Self-Plagiarism
Self-plagiarism occurs when an author reuses portions of their
previous writings in subsequent research papers.
Occasionally, the derived paper is simply a
re-titled and reformatted version of the original one, but more
frequently it is assembled from bits and pieces of previous work.
It is our belief that self-plagiarism is detrimental to
scientific progress and bad for our academic community.
Flooding conferences and journals with near-identical
papers makes searching for information relevant to a
particular topic harder than it has to be. It also
rewards those authors who are able to break down their
results into overlapping least-publishable-units
over those who publish each result only
once. Finally, whenever a self-plagiarized paper is allowed to
be published, another, more deserving paper, is not.
Publications
- Christian Collberg,
Stephen Kobourov,
Joshua Louie, Thomas Slattery,
A Study of
Self-Plagiarism in Computer Science , University of Arizona,
Technical Report TR03-02.
- Christian Collberg,
Stephen Kobourov,
Joshua Louie, Thomas Slattery,
SPlaT: A System for Self-Plagiarism Detection,
IADIS International
Conference WWW/INTERNET 2003, Algarve, Portugal 5-8 November 2003.
- Christian Collberg,
Stephen Kobourov,
Self-plagiarism in computer science,
Communications of the ACM, Vol. 48, Issue 4, April 2005.
The SPlaT Tool
The SPlaT tool can function in three modes:
- In web spider mode SPlat crawls through web sites reachable from the
top fifty Computer Science departments or any other specified start
site downloading research papers to search for instances of
self-plagiarism by Computer Science academics.
- In reviewer's workbench mode SPlaT compares a paper under review to a record
of the author's previously published articles extracted from their
web site and online article repositories (such as portal.acm.org and
citeseer.nj.nec.com ).
- In author mode SPlaT allows authors weary of committing
textual self-plagiarism by cryptomnesia (reusing ones own
previously published text while unaware of its existence) to check
a new paper against previous publications.
In either mode, SPlat checks the collected documents similarity,
and all instances are reported to the user so that they may be investigated
to determine if they are truly fraudulent papers. The tool is intended to
generate warnings, all instances should be verified by an appropriate reviewer.
You will need the following to run SPlaT:
- Java 1.4.2 or higher (for proper web spider operation)
- 3rd party converter from pdf and ps (or whatever file format you want to compare) to raw text
Last updated by Shafik Amin and Gergely Kota on: