Page 71 - Becoming Metric Wise

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Publishing in Scientific Journals

includes the correction. Idea plagiarism may occur accidentally, in the
sense that one thinks that an idea is one’s own, but it actually is someone
else’s. This may happen because one has not carefully checked the exist-
ing literature or even because one has heard or read about it, but forgot
that one had, so-called cryptomnesia (Macrae et al., 1999).
So-called self-plagiarism is a delicate matter. Leaving purely legal aspects
aside (for which we refer to Samuelson, 1994), we note that some colleagues
place it on the same level as other forms of plagiarism, while others state that
self-plagiarism does not exist. Of course, as pointed out by Chrousos et al.
(2012) and by Cronin (2013) one cannot steal ideas from oneself, so linguis-
tically the term “self-plagiarism” is an oxymoron. However, when re-using
one’s own material proper reference must always be given. It is unethical to
claim ideas of others, and it is unethical to give the impression that one pre-
sents an idea for the first time when this is not the case. This corresponds to
the definition stated at the beginning of this section. According to Errami
and Garner (2008) duplication, duplicate submission and repeated publica-
tion (self-plagiarism) are clearly on the rise. As such they urge journal pub-
lishers to use automated means to detect duplicate publications.
Re-publishing parts of one’s work often happens when an article
published as part of conference proceedings is later published as a journal
article. As conference proceedings play an important role in engineering
and computer science this point was investigated by Zhang and Jia
(2013). They found that in this field most editors were willing to accept
submissions derived from a conference paper provided that a substantial
amount of the content had been changed (usually expanded). Concretely,
they often required 30% new content, but some even went as far as 75%
new content. Moreover, such submissions were again submitted to peer
review. So, although a software tool such as CrossCheck would signal a
large overlap in content, this is not considered self-plagiarism. That said,
writing in a repetitive style is usually not good for one’s reputation, unless
one addresses a totally different audience.
Duplicate publication, in the sense of publishing the same article
twice, is another matter. Duplicate publication is only allowed with full
permission of the publisher of the first version.

3.3.2 Fraud
Full-blown fraud is discussed in Gla ¨nzel (2010), including, among others,
the case of J.H. Scho ¨n in the field of semiconductors. This scientist