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I'm writing a short paper from my master thesis to put on arXiv that includes a Definition and a Lemma/Proof.

If I want to publish another extended version for a journal or conference later, can I include the Lemma and Definition directly in the new paper or do I have to cite my previous paper only (without writing them)? (They are the beauty of my work and I'd like to include them into the extended version as well)

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    I've got a question: why do you write the short ArXiV paper at all? If you want to mark your "claim" on the result, your master thesis will do.
    – DCTLib
    Commented Apr 4, 2015 at 12:37
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    Thank you for the naswer @DCTLib :) Actually I wanted to upload my thesis on Arxiv but the latex environment errors killed me! so my prof suggested me to extract two main chapters and publish them in short papers for marking the claim.
    – Kasra Manshaei
    Commented Apr 4, 2015 at 12:47
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    So I presume that your department does not have an institutional repository that could be used for this purpose? Oh, and if you happen to know a very experienced LaTeX user, asking that person to help you with this problem may only cost you a coffee, whereas restructuring your material to a stand-alone paper that is good enough for you to want to have it associated with your name may easily cost you a few days.
    – DCTLib
    Commented Apr 4, 2015 at 13:08
  • @DCTLib: No, we do not have an institutional repository so I tried to split my thesis. Thank you for your comment :)
    – Kasra Manshaei
    Commented Apr 4, 2015 at 14:00

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Essentially, what you seem to be doing here is to write an extended version of a paper that previously appeared in a different venue (here, arXiv). In this case, it is customary to include all of the relevant definitions, theorem, lemmas, and the like in the extended version.

The reason is that the longer paper - in a sense - replaces the shorter version. Thus, you would include them all. Nevertheless, you must state in your longer paper that it is an extended version of an earlier version of the paper (i.e., the short paper).

Note that you can just cite parts of your arXiv paper without including all of its results. It is probably not wise to pursue this approach, though. An arXiv paper is unreviewed, so the reviewers of your journal paper are more likely to question the correctness of the theorem in it. Since also most publishers do not consider arXiv papers to be a prior publication, there is no copyright or dual publication problem with just including theorems and proofs of your shorter paper.

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    In the US at least, arXiv papers are subject to copyright protection just like journal articles are. So as far as copyright is concerned, it does not matter whether the journals consider arXiv papers to be prior publication. However, when you write something and put it on arXiv, you retain the copyright ownership of the text you write there. If you want to later use that text in another paper, then, from the perspective of copyright law, there is no problem since it is your text to use as you like. (This changes if you transfer the copyright to e.g. a journal publisher.)
    – David Z
    Commented Apr 4, 2015 at 15:59
  • @DavidZ: Very useful comment David. thank you :)
    – Kasra Manshaei
    Commented Apr 4, 2015 at 17:30

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