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Self plagiarism and salami slicing

Self plagiarism occurs when you re-use your own published work in your current work, without citing the original published work. It's considered an academic crime because in the act of publication you have assigned the ownership of your original work to someone else (the Journal), and now you are passing it off as it it were once again your own.

Salami slicing refers to the act of chopping your work up into tiny publons: units of publication that are minimal at best, just enough to get published (a publon is also known as a least publishable increment). Salami slicing usually occurs with the re-use of data, or with a slight change of data but saying essentially the same thing in another publication. 

Both self plagiarism and salami slicing are considered poor practice because they flood the academic community with near identical papers, making it more difficult for scholars to find relevant information.

The very obvious use of cut-and-paste (identical wording for very large parts of the chapter) is disappointing. Perhaps this could have been avoided by structuring the results differently?

Published Monday, June 18, 2007 9:55 PM by robyn.owens
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# re: Self plagiarism and salami slicing

Can I just ask whether it is criminal to present the same material in your PhD thesis as you have done in conference/journal papers written during your candidature? I thought it was okay to do this, and possibly even encouraged, but your post confuses me on this issue. Or do you mean only from journal publication to journal publication?

Tuesday, June 19, 2007 11:53 AM by wayne.griffiths

# re: Self plagiarism and salami slicing

From my understanding, you should acknowledge in your thesis any previous publications based on the thesis material. Where the writing in the thesis is the same/very similar to that of a previous publication, I think it is best to follow normal referencing procedures.

I've already had some bits of the early part of my thesis published, but I think that I've altered the analysis and argument enough that I'll be okay with just an acknowledgement - I might check again, though!

Tuesday, June 19, 2007 12:06 PM by Karen.Hall

# re: Self plagiarism and salami slicing

It's a good thing to have published material in your thesis. The point is, it needs to be properly cited. So if your Chapter 3 was published at an international conference or in some journal, you simply need to note this in the declaration at the beginning of the thesis, and point out whether it is an exact copy of the publication or whether the material in Chapter 3 draws from that publication.

Some theses, based on a number of publications, end up repeating the same material, word for word, in one chapter after another. I have commonly seen this referred to in science thesis reports, where the same methods where used in a number of different experiments, and each chapter reports a different experiment. The examiners get bored with reading the same material over and over, and strictly speaking, you shouldn't use exactly the same descriptions, word for word, in different papers. (Strictly speaking, if you do, you should put those words in quotation marks and then cite your original paper.)

Tuesday, June 19, 2007 2:41 PM by robyn.owens

# re: Self plagiarism and salami slicing

And the very next examiner's report I read says the following:

"The presentation is quite interesting, still the technique of interleaving papers in the text is bothersome for the reader, it made the thesis at times repetitive. If one wants to stress that the work produced pubblications (sic), using "exerpts (sic) from ..." and citing the paper would have allowed a better text flow.

Tuesday, June 19, 2007 9:31 PM by robyn.owens

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