Small unintentional plagiarism issues found after years of my Phd thesis. What can I do?

Question

I finished my PhD in early 2018. I immediately sumbitted an hard copy at the dept. library and a pdf copy on the online database (open-access), a few weeks later as per Univeristy rules.

1. at the time I found some mistakes - probably due to the stress of the moment- (typos/syntax etc.) and some quotations (directI/indirect) either not cited correctly, or not cited, but bewteen quotation marks and so on. So, being as honest as I could, I prepared an erratum to be added to the harcover and another one to be uploaded with the pdf online.

And I was satisfied and happy.

2)After 4 years I had to read again my old thesis to do some future publication.

And there I found other - well 4 to be exact - words and/or senteces missing quotation or quotation marks without the ref. I guess I was more stressed, exausthed and distracted than I Thought.

I had my manuscript checked on a plagarism scan and the outcome is between 3-4 %, that counts most of the correct citations (i.e. indented paragraphs and/or italic), and some common used wording; so the percetuange it is surely lower.

However, thanks to that tool I found this 4 missing quotations.

These issues are normally right after a directly or indirectly quoted paragraph of author X,Y,Z.

So, after many years I can guess I was rearranging parts and some got lost. I guess we may consider it "plagiarism in good faith"or simply unintentional. I know, it is still palgiarism.

Ah! "the mistakes of youth".

So, I really do not know what I can do now.

Sending another Erratum could be suspiscious or creating Drama in an University I wouldn't go back to not even under torture (ahha!). Right?

Do I have other options?

Thanks in advance for your suggestions.

Answer 1

To cite E. of Arendelle [2013]:

Let it go!

This is the best advice you can get. There's not really anything you can or should do. It is a PhD thesis, not a published article. It is not published, except at the university which means that probably nobody looks at it. You've already added some corrections, which is probably more than most would.

Answer 2

I will go against the feel-good answers you will receive.

Burn your diploma and go to your local religious structure and start working there for free, because, you know, people in their life commits mistakes, but saints and the like never ever commits any mistakes, or when they do, they find some perpetual punishment.

Ok, jokes aside, is not the hard learned lesson “I was way more stressed than I thought” enough? You did those mistakes because you were most likely on the edge of burnout, not because you were foolishly tired , and you were ready to cut some (very small) corners to get to your goal.

Think about it.