Is it plagiarism if I use a text I wrote myself but put on the internet before?

Question

I just rememebered a case when I was still in school: we had to write an essay about a specific topic and one guy put big parts of his essay on Wikipedia before handing it in. When the teacher checked for plagiarism she indeed found big parts of his text in the Wikipedia article and thus accused him of plagiarism.

How would that situation be with journal papers (or other "official" ways of publishing)? Can I reuse part(s) of texts I wrote myself but that are available publicly/online like on Wikipedia, my Blog, university homepage, etc.?

(Maybe consider that pseudonyms are used on Wikipedia, Blogs, etc.)

Answer 1

I think this is an interesting question that depends on separating three concepts that sometimes get intertwined:

1. plagiarism
2. copyright
3. legality

Plagiarism refers to using something without properly indicating its source.

Copyright refers to having the right to use material elsewhere.

Legality refers to whether you're violating a law or committing a crime by doing something.

If you've posted something anywhere (and especially to an openly editable place like wikipedia or SE), then there's possible issues with reusing it on each of the fronts.

With respect to plagiarism, what matters is if the prior posting counts as "published" or "submitted" for the purposes of the item in question. (The former being the standard for journals and books; the latter being the standard for classes -- though I suspect most classes would care if you submitted something you already had published).

For copyright, you may not have the legal right to use something in its entirety even if you're the one who wrote it. This would depend on which copy rights your retained from your first publication. If it's SE, for instance, you're under Creative Commons. Wikipedia seems to have their own thing (I'm not a lawyer and can't entirely parse their policy).

Finally, none of this means that you're doing anything criminal, but if you were publishing for money, you could have liability if you violate the copyright.

Two confusing issues are that copyrights can speak as if they create citation obligations (they don't) and act as if their violation is a crime, but at least in the US its only a crime when done for profit.

Answer 2

Plagiarism essentially covers illicit appropriation of credit and its benefits (and possibly depriving the author of them; this particularly includes omission of the original author's credits).

In your case, what is described in the brackets is not relevant, as whoever "lifted" the text from the internet is the author themselves. The only problem can arise when credit is claimed twice: e.g. the work has been separately prepared for one journal article/exam and later is re-used for another for double credit.

I think it is not ideal to publish a piece of coursework solution before submitting it (for precisely the reason OP lists), but it is not plagiarism provided it has not been used to gain credit for original work anywhere else. Some teachers permit resubmission of work executed for a prior opportunity by the same author in the sense that it is the authors' work itself; in which case, also, it is not plagiarism, because the re-use has been deemed by the teacher to be legitimate.

TL;DR: For the purposes of the present question, plagiarism is the attempt to gain illicit credit for a task requiring original work by copying an existing text (from others or oneself).

Answer 3

Don't reuse material you have contributed to Wikipedia (or other sources where you aren't clearly attributed).

It's too difficult to establish that you are the source of the Wikipedia material (and in some cases impossible). Some authors are anonymous or use pseudonyms. In addition, content on Wikipedia often can't be straightforwardly attributed to one author, due to the community process of creating and revising text.

A further problem is that most Wikipedia content is under a license that allows redistribution "if and only if the copied version is made available on the same terms to others and acknowledgment of the authors of the Wikipedia article used is included". In many cases this will not be compatible with the terms of a journal you wish to publish in.

Wikipedia is very commonly used and very easy to find, and if someone does find it, it raises unnecessary ethical concerns. Even if you believe that there is no actual problem and you are able to provide evidence of that, it is simply best to avoid any suspicion of wrongdoing on this. Someone might get the wrong impression, and you might not have a chance to correct it (for example, what if a hiring committee finds it and assumes you have plagiarised, discarding your application?).

Therefore, I would simply avoid this. Even though in some cases it would be technically allowable, it would raise too many possible concrens. If you need content similar to what you have previously written up on Wikipedia, just rewrite it.

Reusing material from other sources like blogs is less clear.

There isn't an absolute ethical rule against republishing your own material. However, claiming something it is new when it is actually recycled typically is a problem. This is sometimes called "self-plagiarism" (though that term is controversial). Wikipedia has more detail on this.

Journals typically expect your paper submission to be previously unpublished work. However, whether previously publishing something informally on a blog falls afoul of this requirement is a gray area, and probably dependent on individual journal policies.

If you want to reuse some material from a blog or similar source, be sure you know the policy of the journal you are publishing. Contacting an editor would be a good idea if you aren't sure.

In some cases you may be able to reference your blog post, though whether that is considered an acceptable source to cite will also probably be journal-dependent.

Answer 4

Self-plagiarism is a thing. I was unaware of this until a few years ago when I decided to return to school and complete my bachelors. The plagiarism guidelines from my school specifically called out using previously published (or submitted in the case of a class) work, even if the work is yours, as plagiarism. However, this didn't mean that you couldn't use your previous work. The solution was to quote and properly site your previous work as a reference. I expect that this would be acceptable in your case as well.

Answer 5

There are four views on plagiarism here.

The first is the broad view. Here, plagiarism simply means taking someone else's work and passing it off as your own. In that sense, this is not plagiarism.

In a formal academic context, there are three additional perspectives of which you should be aware.

The first is that plagiarism can further extend to failing to properly attribute a reference, even if you don't claim it as your own work. Using a statistic or a simple, "I read somewhere" without the corresponding citation can be seen as a form a plagiarism because, while you didn't try to pass the work off as your own, you still failed to cite the source and deprived them of due credit for their work. In this case, it does not matter that you are your own source, because without the citation the reader has no way to know this.

The second is that plagiarism can extend to re-using your own material on successive assignments. Personally, while I can understand this as a policy violation, especially for undergraduates, I don't feel this should be called plagiarism. Nevertheless, in academic context this is often called and treated as a plagiarism, because you failed in the practice of the objectives of the assignment. From the instructor's point of view, in failing to cite yourself, they feel like you tried to deceive them by hiding that you did not do original work for this assignment. And even if you do cite yourself, what kind of paper just has one citation to another paper which it copies word for word? It is seen as academically dishonest, even it's not quite "pure" plagiarism, and speaks to personal integrity.

The final perspective on plagiarism is to falsify a source or research. This is similar to your situation in that if it were okay to put information on wikipedia yourself and then immediately cite it in your own paper, you would be able to create a circular source of authority, with no real citation or reference behind it. You cite Wikipedia, but wikipedia is just your own words. This might be credible in the real sense, but it breaks the proper attribution chain, making research down the road impossible to verify. Moreover, it's seen as an attempt to artificially inflate an argument by adding a meaningless citation, which is again about misplacing credit for the work.

Answer 6

Many publications insist that they be the first place where your work is published. It may not actually matter if it is plagiarism if it violate's the journal's policies on that count.

And, yes, as others pointed out, there is such a thing as self-plagiarism.

When it comes to plagiarism, context matters a lot. For instance, it matters if the overlap between your publication and the Wikipedia page is only one paragraph in a 100-page book, vs. whether it's 90% overlap.

Answer 7

If you quote your source than it is not plagiarism, for example According to John Adam "Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence". You can also paraphrase and site your source, plagiarism is the practice of using someone else writings or work and trying to say it's yours without giving them credit according to Dictionary.com. Also I would avoid any and all wiki's when writing papers;however, most credible wiki pages site sources at the bottom of the page, you can often find the original article that the information came from,allowing you to go right to the source. Using paraphrasing will often get you past a plagiarism checker, although teachers read so many papers that they often know when they have heard something before and expect you to site where the information came from.