Is it plagiarism to reuse your own full-text material from a previous conference in a new conference?

Question

I am a reviewer at a conference. An author submitted a paper, and I searched the author's previous papers. I found they have one paper with a very similar title accepted to a conference in 2012. I downloaded the paper, and about 1.5 pages of the 6 page document is exactly the same as the 2012 paper (all words and everything else.) So is that plagiarism?

There is no reference to their own 2012 work. Without paying attention to the rest of paper? Should I drop that or not?

Update: Yes the paper was accepted and indexed on IEEE web site. and I download the paper from IEEE web site.

Answer 1

Yeah, copying 25% of a prior paper without attribution is definitely self-plagiarism. Report it to the program chairs of the conference, and let them sort out how to manage the problem from there.

Additional information, for any coming from different publication cultures: electrical engineering / computer science conferences are serious publications that take originality very seriously, and IEEE policy on the matter is quite explicit.

Answer 2

As others have noted, this is a lot of copying, and it would be difficult to justify, but I would say that it is not by itself unacceptable. Ultimately, it boils down not to how much of the paper is replicated, but to how much of the result is replicated.

If it just happens that for this problem, describing the preliminaries takes up 1.5 pages, and they've copied that from an earlier paper on the same subject, it can still be justified, so long as the thing that is actually being presented is sufficiently new. A good proof, for instance, may only take up a page and a half itself, and still be well worth publishing.

This is why I said, in my earlier comment that it depends on the field. In some fields the text of the paper is itself the result (like a particularly well-researched line of reasoning). In that case self-plagiarizing is a big deal. In other fields the text serves only to present the results, like a proof, some emperical results or an algorithm, and copy-pasting the preliminaries is almost standard practice. It's kind of inadvisable, but it's not by devinition unacceptable.

Even the fact that they've not cited their previous paper can be justified if the previous result is not relevant for this result. Citing yourself when it's not relevant is a different kind of dishonesty all in itself, so you're caught between two fires.

Of course, the other side is that they could be trying to artificially inflate their publication record and they've not cited their previous work in an effort embellish that fact. At the very least, they've not gone through any effort to show that their intentions are honest.

You should mention to your co-reviewers and editor that this is the case. The important point is that there's no automatic rule saying that copying 20 percent is acceptable and 25% is crossing the line. You (and the other reviewers) should make the judgment on whether the self-plagiarism concerns just the text or also the actual results.

Answer 3

Answer to the question: no it is not plagiarism. Plagiarism is defined as passing off someone else's text, idea, representation as your own. As the author in question is actually the author of the old paper, it is not plagiarized.

If the author signed over the exclusive copyright, it is a copyright violation.

If your conference requires contributions to be novel (but see below), then it fails on that account - regardless whether the abstract is copy&paste or rephrased (and even in that case you may report that the citations are not appropriate, and previous work is missing).

In addition, as reviewer you may decide that it is not interesting enough (e.g. because it is known already) even if there is no formal novelty requirement.

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Personally I find self-plagiarism a misleading and unfortunate term (but yes I do know what it means, and I totally agree that we need to fight the underlying problems). But IMHO is not a straightforward extension of plagiarism, and in my experience, there are better terms to unambiguously name the problems.

In addition, the term has the clear connotation of an offense - but whether and how much one should cite oneself depends a lot on circumstances. In particular, not saying that this your idea is 5 years old is offensive (only) if there is a requirement or expectation of novelty. On the other hand, one would expect a lifetime-achievement award lecture to be full of widely known ideas.

But even in a paper I'd not cite all my previous papers that are somehow relevant but only the one (or maybe two) that is of most use to the reader. Excessive self-citation isn't better than not citing yourself - it is just a different problem.

I thus find it much more practical to require a contribution to be novel (no duplicate publication) and substantial (no salami publication - though for a conference presentation less is often more). There are further requirements (outside the self-plagiarism questions), e.g. the contribution must be the authors' own (no plagiarism).

With students if necessary for the purpose I clarify that novelty includes written from scratch. In addition, even if that is independent of self-plagiarism, I make people aware of the fact that they can violate the copyright of somehing they hold the (in my legislation inalienable) authorship rights to.

(I do think though, that academia would be better off if the novelty requirement would be somewhat dropped in favor of replication studies)

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I'd like to throw in a slightly different view from a field with presumably very different conference culture, which I'd formulte as

When reviewing conference abstracts, I ask myself:

• Overall quality (as far as one can tell from 200 words)?
• How well does it fit with the interests of the audience?
• I rather disregard "global" novelty compared to novelty to the audience at that conference.
  Our conferences do not have novelty requirements and neither do they ask for an exclusive copyright transfer (unlike our journals). Ultimately, if the topic is too old and well-known, it will fail at the "interesting?" question.

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Long story: we submit 200 words or maybe 1 page abstracts - so 1.5 copied pages are plain impossible. More importantly, our conferences don't count as peer-reviewed publication, for that we publish in a proper journal (we often don't even have conference proceedings but instead have a special issue of one of the reputable peer-reviewed journals). In particular with my medical colleagues I see a trend that they are concerned someone could steal their idea - so they will present only results that have already been published in a peer-reviewed journal (pretty much the opposite of "novelty").

For me the important point of a conference presentation is to tell the audience something interesting for them. I freely admit that I hate presentations that don't convey any useful message to anyone in the audience beyond "I, the author, am a hero" or "This [totally useless crap] is sooo new".

If there is already an accepted paper, I include the reference into the conference abstract, for several reasons: the reference serves as "topic has passed peer-review" tag and of course it is an additional advertisement for the paper. The propriety* of citing oneself is only a minor point as we don't have strict novelty requirements; and the lower the number of allowed words, the less usual it is.

Due to our few 100 word limits, I'd also never look for much originality in a conference abstract: once you've found a formulation that saves 5 words, you're not gonna give it up easily ;-)

As I work at the interface between some disciplines doing statistical data analysis for chemical data and medical diagnostic problems, I attend conferences with rather disjunct attendees.

Consequently,

• I've been presenting the same software (poster) at three conferences (within 2 months) with a total of probably close to 2000 attendees but an overlap that I estimate to be < 20 people. I submitted it to those conferences because I thought it interesting for their respective audiences and I did not expect many people to attend more than one of them.
• I'm invited to speak in more detail about a topic that I first presented 3 years ago at a chemometrics conference. (The paper was published 2 years ago and of course I refer to it: after all I want people to read it - but not to the previous conference) Again, I am the overlap in attendance between the statistics-heavy first conference and the application-centered conference now.

And, by the way, I was taught about scientific writing to avoid synonyms and always try to stick to the same terms (once good terms are found) - even if that is repetitive throughout the paper, and use easy language in order to be unambiguous and as understandable as possible to other non-native English readers. This is another source of not so very original formulations.