I am currently writing up a paper, and am tempted to copy/paste an entire section (several pages) from a previous paper I have written.
Some important context before you pass judgment: The section I intend to copy describes an intervention. It was evaluated in a shallow way in the previous paper, and the new paper conducts a more thorough evaluation with different data. So, the two papers have different methods, results, and conclusions, but the intervention they are evaluating is the same. Would it be ok to reuse the section that describes the intervention?
Copying an entire section of the old paper feels a bit like cheating, but rephrasing it just for the sake of avoiding self-plagiarism feels like pointless busy work. I could just cite the older paper and direct the reader to read it for details, but this would leave me with a paper that would not stand up on its own. The reader would not get much from the paper without understanding the intervention, so forcing them to find and read a different paper does not seem like a good solution.
For what it is worth:
- I am the sole author on both papers, so there are no concerns about potentially using content from a co-author.
- The new paper cites the old paper, so I'm not trying to hide the existence of the old paper.