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Comment by droithomme | Hacker News Reader

"Self-plagiarizing" isn't a real thing. It's complete nonsense to say you are plagiarizing from yourself.

Shocking part is so many people are just falling for this argument without thinking about it. As well as those who think about it, and to join in the thrills of a witch hunt, justify to themselves that this self-plagiarization is not just a real thing, but unethical behavior bordering on criminal.

Fabricating quotes and making up facts though is bad and justifies firing and blacklisting. Both practices are unfortunately endemic within contemporary publications, perhaps due to a lack of fact checkers at many publishers.

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The "victim" of plagiarism isn't the original author. It's the reader, who is deceived into thinking they are reading original thoughts when they'd instead be better served by the original source.

Nobody in the media is "just falling" for the idea of "self-plagiarizing"; in virtually every place I've seen this issue covered, there's been extensive scrutiny of the idea of "self-plagiarism" and where it ranks in the catalog of literary sins.

This post is yet another example of the "middlebrow dismissal":

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4693920

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4714217

It is all well and good to grapple with the idea of whether and how "self-plagiarizing" is a real offense. But to do so in a comment like yours, dismissing it as herd thinking and witch hunting, is lazy and ill-informed. Your comment has as its premise something that is actually the opposite of the truth; ironically, it distracts from the real controversy of how big a deal self-plagiarism is by pretending that there is no such controversy.

I don't buy it. You're the author of the original source. If you write an essay, and then realize there are some good parts, but most of it was too confusing to follow, you are no longer allowed to use those good parts in a new essay, which would be better for the reader?

Of course you're allowed to do that; you simply have to be honest about what you're doing. Similarly, when some other author writes a few good bits but fails to make a point you feel is worthy, you're allowed to incorporate their work and expand on it; you just have to be clear and direct about what you're doing.

What's not OK is to pass off work from some other source as original or novel.

I remember seeing a Hacker News submission of one of the later Jonah Lehrer stories, and thinking, "Didn't I read this a couple years ago?" Indeed I had, in the earlier publication where Lehrer published the same piece. When an author submits a story to a professionally edited publication, the standard terms of the publication contract routinely include a provision in which the author warrants that the writing is new, an original work of authorship not published before. (Publishers have other contractual arrangements for publishing reprints of previously published articles.) I'm with you in thinking that "self-plagiarizing" is an inartful phrase, but when Lehrer submitted pieces to later publications that he had written a few years earlier and already had published in earlier publications, he was violating the promises in his publishing contract, and committing a kind of fraud. Perhaps using the term "breaching author's contract" or even the strong term "fraud" might have made clear why that aspect of what Lehrer did was wrong and a ground for the recent publishers to decide not to deal with Lehrer anymore.

I agree with you that in many of these cases it may be a contract violation and can be discussed as such when that's the case. My objection is to terming this plagiarism which it is not. As we see in the referenced article, it moves from the modified "self-plagiarism" to "plagiarism" quickly, by the fourth paragraph when it says "Four excruciating months later, Jonah Lehrer is known as a fabricator, a plagiarist, a reckless recycler." Now the word plagiarism is screwed because of irresponsible articles conflating contract violations with plagiarism. I see this term in an article, what does it mean? Who knows. Probably is BS. It's like the word rape. If I hear someone is a rapist, it means nothing to me since he probably had consensual sex with his 17 year old girlfriend when he was 18. Or perhaps it is a reference I have seen tossed around to refer to when a male gets into a heated argument with a female, it can now be termed "verbal sexual assault", also now known as "rape".

No, he actually was caught plagiarizing from other authors. I don't love this NYMag piece, but it isn't pulling a fast one on you.

OK, thanks, you are right.

Three cases of slightly rewording other people's blog posts. Full text here, and is very clearly plagiarism.

http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/201...

I'm 100% with you on the nonsense of "self-plagiarizing". But I think making up quotes wholesale in a non-fiction piece ought to be enough by itself to get you drummed out of journalism.

I agree with you completely. Fabricating stuff in journalism and scientific studies (see "Why Most Published Research Findings Are False") should result in blacklisting, and if the publication is complicit, they should be boycotted. Not that that's what happens, but would be nice if it worked that way.

I understood "self-plagiarizing" as it was used in this article to be selling your words to one entity and then selling them to another.

It's likely that a highly paid writer would be expected to produce unique pieces, and not to resell the ones paid for.

Writing pieces on your blog and then using paragraphs in a e-newsletter would not fall under this definition.

It's pretty clearly a real thing -- even if you don't like how the concept is named or think that it's unethical, it's a specific type of behavior/action that can be discussed.

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