18.677 self-plagarism

               Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 18, No. 677.
       Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's College London
                   www.kcl.ac.uk/humanities/cch/humanist/
                        www.princeton.edu/humanist/
                     Submit to: humanist_at_princeton.edu

         Date: Thu, 31 Mar 2005 06:00:51 +0100
         From: Patrick Durusau <patrick.durusau_at_sbl-site.org>
         Subject: Self-Plagiarism

Willard,

I thought Humanist readers would be interested in a recent treatment of the
problem of self-plagiarism as a update to Irving Hexham's 1992 post to the
Humanist:

http://lists.village.virginia.edu/lists_archive/Humanist/v05/0795.html

Self-Plagiarism in Computer Science, Christian Collberg and Stehpen
Kobourov, Communications of the ACM, volume 48, number 4, 88-94.

The authors define the following terminology for self-plagiarism:

**********************
Textual reuse: Incorporating text/images/or other material from previously
published work. (By "published work" we mean articles published in refereed
conferences and journals where copyright is assigned to someone other than
the author.)

Semantic reuse: Incorporating ideas from previously published work.

Blatant reuse: Incorporating texts or ideas frompreviously published work
in such a way that the two works are virtually indistinguishable.

Selective reuse: Incorporating bits and pieces from previously published work.

Incidental reuse: Incorporating texts or ideas not directly related to the
new ideas presented in the paper (such as related work sections, motivating
examples, among others).

Reuse by cryptomnesia [4]: Incorporating texts or ideas from previously
published work while unaware of the existence of that work.

Opaque reuse: Incorporating texts or ideas from previously published work
without acknowledging the existence of that work.

Advocacy reuse: Incorporating texts or ideas from previously published work
when writing to a community different from that in which the original work
was published.

at page 91
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The authors have created software, SPlaT (Self-Plagirism Tool), available
at: http://splat.cs.arizona.edu, to assist in their investigation of the
incidence of self-plagarism.

I have not installed the software (yet) but can easily imagine using it in
reviewer mode while acting as a peer reviewer for markup conferences.

The article concludes with a number of questions as to what can and should
be done, as well as who would be responsible for taking action to prevent
self-plagiarism.

If humanists are going to be concerned with "classic" plagiarim by
students, it seems to me that self-plagiarism deserves equal concern.

Hope you are having a great day!

Patrick

--
Patrick Durusau
Director of Research and Development
Society of Biblical Literature
Patrick.Durusau_at_sbl-site.org
Chair, V1 - Text Processing: Office and Publishing Systems Interface
Co-Editor, ISO 13250, Topic Maps -- Reference Model
Topic Maps: Human, not artificial, intelligence at work!