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

The SPlaT Tool

The SPlaT tool can function in three modes:
  1. 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.
  2. 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 ).
  3. 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:
Last updated by Shafik Amin and Gergely Kota on: