An author may wish to reuse text from another publication that he or she has authored. To avoid the possibility of suspected plagiarism (see Box) and/or the possibility of violating copyright of the other work published by the author, the author should follow the practices outlined above (see ‘Avoiding plagiarism’) or seek permission to republish content under copyright. Editorial teams should work with authors, where this may have occurred in a review, to ensure that text has the correct attributions.
This applies predominantly to articles other than Cochrane Reviews. It is expected that authors of a Cochrane Review will reuse substantial parts of their protocol in the Cochrane Review that follows, for example, and this is one of the special circumstances outlined. These special circumstances do not equate to plagiarism.
Authors reusing text from their published works without proper attribution and/or copyright clearance may be known as duplicate publication, multiple publication, overlapping publications, redundant publication, repetitive publication, self-plagiarism, or text recycling (Wager 2014). Source: Wager E. Defining and responding to plagiarism. Learned Publishing 2014;27(1):33–42. |
The Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) has published guidance, in the form of a flowchart, on how to deal with suspected redundant publication in a submitted manuscript. Editorial teams may wish to refer to this or discuss a particular situation with the Editor in Chief.