Self-Plagiarism Research Literature in the Social Sciences: A Scoping Review

Abstract

Self-plagiarism is a contentious issue in higher education, research and scholarly publishing contexts. The practice is problematic because it disrupts scientific publishing by overemphasizing results, increasing journal publication costs, and artificially inflating journal impact, among other consequences. We hypothesized that there was a dearth of empirical studies on the topic of self-plagiarism, with an over-abundance of editorial and commentary articles based on anecdotal evidence. The research question was: What typologies of evidence characterize the literature on self-plagiarism in scholarly and research journals? We conducted a scoping review, using the search terms "self-plagiarism" and "self-plagiarism" (hyphenated), consulting five social sciences research databases, supplemented by a manual search for articles, resulting in over 5900 results. After removing duplicates and excluding non-scholarly sources, we arrived at a data set of 133 sources, with publication dates ranging from 1968 to 2017. With an interrater reliability of over 93% between two researchers, our typological analysis revealed 47 sources (34.3%) were editorials; 41 (29.9%) were conceptual research (including teaching cases); 16 (11.7%) were editorial responses; 12 (8.6%) were secondary research; and only 8 sources (5.8%) were primary research. There is little guidance in the available literature to graduate students or their professors about how to disentangle the complexities of self-plagiarism. With primary and secondary research combined accounting for 14.4% of overall contributions to the data set, and primary research constituting only 6% of overall contributions, we conclude with a call for more empirical evidence on the topic to support contributions to the scholarly dialogue.

Plagiarism in articles published in journals indexed in the Scientific Periodicals Electronic Library (SPELL): a comparative analysis between 2013 and 2018

“…According to Eaton and Crossman (2018), self-plagiarism is a sub-category of plagiarism and is considered to be complex and polemical. The study and debate of selfplagiarism have received growing interest from editors with the objective to establish clear and specific guidelines about the issue to authors during the process of submitting scientific work in social science areas.…”

“…Self-plagiarism, for instance, is not addressed by the law because it is a situation in which authors themselves reuse their own works; i.e., there is no offense in relation to others' rights. Therefore, it falls beyond legal issues and is essentially considered essentially an ethical problem since a redundant publication (self-plagiarism) "disrupts scientific publishing by over-emphasizing results, increasing journal publication costs, and artificially inflating journal impact, among other consequences" (Eaton and Crossman 2018). Table 1 presents the most common types of plagiarism in the international academic context according to the literature and the practices in some teaching institutions.…”

Text recycling: Views of North American journal editors from an interview‐based study

“…Andreescu, 2013;Bouville, 2008;Bretag & Mahmud, 2009;Roig, 2008;Scanlon, 2007). For a review of the discourse on TR and related matters in the social sciences (see Eaton & Crossman, 2018); for an overview of the debate in the health sciences (see Moskovitz, 2017).…”

Text Recycling in STEM Research: An Exploratory Investigation of Expert and Novice Beliefs and Attitudes

“…Horbach and Halffman (2017) analyzed "unacceptable" cases of text recycling in a corpus of papers by Dutch academics in biology, economics, history, and psychology. For a review of other scholarship on text recycling in the social sciences, Eaton and Crossman (2018).…”