Avoiding plagiarism, self-plagiarism, and other questionable writing practices: A guide to ethical writing

Plagiarism and authorship disputes

Consider the following scenario. Two researchers who have collaborated on various projects have, in the past, have jointly published a number of papers. Three quarters into the writing of the manuscript from their most recent joint projects, the researchers experience a profound difference of opinion regarding the direction of the current project and the incident leads to the eventual break-up of their research association. Soon after, one of the researchers moves to another institution in another country and begins to pursue a different line of research. A year later, the remaining researcher decides to finish writing the manuscript and submits it for publication with his name as sole author. By appropriating the joint manuscript and submitting it under his name, has this other researcher committed plagiarism?

Let’s consider another scenario, a graduate student working under her mentor’s supervision makes an interesting discovery as part of her doctoral thesis work. Before she is ready to publish her thesis, however, her mentor feels that the discovery merits immediate publication and decides to report her data, along with other data he had collected from other graduate fellows working in his lab, in a journal article. The mentor does not list the graduate student’s name as a co-author nor is there a byline in the article indicating the exent of her contribution under the pretext that the student’s contribution in and of itself did not merit authorship.

Clearly, the above scenarios represent ethical breaches that many individuals and institutions, including the National Science Foundation, would consider as instances of plagiarism. However, not everyone agrees that these types of cases are plagiarism. For example, ORI classifies these problems not as plagiarism, but as authorship disputes. The involved parties can avoid these and other troublesome situations, such as disputes regarding the order of authorship of a paper, by discussing and agreeing on a plan BEFORE work on a project commences.

Additional discussion and guidance on these matters can be found in the section titled: “Authorship issues and conflicts of interest”.

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As this document illustrates, there are many varieties of plagiarism. Although we have covered some of the most common forms, these can be combined in a variety of ways to form new types of plagiarism not discussed here. In the next section we turn our attention to the problem of self-plagiarism.