In the “Ethics in Science” course I regularly teach, we spend some time discussing case studies to explore some of the situations students may encounter in their scientific training or careers where they will want to be able to make good ethical decisions.
A couple of these cases touch on the question of “recycling” pieces of old grant proposals or journal articles — say, the background and literature review.
There seem to be cases where the right thing to do is pretty straightforward. For example, helping yourself to the background section someone else had written for her own grant proposal would be wrong. This would amount to misappropriating someone else’s words and ideas without her permission and without giving her credit. (Plagiarism anyone?) Plus, it would be weaseling out of one’s own duty to actually read the relevant literature, develop a view about what it’s saying, and communicate clearly why it matters in motivating the research being proposed.
Similarly, reusing one’s own background section seems pretty clearly within the bounds of ethical behavior. You did the intellectual labor yourself, and especially in the case where you are revising and resubmitting your own proposal, there’s no compelling reason for you to reinvent that particular wheel (unless, if course, reviewer comments indicate that the background section requires serious revision, the literature cited ought to take account of important recent developments that were missing in the first round, etc.).
Between these two extremes, my students happened upon a situation that seemed less clear-cut. How acceptable is it to recycle the background section (or experimental protocol, for that matter) from an old grant proposal you wrote in collaboration with someone else? Does it make a difference whether that old grant proposal was actually funded? Does it matter whether you are “more powerful” or “less powerful” (however you want to cash that out) within the collaboration? Does it require explicit permission from the person with whom you collaborated on the original proposal? Does it require clear citation of the intellectual contribution of the person with whom you collaborated on the original proposal, even if she is not officially a collaborator on the new proposal?
And, in your experience, does this kind of recycling make more sense than just sitting down and writing something new?
A basic principle is that the creator of a work owns the right to it. So, as a first stab at this I would say that whoever actually wrote the section can reuse it without asking or giving credit; the others can not. If you truly did collaborate – both wrote and edited the thing – then be safe rather than sorry and just rewrite it. Chances are you’ll end up with a better, tighter version anyway.
What I always wonder a bit about is successive papers in the same project. The actual study and results differ, but the background is sometimes all but identical across a number of papers. You can’t just cite one of your earlier papers since the background does have to be in the paper for the benefit of an eventual reader. And blockquoting yourself feels just odd. So far I generally reuse my earlier text, but edit it in light of what I now know – improve formulations, update references and so on. I figure that’s enough to make the background section a new version that can stand on its own.
I wonder about this with methods sections of successive papers in the same project. The lab I’m in has six years of publications using the same task, and while we definitely say “For details, see Smith et al (2005),” the two-paragraph description gets close to copy-pasted into the first draft of the next article. From there, it definitely gets tweaked according to the style of whoever’s actually writing the thing, but many of these versions are *very* similar.
…but, various publishers have warned about “self-plagiarism” (see, for example, IEEE’s policy). Can you plagiarize yourself?
OTOH, how many ways can you say the same thing? If you have multiple papers reporting different aspects of the same work, won’t you naturally explain things the same way in the research and methods sections?
Recycling parts of grant apps is totally OK. My position is that co-authors are *authors* with joint ownership and therefore rights. However, decent professionalism requires you get explicit permission when you know damn well the passage you are using is substantial, has some intellectual value (I.e. Not simple Methodological description) and you didn’t write or contribute strongly to it. Relative seniority or power has nothing to do with the ethics, but PIs should be wary of what looks like chronic stealing of significant scholarly work from their trainees.
I don’t think you need to explicitly cite yourself for the Methods text. Nor anything in the line of “this Intro is conceptually identical to what I put in 5 unfunded grant applications.” It helps, of course, if you cite enough of your prior published work which has the related themes or boilerplate Methods so that any scholarly reader will know what is a continued theme and what is not.
In a scientific paper, the *data* are expected to be unique. Other than that it is expected that you will have similar Methods (using them is not plagiarism, right? So why would describing them be plagiarism?) and pursue similar interpretive themes. That you may have common context into which several manuscripts fit.
From the title of this post, I thought it was going to be about whether it is morally acceptable to sift through other’s trash for the purposes of collecting their recycleables. Ah, the hippie co-op debate days…
There is no such thing as “self-plagiarism”.
Wikipedia’s discussion of “self-plagiarism” is actually pretty good.
It notes that Stephanie J. Bird (among others) thinks “self-plagiarism” is a misnomer, since it wouldn’t involve misappropriating someone else’s words, ideas, etc. without proper citation.
That said, there seems to be a recognition that there are situations where reusing one’s own words, ideas, etc. can be unethical — at least if one is not clearly identifying that the recycling is going on. (One of the more compelling examples discussed: publishing the same article in more than one journal, which is the kind of thing that might create the appearance that a particular result has more “independent support” in the literature than it actually does.)
My own feeling is, if there’s nothing wrong with the reuse one is contemplating, there should be nothing wrong with identifying that you have reused the material in this way. If it’s something you feel like you ought to hide, maybe that’s a clue that there’s an ethical problem lurking.
Hi. Looks like I agree with Stephanie Bird.
I don’t even think that publishing the same article more than once is necessarily unethical. It provides excess support for the idea only to someone who only counts, but doesn’t read. But that’s an extreme case.
One thing that I think about when I see these discussions is that journals always grant to authors the rights to re-print all or part of their papers in other works that they may create. That’s a right that I as an author value, and it is not unethical.
Even more interesting; I just published an article in PLoS ONE (possibly the world’s largest journal). All their articles are published under a CC attribution license. That means that not only can I reprint my own article, I can reprint, in any form I want, any article or portion of any article published there. All I have to do is to acknowledge the source. And if I modify the text, it won’t be a quotation any more, so it would be acknowledged by something like “Portions of this paper were adapted from portions of the paper X by author Y under the terms of a CC Attribution license ….”. Figuring out the ethics of that ought to be interesting.
The acknowledgment is important, and I agree that it’s a good litmus test of ethics. But there are times when I re-use my own text (mostly in descriptions of methods) that do not feel like they warrant acknowledgment. It would be easy to put in, though.
“It provides excess support for the idea only to someone who only counts, but doesn’t read”
So, deans and P & T committees then?
snerk.