how one is not accused of plagiarism when including an article in a MSc thesis? [duplicate]

Question

Let us suppose that I am following my MSc studies. At the end of my compulsory courses I have an accepted article for being presented in a conference with my advisor. For graduating, I need to prepare a thesis, and I want to include this article as the main part of my thesis (80% of the thesis). So I have the following questions (I believe it is not necessary to open another thread for this):

a) How should I do this thesis? Should it be an extended version of the article that is about to be published?

b) How should I cite the article that will be published in my thesis if most of it is based on my article? I believe it would be somewhat troublesome to cite one's work at every moment in the thesis?

c) What would happen if, after the article is published and my thesis is in the digital library of my university, somebody passes a plagiarism checker (like Turnitin) to it? It would detect my thesis in the university repository. I could be blamed for self-plagiarism or even plagiarism (because my supervisor's name would not appear like an author in the thesis document, but as a supervisor).

Any help would be much appreciated.

Thank you very much.

Answer 1

Many journals have specific policies that allow the submission of material that has previously appeared in an MS or Ph.D. thesis. This is an exception to the general rule that submitted manuscripts must consist of new, not previously published, research.

Similarly, many academic institutions have policies that allow for the inclusion of text from published papers in MS and Ph.D. theses if the journal publisher also allows this.

Assuming that both your institution and the journal that you're publishing in have such policies, then you can reuse a journal article in your thesis. This is really quite common in many STEM fields. When you do submit your paper, you should make it clear that some or all of the paper has previously appeared in your thesis and refer to the publisher's guidelines on this.

Answer 2

You could include the article verbatim and not be accused of plagiarising. (Self-plagiarism isn't relevant here.) But, a thesis has different demands to a journal, so changes will be required.

Explain that your thesis is based upon a published journal article (or published articles), you can include the explanation in the introduction, a single citation (to each article) will suffice. There's no need to distinguish material that hasn't been published (or has been published elsewhere).

In cases when a journal article appears after a thesis, include a mention, e.g., a preliminary version of this article appeared in X's thesis [cite].