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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.
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  • Even though it is self-plagiarism, it is considered to be plagiarism at the end of the day. As long as you cite the original paper for this intervention, there would not be any problem.
    – optimal control
    Commented Jul 8 at 8:33
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    I absolutely concur that very often the simplest course of action is to copy over the technical description of an intervention verbatim, and that rephrasing it just to avoid self-plagiarism is pointless. I personally would tend to copying verbatim and pointing this out explicitly, but happily I am not the one writing these parts of papers. So I would be interested to see what is commonly accepted practice, at least in this community.
    – Stephan Kolassa
    Commented Jul 8 at 9:02
  • @StephanKolassa, paraphrasing isn't a guard agains self-plagiarism. Only citation is as only citation maintains the chain of context of ideas. The earlier paper has potentially important context that is lost without citation.
    – Buffy
    Commented Jul 8 at 10:00
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    @Buffy: of course one should always cite the earlier paper, and the OP is explicit they are doing so.
    – Stephan Kolassa
    Commented Jul 8 at 10:01
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    You mentioned in a comment on the answer that the previous paper is a conference paper. That might be a significant thing to mention in the question, especially if the new paper is a journal paper. In some fields it's quite normal to reuse parts of a conference paper in a journal paper, especially if the journal paper is an expanded version of the same work.
    – N. Virgo
    Commented Jul 9 at 5:22

3 Answers 3

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You misunderstand the difference between self plagiarism and copyright infringement. First, if you cite the previous work then you aren't misattributing the ideas or breaking a chain of context, so it isn't technically self-plagiarism. Second, paraphrasing is no guard against any form of plagiarism which is focused on the underlying ideas, not the specific words.

But what you propose is likely copyright infringement if your earlier paper is published and you have given up copyright. There are some license forms that would permit what you suggest but they aren't universal. I'd guess that, in most cases, a copyright holder would be upset, especially if you submit the second paper to another publisher.

Note, however, that it shouldn't be necessary to do this at all. Scholars are used to following citation references to earlier work to get the details of things. You are probably better off using standard referencing of the earlier work pointing readers to the necessary background.

However, you can do what you suggest, with citation, if you are the copyright holder of the first paper. You can also do it with explicit permission of the copyright holder if it isn't yourself.

But also ask yourself whether a more concise paper might be better.

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    "Scholars are used to following citation references to earlier work to get the details of things." Not everyone has free access to papers.
    – Stephan Kolassa
    Commented Jul 8 at 9:54
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    @StephanKolassa, "free access" isn't a part of the definition of either copyright infringement or plagiarism. The world isn't perfect. And, again, paraphrasing isn't a guard against any form of plagiarism. Only citation is, which the OP promises in any case.
    – Buffy
    Commented Jul 8 at 9:57
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    @Buffy thank you for identifying that this is an issue of copyright rather than plagiarism, that helps a lot. Fortunately the conference organisers for the prior paper explicitly state that copyright remains with the authors, so in this particular case I am free and clear, but I appreciate that this would not always be the case.
    – David Milne
    Commented Jul 8 at 11:04
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    Regarding whether I should just cite the old paper and shoot for conciseness, I think that depends on the extent that other parts of the paper rely on an understanding of the content in the section. If I remove this section the new paper will not stand up on its own. There are parts of the discussion and conclusions that talk about specific aspects of the intervention, and won't make any sense to someone who hasn't read the section. I think at that point you have gone from concise (which is good for the reader) to confusing and cryptic (which is not).
    – David Milne
    Commented Jul 8 at 11:14
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    @DavidMilne Holding copyright is not necessarily enough, if you're being thorough about it you would also have to consider any license terms you've agreed to and especially any exclusive terms. If you give exclusive commercial publishing rights to your work while retaining copyright, those exclusive rights are still something you're required to honor. That said, I would not expect a publisher to pursue any sort of claim in this situation, and there's probably no claim to make if the copied section is sufficiently brief.
    – Bryan Krause ♦
    Commented Jul 8 at 13:52
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Can I self-plagiarise a part of a previous paper?

No, you most certainly cannot self-plagiarize. But also, what you are proposing to do does not actually sound like self-plagiarism, so maybe the titular question is not what you should be asking exactly.

Self-plagiarism is the act of passing off your old work as new. That is, an essential component of self-plagiarism is that there is some kind of deception involved, where you deliberately withhold from your readers the information that part or all of your text has already been published elsewhere.

If there is no deception, there is no self-plagiarism. Therefore, if you cite your old paper, and not just in a misleading, sneaky way but with a clear explanatory remark along the lines of: "the following subsection is reproduced verbatim from [citation]", then you are not committing self-plagiarism.

Does that mean that it is okay to do what you are proposing? Well, not necessarily. Because the downside of not committing self-plagiarism is that your readers now understand that some of the content of your article is not novel. And they may consequently feel that the article itself, is, well, not novel, or at least not sufficiently novel to be published. You won't have committed any ethical transgression -- you may simply have submitted for publication a not very good paper, which may end up with the article getting rejected.

Anyway, if your question is about ethics, then the answer is yes, you would be in the clear in reusing the old material (with citations and an appropriately clear disclosure, such as the use of quotation marks and/or an added explanatory remark).

Now, setting aside ethics, is it a good idea to do it? I don't think you've given us enough information to say. It's really a question of what style of presenting your ideas would result in the best-written piece of scholarly work and best serve your readers. But maybe one way of thinking about the issue is: if you are seriously considering including a lengthy excerpt from an old paper in your new paper, can you honestly say that the new paper is novel enough to be worth publishing? In other words, while I wouldn't rule out that there are situations where the idea of reusing the old material makes sense, I'd regard the idea as a bit of a warning sign - in a similar way to how there's a certain New York Times opinion columnist whose columns regularly include about 30% or more of block-quoted content; suffice it to say, I don't hold this person in high regard.

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  • I understand the concern about novelty but I think my question provided enough background to address it. The new paper conducts a more robust evaluation that resolves some of the limitations of the prior paper. Also, aren't confirmation studies a critical component of good science? Are we not allowed to conduct our own confirmation studies because they aren't sufficiently novel?
    – David Milne
    Commented Jul 9 at 1:04
  • @DavidMilne I don’t feel like you’ve provided enough background, or possibly I myself don’t have the necessary background to comment meaningfully about the novelty issue. I’m a pure mathematician, we don’t do confirmation studies. (And we don’t typically reuse language from old papers, except short and very formulaic things like definitions of technical terms.) But I hope I’ve at least partially answered your question.
    – Dan Romik
    Commented Jul 9 at 1:38
  • @DavidMilne Another thought after reading some of your comments: regarding the new paper “not standing on its own”, in math it is quite common for papers to build heavily on earlier papers (by the same or other authors), to the extent that they explicitly say things like “we assume the reader has read section 4 of [citation]”. No one thinks this is strange, or “confusing and cryptic” as you said in your comment. And no thinks it would make sense to reproduce section 4 of the old paper in the new paper when it is readily available for anyone to look up.
    – Dan Romik
    Commented Jul 9 at 1:49
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"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."

How long is this section that you feel such hesitation towards rewriting it? I'd say just bite the bullet.

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    Once again, paraphrasing is not a guard against plagiarism or self-plagiarism.
    – Buffy
    Commented Jul 8 at 18:47
  • @Buffy It is not, BUT this is a common workaround in experimental sciences where you draw a fine line between needing to explain a methodology for reproducibility, and also avoid direct copying from prior works. I have encountered this issue several times in my career where my group has developed several proprietary methodologies which we reuse over multiple studies. We cannot solely cite previous work because we made slight modifications which are important to note (again for reproducibility). I have had this discussion with editors and their advice is always do your best to differentiate.
    – R1NaNo
    Commented Jul 9 at 12:59
  • I should probably have phrased that better and said I'd say just bite the bullet and REWRITE. I don't condone paraphrasing.
    – BioBrains
    Commented Jul 12 at 8:33

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