Timeline for Writing Thesis: Copying from published papers
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
10 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Apr 14, 2019 at 18:26 | comment | added | cbeleites | Wrt. self-plagiarism: over here long-form theses are not usually required to be totally novel work: work already submitted for another exam cannot count towards the thesis, but publications of parts of the thesis work do not hurt the novelty of the long form thesis. Here, the PhD student declares "None of the material presented for the thesis has been submitted for any other exam" - so for me self-plagiarism is violating the particular novelty requirements for the submission in question. BTW, a list of "publications produced during the thesis work" is usually part of the submission. | |
| Apr 14, 2019 at 18:16 | comment | added | cbeleites | Buffy, I'm along with @PeterShor: all citations in the paper also need to appear in the thesis (by the same logic by which they made it into the paper) - so I don't see how the citation chain could be broken unless there's proper plagiarism. And I'd expect a thesis to be more detailed and elaborate than the paper, not the other way round - so for learning on the topic, a long-form thesis (or a technical report) is usually much better than the paper. | |
| Apr 14, 2019 at 18:13 | comment | added | David Richerby | @PeterShor My reading of the question is that the asker intends writing their thesis as if the papers don't exist: using the material from them but not citing them. At first, I thought "Don't do this" meant don't copy-paste stuff from your papers but I think it actually means don't do it without saying you've done it. | |
| Apr 14, 2019 at 17:36 | comment | added | Buffy | @PeterShor, as I said, you can quote large sections safely in the absence of other restrictions. But don't present the work as new when it is not. You don't need to paraphrase. You just need to be honest about origins. I'm surprised that isn't clear. | |
| Apr 14, 2019 at 17:34 | comment | added | Peter Shor | Copying large sections is more or less inevitable even when you rewrite your papers to be more comprehensible. Assuming copyright is not an issue, there is absolutely no need to paraphrase the text from your earlier papers. It's much more work, and it will probably result in a decrease in comprehensibility in some sections. | |
| Apr 14, 2019 at 17:27 | comment | added | Buffy | @PeterShor, the question was about copying, explicitly. So was the answer. You can have it both ways as long as you honor copyrights that may no longer be yours, and you present the complete record. The record might only require a bibliography in some cases. There is very little anymore that is completely self contained in scholarship. You build on earlier work, both yours and that of others. | |
| Apr 14, 2019 at 15:38 | comment | added | Peter Shor | This is a baffling answer. It seems to me that a thesis is a perfect place to rewrite a connected series of papers that you have published, clarifying the ideas in them, making it is a self-contained work including all the logical arguments, so that the reader doesn't have to go find the original papers and read them. (Of course, you should say which parts came from previous papers.) Why make the readers look at the original papers if you don't have to? Is it good for their souls? | |
| Apr 14, 2019 at 14:10 | comment | added | Buffy | @Stumbler, it depends on field and place. Doctoral dissertations are more likely to be published and it is often a requirement, even when the publishing isn't reviewed other than by the faculty. They are fairly likely to be read by other grad students, anyway. | |
| Apr 14, 2019 at 14:06 | comment | added | Stumbler | Are theses actually published? Aren't theses just really for the examination of awarding a PhD (or Masters)? Maybe it depends on the discipline. | |
| Apr 14, 2019 at 12:52 | history | answered | Buffy | CC BY-SA 4.0 |