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Self-plagiarism..aka..Can I copy paste my own stuff in my research paper?

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As students and professionals, report/thesis writing is an important task that requires quite a bit of effort. If we are into publishing our work, we have to be more careful as to how we arrnage and present out work.

Usually we tend to write several reports and some of the material may overlap.

With the new plagiarism software, one may doubt whether we can directly use our work. After all we wrote it.
Plagiarism can be a direct copy-paste from your own previous work or from literature. It is a serious issue especially because it is now easy to do it using software.




There are two main points to remember in this case.

Point # 1 - Copying from your own previous work.

When writing a manuscript which has experimental, theoretical, or mathematical components from a previous work of your own, avoid using entire sections verbatim.

Such instances may show up as plagiarism during checks by the publishers. There is also a noticeable difference between the language of these sections and that of the rest of the new manuscript. Hence, ensure that at least the sentence construction is modified, even if the procedure and explanation are supposed to be identical to those in the previous publication.

Point # 2 - Copying from other sections in the same manuscript


Avoid copy-pasting sentences from the main text to make up the abstract and the conclusions. Such copy-pasting is very easy to detect and it indicates two things -

(1) The author does not know the difference between abstract, main text, and conclusions.

(2) The author is too lazy to actually use different sentence structures to rephrase their ideas.


These points are very evident and reviewers are quick to notice them. Hence, it is better to find a way around these errors.

Check out the video for a detailed explanation! -



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