematic.

However, repeating sentences or paragraphs from one paper to the other is probably common in science and I don't think there is anything wrong with that.

Gunther Eysenbach
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The discussion of plagiarism is very interesting and has important lessons, especially for anyone who does not understand the rules and is not aware that plagiarism is theft. I’ve been both a perpetrator and a victim of the practice, but I feel reassured about the perpetration after reading the comments of Iain Chalmers and Gunther Eysenbach. I was a perpetrator in the first edition of the Dictionary of Epidemiology when I failed to acknowledge in the text itself the source of lengthy definitions of procedures used in communicable disease control, although I did list the source in the bibliography. That was an oversight attributable to my ignorance or lack or awareness of the correct protocol at that time. If there is such a thing as self-plagiarism, I have been guilty increasingly often in recent years. I’m sure many others have shared my experience of being invited to give the same paper at several conferences, and have then had to deal with requests for its publication in a book, conference proceedings, or national journal. When this has happened to me, I’ve gone through the motions of changing the text, but often these changes have been merely cosmetic and trivial rather than substantive. As the editor of the Dictionary of Epidemiology, I have had many requests to quote from it in other works, usually in a glossary, occasionally in a textbook or monograph. I have always given my permission, and shared all the correspondence with the publishers and the International Epidemiological Association (IEA), the sponsoring organization that holds the copyright. The compiler of at least one other dictionary has lifted a very large number of definitions and discussions—most of them word for word, sometimes with but often without acknowledging the source. That individual never communicated with me, or with the IEA or the publishers. If others have had similar experiences I, and I think other members of WAME, would be interested to know how they dealt with this problem.

John M Last
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First, I wish to point out that as far as I can determine we are navigating uncharted territory here. Official guidance on text plagiarism does not typically go further than the “thou shall not misappropriate _substantial_ portions of others’ text” and never specifies how much ‘substantial’ really is. Much of the guidance simply fails to address the many subtle forms of plagiarism. What little guidance exists on self-plagiarism (beyond warnings against duplicate publication of data; salami slicing; and the like) is even less clear, though I am aware that some journals have stipulated that no more than a certain percentage of a submitted article (around 10%) should have been published elsewhere. My views on these issues are based partly on my interpretation of established scholarly conventions of quotation and attribution and what I believe should be the highest standards of ethical scholarly and scientific practice. They have been derived from a number of sources, including Kolin’s (2002) book on writing. I believe that he is the one who discusses the concept of the reader-writer contract, a notion that I find very meaningful and applicable to scientific writing, but I admit that at the moment I cannot find the page number where this issue is specifically covered in his book. Although I wish I had thought of the concept myself, I assure you that I am by no means its originator.

Please understand that, fundamentally, I have no objections to instances in which the same message is being repeated by the same author, even when it is projected to the same audience, as long as the audience is not being deceived in any way as to its origin and accuracy. Indeed, some messages are well worth repeating, particularly within the very realm we are currently discussing (ie, publication and science ethics). What I object to is not informing the reader that these messages, or portions of the messages, the text of these messages, are not new and that they have appeared elsewhere. It simply troubles me when the reader is mislead into believing that an article contains new material when, in fact, it is mostly recycled stuff (ie, when the title is completely changed, but the ideas and much of the text is recycled from an earlier published paper). Thus, I  always urge authors, whether students or professionals, to avoid re-using verbatim text when writing papers. I am not necessarily referring to the re-use of a few loose phrases here or there. As others have pointed out, certain descriptions of phenomena can only be conveyed in a limited number of ways and cannot or should not be thoroughly rephrased. However, the re-use of a previously published set of consecutive sentences with little or no modification should be generally avoided, though I am sure that there can be a situation or two when such re-use may be acceptable.

Am I annoyed or do I feel cheated when I read recycled verbatim material and I am not told anything about its origin? Yes. To illustrate my feelings on text recycling, let me describe an incident that occurred to me a few years back and which I often use (self-plagiarize?) when discussing these matters with others.

I once found myself having some difficulty understanding certain aspects of a fairly long and detailed methodology section of a paper that I was refereeing. The paper presented a successful replication of an earlier set of studies published by the same pair of authors in a different journal. Fortunately, I had access to the first journal and when I finally managed to consult the original studies, I discovered, to my dismay, that except for a new section that described an additional set of manipulations, the method section of the new paper was largely taken verbatim from the older paper. Was I annoyed and disappointed over this discovery? Absolutely! I was annoyed because the method section was obviously unclear in the first set of studies (I later verified this with a colleague who had expertise on the subject matter) and the authors had missed a perfect opportunity to improve it the second time around. Methodology sections are perhaps the most important part of a paper, they are very difficult to write and, in my view, can always use revisions. In this particular case, I was profoundly disappointed because, in my mind, these authors, one of whom was an undisputed leader in the field, presumptuously assumed that their previous writing was of such high quality that it did not merit a second look and that, furthermore, they could simply recycle their old material. Again, writing good scientific prose is not an easy task even for those who have an excellent command of the language and the knowledge domain that they are working with. As such, I think we have an obligation to continuously strive for the highest levels of clarity. Therefore, such writing can always benefit from a revision. In sum, I find many instances of wholesale recycling of previously published text, particularly by authors who are fully proficient in English, to be troublesome and not consistent with the highest standards of ethical practice. Moreover, I sincerely hope that we are not teaching aspiring scientists and scholars that recycling previously published text is a desirable practice.

My sense is that there some folks who share my views. However, I really don't know for sure and hope that others will chime in with their opinions. It is certainly clear that recycling text is not all that uncommon. As usual, the question is always how much and under what circumstances? Again, recycling is one of those areas that can benefit from a frank and open discussion in the hopes that sensible guidelines will follow.

Miguel

Reference

Kolin, F. C. (2002). Successful Writing at Work, 6th Edition. Houghton Mifflin (I believe there is a newer edition out).
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I had been operating using the notions of "plagiarism" and "self-plagiarism" as noted above. I concur, based on my experience that the "self-plagiarism" issue is prevalent.

In my capacity as a member of the Policy Committee of the Council of Science Editors, which published a White Paper on editorial practices last October (in which I think we dealt with this), I discussed these concepts with the lawyer on the Committee. Based on these discussions, it became clear that legally, "self-plagiarism" has no standing. To differentiate it from "plagiarism," a suggestion was made to use the terms "duplication" or "copying" of text.

That said, there are copyright issues to consider with allowing authors to "duplicate" their previous work in another manuscript for publication (assuming the traditional copyright assignment clauses). If journals have authors sign an originality clause, as we do, then you have to start to wonder when you see "duplication" of text.

On a related point, the "duplication" of text by authors in their subsequent manuscripts raises the issue of "salami" science. We require authors to submit related articles (published), in press articles, manuscripts under consideration elsewhere (in confidence), and published abstracts. We have found that in cases where authors "duplicate" content from their previous publications, we tend to have a case of salami science. In such cases, we have 3 tracks to take. One, we reject the new submission because we determine that it adds very little to the authors' previous work. Two, we ask the authors to rewrite the manuscript, removing the offending content, and to resubmit the study as a brief report, so that our reviewers and editors can concentrate on what is new. That way, if we publish the study, readers don't sift through old news to get to the new material. Three, we find that the "duplication" is restricted to only a few lines and can be dealt with at revision (if revision is sought). In all cases, we try to take the opportunity to educate readers that they should desist with this practice if they want to submit to us. Note, that we consider "duplication" word for word copying. We allow paraphrasing because, as others have pointed it, rewriting the methods can be a challenge.

Michael Vasko
Managing Editor, Arch Phys Med Rehabil
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I’m sorry, but I’m going to have to withdraw from this discussion. I am being told that “the re-use of a previously published set of consecutive sentences with little or no modification should be generally avoided.”  I guess my advice has to be to those who agree with this point of view, don’t read anything that I have published over the past 30 years because you will risk feeling let down by my self-plagiarism.

For those who are serious about real plagiarism, however, I can give a clean bill of unself-plagiarised health in respect of my article exposing a serial plagiarist of other people’s words and data (Chalmers I. Role of systematic reviews in detecting plagiarism: case of Asim Kurjak. BMJ 2006;333:594-596). In the light of the general acquiescence of the editorial community in real, serious plagiarism, it would be nice to think that those contributing to the WAME list might bring themselves to applaud the BMJ’s action in publishing my piece, and express some solidarity with the editors of the Croatian Medical Journal who are being vilified by powerful people in the University of Zagreb because of their alleged involvement in the BMJ article.

Iain C
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In my view there are problems with the WAME policy:

1) "Plagiarism is the use of others' published and unpublished ideas or words (or other intellectual property) without attribution or permission, and presenting them as new and original rather than derived from an existing source.”

Permission has nothing to do with it. I cannot give someone permission to use my words (one of the problems with the concept of plagiarism as "theft").

2)Attribution is only 'required' when the words or ideas are not 'common knowledge'. This is not in the definition of course, but is generally accepted as valid; otherwise we would have bibiographies infinitely long. However, there is no generally accepted definition of 'common knowledge', and what is known to one community of readers and writers at one point in time may not be at another time, or to a different community. This is part of what makes reading the older literature so difficult—so many things are assumed to be held in common with the now-retired or deceased readership. The definition of 'common knowledge' usually falls to experts, whereas novice writers in any field-idiom are by definition non-expert. This picks up the problem also that Miguel Roig mentions—the ESL writer for whom the definition of "common knowledge" in English will be especially problematic. Novice writers are at especial risk for transgressing, as they remain non-experts as long as they have not already become experts. Most academic institutions, including journals, do not seem to think it is their job to help the novice writer become an expert in this fashion. I see this as evidence of institutions operating under "dualistic" modes of thinking, and this allows them to pretend that skillful citation is a moral virtue rather than a skill set.

3) The requirement that plagiarism involves an 'intent' to deceive is also problematic. It requires the conclusion of moral degeneracy as opposed to technical deficiency. Of course there are blatant cases that can be explained far better by the 'intent to deceive', but is rarely a useful operational definition, in Bridgman's sense of 'operational'.  I suspect the reason the ORI is more interested in plagiarism in the results section is that this is usually something quite different—fraudulent presentation of fake (because non-original) observations—a high crime in science. 'Borrowing words,' no matter how slipshod it may appear from a literary point of view, is hardly a high crime in biomedicine. Hence my suggestion that we treat cases in which less than some cut-off, such as 10% of the words, as "errata".

4) "Plagiarism is scientific misconduct and should be addressed as such"- See comment to #3.

John R. Rodgers
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In lieu of individual thanks, I want to thank everyone for their enthusiastic response to my query concerning plagiarism. While there remain areas of controversy, your thoughtful ideas are appreciated.

Jeff Susman
Editor, Journal of Family Practice
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I have a couple of reactions to John's contribution. First, I think his remarks, and for that matter this entire thread and the one on self-plagiarism, illustrate some of the problems with current 'definitions'. They tend to be fairly short and imprecise, and therefore fail to capture the many ways in which these types of misconduct manifest themselves.  Because there are so many gray areas in these domains, I think it is extremely important for the various official bodies to provide expanded 'guidance' on these issues rather than mere definitions.

I am not certain that an author's level of proficiency with the language is necessarily a factor in deciding which elements of their writing constitute common knowledge or are in need of a citation. Rather, I think that the problem with common knowledge has more to do with an author's familiarity with the publication he is writing for and its readership, and his/her knowledge of Western rules of proper scholarship regarding citation and attribution. Thus, I suspect that Limited-English proficiency authors from non-Western nations might be more at risk for transgressing in these areas. Nevertheless, the concept of 'common knowledge' is perhaps one of the vaguest and ill-defined concepts I have come across in the area of writing ethics and I certainly agree that novice writers are more likely to be at risk for transgressing in this area.

I am not sure that I agree with the statement that "ORI is necessarily more interested in plagiarism in the results section". I actually tend to agree that text plagiarism is a lesser crime than any fabrication, falsification, duplication, etc. of data, but my sense is that ORI treats egregious cases of plagiarism with the same degree of seriousness as other forms of serious 'data' misconduct (ie, falsification and fabrication).

Finally, I tend to support efforts at operationalizing plagiarism and other forms of authorship misconduct. But, as a college professor, I really worry about the possible impact of ending up with guidance for plagiarism for professionals, particularly if it applies equally to those who are fully proficient in English, that is more lenient than that currently applied to students.

Just some thoughts on a snowy, Friday afternoon in New York.

Miguel Roig
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We have confronted the issue of plagiarism on many occasions by many authors and in all forms discussed on this listserve. We are convinced that most people are not knowledgeable about what constitutes plagiarism and have drafted a policy on it. Here is the link:

http://edmgr.ovid.com/ajn/accounts/PlagiarismPolicy.doc

We are concerned here about self-plagiarism that falls short of duplicate publication because we believe that biomedical writing should adhere to the same standards as good, ethical writing in other communities. Our position is that it is intellectually dishonest not to tell the reader that you've written these same words elsewhere. Better to quote yourself.

We also have found that many authors think that paraphrasing means to simply change a few words in a sentence. Thus, we received a paper that took a JAMA article, changed a few words in each sentence, deleted some paragraphs, kept others with the same order of sentences and paragraphs, and added a couple new paragraphs. The author did cite the JAMA article, but did not understand that this was still plagiarism.

Diana J. Mason
Editor-in-Chief, American Journal of Nursing
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Let me add one more thought to this discussion. I'm sure that I self-plagiarized earlier in my career. I was writing a lot about one topic and didn't even have to cut-and-past; I had the words in my head one way and didn't even think to quote myself or to try to rephrase what was in my head. I think these are issues that are not well taught in educational programs and I don't think it's helpful for us to be punitive for people who are naïve to this aspect of plagiarism. We use it as a 'teaching moment' here unless it's on the level of duplicate publication.

Diana J. Mason
Editor-in-Chief, American Journal of Nursing
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I want to add a pair of questions into this discussion about plagiarism because I feel that we are using many theoretical concepts and few practical situations.

1- Can any author be the "owner" of some specific words.

In my opinion plagiarism is more a qualitative idea than a quantitative one. We all use the same words as long as we use the same language. I think that plagiarism is more related with the use of some ideas and knowledge and it implies everything else.

2- Where is the line between self-plagiarism and author style.

I also think that self-plagiarism is related with the use of scientific ideas. In the medical field, and many other scientific and non scientific fields, is common to see "styles of writing." We cannot use a mathematical definition to determine what is suspicious of plagiarism and what is not.

By this message I do not mean that I am a defender of plagiarism, I am strictly against it. I consider that "one strike is out".

Rodolfo Soca
Former Director, 16 de Abril

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I wish to return to the reuse of material from one's own earlier publications.
Some have called this "self-plagiarism" while others have dismissed the idea as absurd.

The WAME Statement refers to self-plagiarism as follows:
”Self-plagiarism refers to the practice of an author using portions of their previous writings on the same topic in another of their
publications, without specifically citing it formally in quotes. This practice is widespread and sometimes unintentional, as there are only so many ways to say the same thing on many occasions, particularly when writing the Methods section of an article.
Although this usually violates the copyright that has been assigned to the publisher, there is no consensus as to whether this is a form of scientific misconduct, or how many of one's own words one can use before it is truly "plagiarism." Probably for this reason self-plagiarism is not regarded in the same light as plagiarism of the ideas and words of other individuals. If journals have developed a policy on this matter, it should be clearly stated for authors.”

http://www.wame.org/resources/publication-ethics-policies-for-medical-journals#plagiarism

I feel that those who argue against self-quotation have either lost sight of the purpose of scientific publications or are extrapolating from one context (eg, presentation of research findings) to all parts of a research article.

For example, Miguel Roig wrote:

"I always urge authors, whether students or professionals, to avoid re-using verbatim text when writing papers."

I can see that this may be good advice in some contexts, but I wish to argue that in other contexts it is thoroughly bad advice.

Here are three examples:

1 I expect a report of a medical study (eg, of a randomized trial) to say exactly what is in the protocol in relation to key methodological aspects. To suggest either that this is "self-plagiarism" or that the text should be reworded is completely ludicrous. I would expect, for example, the descriptions of inclusion/exclusion criteria, sample size calculations, and details of interventions or diagnostic procedures to use the same wording as the protocol. That applies even if the protocol has been published, as is increasingly happening, especially for clinical trials. Indeed I would argue that it is unscientific to vary the text - that would make readers suspicious that something had been changed and may weaken the credibility of the results .

2 When two articles are published on the same study I expect the key information to be consistent across the reports. Of course, the second article may contain fewer details, but the essential elements of the study will need to be described in all papers. Again, rewording runs the risk of sowing confusion.

3 When two studies are carried out that are structured identically but differ with respect to some key element, eg, the intervention explored, the setting, or the clinical context, again I would expect the methods to be described in identical terms.

In all of these cases, the use of identical text helps the reader know that exactly the same procedures were adopted. Changing the text to suggest otherwise is perverse and ridiculous. (There is also a case for extending the argument to different authors who have used identical study methods.)

A hidden question here is the extent to which an article should stand alone. Some duplication is surely preferable to omitting all details and just giving a reference. Which serves the reader better a paper with a reference to a separate publication (or more than one) that includes the missing methodological information but which may not be easily accessible, or a slightly longer paper which repeats key information?

Of course, earlier publications from which the new article draws verbatim text should be referenced.

The ORI Statement reads, in part:

“ORI generally does not pursue the limited use of identical or nearly-identical phrases which describe a commonly-used methodology or previous research because ORI does not consider such use as substantially misleading to the reader or of great significance.”

http://ori.dhhs.gov/policies/plagiarism.shtml

I would go further and suggest that it should be made explicit that copying of details of methodology between one's own papers is not scientific misconduct, and indeed it may be the best approach to make clear that the methods were identical.

As indicated in the WAME text I quoted above, the use of the same words in more than one publication raises different issues in the Methods section than elsewhere in an article. But copying is often not unintentional, as is suggested, but deliberate, and surely this can be perfectly proper. WAME could consider amplifying their advice on this issue.

Doug
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What about the related issue of verbatim wording in reviews one reviewer does for multiple manuscripts submitted to a given journal? Suppose that a particular methodological problem is repeated sufficiently often in different manuscripts that a reviewer who sees many of these manuscripts deems it worth while to get the wording and the citations just right for a comment/question (perhaps a series of questions with likely answers anticipated, and comments on these likely answers). Is this reviewer then obligated to change the wording, and deviate from what is ideal, to avoid the perception that the comments are being recycled without any thought or any specificity to the manuscript in question?

Vance Berger
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I am happy about this being brought up again. What about different papers from the same study (or similar ones done at a department) using the methods section from previous papers?