thesis-article (plagiarism)?

[traductio]

The idea of "self-plagiarism" absurd. The issue is duplicate publication.

This is a key distinction. I'm rather surprised to read that journal editors would refuse a submission because it reworked material from a thesis, but that's field differences for ya. (I'm not in literature, although I do publish in humanities journals.) There are ethical issues with reusing one's work, but they aren't related to plagiarism (which is the use of someone else's material or ideas as if they were your own, a non-issue when you're using your own work). It helps to identify the issue this way.

(On a side note, there's a grad student in the program where I teach who heard -- from whom I don't know -- that if you do so much as present a paper at a conference, you can't use it in your thesis because that's self-plagiarism. This qualifies as some of the worst advice ever given to a grad student, but it also confuses the issues. There might be reasons to object to a student using an article they published in their thesis, at least in my field of communication, where article-based theses are rare. But that issue is the bind it puts reviewers in, as students often perceive their published work as somehow beyond critique. My job as an evaluator is to critique your work and make you revise it as needs be, whether it has been published or not. But that's not a plagiarism issue.)

[Hibush]

I was at a presentation by a journal editor a few weeks ago (so few PhD students turned up that they collared any faculty who were in the building to bulk up the audience). The editor's view (from a top journal in my field) is that taking the main ideas from a dissertation/thesis for publication is absolutely fine, and even expected. She did, though, emphasise that while copying verbatim from the dissertation would not be regarded as plagiarism, it would be unlikely to result in a strong journal submission. A journal article is a different beast to a dissertation so you are likely to require substantial rewrites - without changing the main ideas - to get the material into a more concise form that makes it attractive to a journal.

So the undergrad technique of paraphrasing to avoid "plagiarism" is not what the editor recommends. That would just result in suckier prose.

She seems to be saying that the brilliant language of the dissertation is not good enough for journal publication. You have to up your game to publish there.

I don't read any indication that double publication is a concern at all in this explanation of the presentation.

[Hibush]

I went ahead and looked up Leviathan. It seems to publish all kinds of things related to Melville, which gives the impression that their polices are fairly adaptable to varied situations.

The EIC is out of the UCB English department, so that's rather insidery. You wouldn't expect an outlier to the community norms.

The instructions to authors all look very conventional. There is nothing mentioned about theses or dissertations there or in their ethics statement.

They also say that they subscribe to the Committee on Publication Ethics' Core Practices.  In my reading, they are in violation of Practice #7: "Policies should be clear on what counts as prepublication that will preclude consideration. What constitutes plagiarism and redundant/overlapping publication should be specified."


On the other hand, the editor may have been thinking along the lines of the editor who spoke at Scotia's place. That is, theses are tedious, unpublishable dross. In that case, they may be receptive to an original take on the points in the thesis.

[polly_mer]

Huh, goes to show you how much variation across fields there is. No one in the sciences (so far as I know) would consider a dissertation or thesis prior publication. No one reads the things except the committee (if you're lucky), and each chapter is generally either a reprint or draft of a journal article.

Indeed, this is exactly how it works in my (earth sciencey) field, right down to the committee comment. Nobody in the sciences wants to read your PhD (Master's doubly so) - the only exception being if there is something that was never published formally but is still of interest.

In my computational areas, it was quite common to put the computer code into the thesis/dissertation as appendices (now one puts code in a repo for direct download).   I definitely have acquired copies of dissertations to see exactly how some equations became code.

My dissertation was indeed journal articles bookended by a literature review/intro and a summary/future work section.

[RatGuy]

For what it's worth, my experience was 10 years ago. I wanted to snag the email for this conversation, but I don't have access to that inbox anymore. I will say that the language in the submission guidelines at the time did have caveats about dissertation material. I admit that I haven't been able to find any similar language recently. I wonder if that was a temporary shift in submission criteria.

I went ahead and looked up Leviathan. It seems to publish all kinds of things related to Melville, which gives the impression that their polices are fairly adaptable to varied situations.

The EIC is out of the UCB English department, so that's rather insidery. You wouldn't expect an outlier to the community norms.

The instructions to authors all look very conventional. There is nothing mentioned about theses or dissertations there or in their ethics statement.

They also say that they subscribe to the Committee on Publication Ethics' Core Practices.  In my reading, they are in violation of Practice #7: "Policies should be clear on what counts as prepublication that will preclude consideration. What constitutes plagiarism and redundant/overlapping publication should be specified."


On the other hand, the editor may have been thinking along the lines of the editor who spoke at Scotia's place. That is, theses are tedious, unpublishable dross. In that case, they may be receptive to an original take on the points in the thesis.

[Parasaurolophus]

My dissertation has yielded three articles so far (including one major prize winner and one runner-up), and I'm hoping for two more. Plus whatever incidental articles I eventually write up from scratch.