18 September, 2025
When a plagiarism scandal passes from academia into the wider public discourse, academics are liable to find aspects of the public reaction silly. The reaction may be miscalibrated, insensitive to vast differences in the seriousness of alleged plagiarism or to differences in norms in different contexts. It matters whether what has been reproduced the main, purportedly original contribution of an article or instead a humdrum description of widely known facts or a summary of previous work. It would be wrong for an article to pass off the central argument of some other article as its own, but it needn’t be an error of any sort to repeat without citation some usual form of words for stating a theory. At the extreme, it would be silly to require physicists who write e = mc2 to put it in quotation marks and provide a footnote citing Einstein. In general, in academic writing the possible circumstances are sufficiently varied that practice needs often to be guided by common sense, not mechanical rules. It is this common sense that those who do not work in a relevant field and do not have a feel for why its norms are thus and so are liable, understandably, to lack.
Nonetheless, no doubt as part of a broader bureaucratization of academia, common sense has been losing ground to mechanical rules even in the citational norms within academia. The King James Bible is a book, no? Says someone at a publisher headquartered in an industrial park. So it had better be cited as you would cite a monograph published in 2020. (What is God’s first name?) Nor is it only non-academics to blame. Many a contemporary university lecturer has as little sense of the history and contingency of academic norms and is as thoughtless about their function as any bureaucrat.
A particularly revealing phenomenon is the rise of the notion of self-plagiarism in the last twenty-five years. This rise, which seems not to have been much remarked, has been abrupt and meteoric. Today, universities warn students of it and publishers warn authors. Until about 2000, the notion was hardly anywhere. The Google Books Ngram Viewer, tracking the frequency of words and phrases in Google’s corpus of English books, brings this out clearly. The phrase ‘self-plagiarism’ hardly appeared until the end of the 1990s. Between 1998 and 2022, its frequency increased 134-fold.
One reason the phenomenon is interesting is that it tends to tell against a hypothesis for the rigidifying of norms. According to the hypothesis, this rigidification results from the ascendancy of neoliberalism and an associated ethic of bourgeois possessive individualism, in which academic work becomes commodities to be privately bought, sold and owned. For a popular and intuitive model for explaining the wrongness of plagiarism is that it is a form of theft. Theft is wrong, plagiarism is simply theft of a particular kind of good, so plagiarism is wrong. If plagiarism-hunting intensifies in a society, is it not grist to the mill of those who bemoan the progress of commodification?
Whatever the plausibility of the hypothesis in other areas, it can hardly explain, at least directly, the rise of the notion of self-plagiarism. For one cannot steal from oneself. It is true that copyright, belonging to publishers, may also be at issue, but this is not at the core of why self-plagiarism is held to be wrong. The current norms concerning self-plagiarism would also forbid copying from a self-published book.
Nor can what is at issue be some general rule of treating one’s past self in just the same way as one would treat another. If one owes a crucial thought to an unpublished text by someone else, one certainly has to cite it, but the current norms do not require that one cite, in a publication, unpublished drafts of one’s own from which material is drawn. (In any case, how would one individuate drafts? Is the draft of May distinct from the draft of June?) Indeed, at least in the fields that I know best, an article need not usually cite working papers from which it is descended.
A better hypothesis emerges when we consider the other popular model for explaining the wrongness of plagiarism, namely that it is a form of self-interested deceit: in order to get credit, one passes off the contribution of others as one’s own. If this were understood still as merely a form of theft in which what is stolen is credit, no advance would have been made on the hypothesis of intensifying possessive individualism: credit can no more be stolen from oneself by oneself than can anything else. Indeed, self-plagiarism, unlike plagiarism traditionally understood, could not lead others into thinking that one originated some idea that one did not in fact originate.
What makes the hypothesis work is that what one gets credit for is not only – and in many contexts not mainly – ideas, but publications. Someone who looks only at one’s list of publications, without reading anything on it, may indeed come away more confident in one’s abilities if it included two articles in top journals rather than only one. To the extent that the mere number and apparent prestige of publications become more important, and the weight of bibliometric methods in the advancement of careers increases, people will have a greater incentive to pass off already published ideas as fresh excogitations. To the extent that people have a greater incentive to do this and so to make ineffective what have become important means of keeping order in the academic world, severer measures will be needed to keep the practice in check. At the same time, the inhabitants of that world will be willing to accept greater costs – such as those involved in the replacement of common sense by rigid rules – to that end. In the last few decades these have been large extents.
To know the causes of problems is not to know how to solve them, for it may not be possible, or even in certain cases desirable, to eliminate the causes. It was not, after all, irrational that lists of publications came to be used as a metric in, say, assessing job applications. Such lists, at least if those who look over them are closely familiar with what tends to be published in various venues, are informative, even if very imperfect measures. In the face of the enormous number of applications that those who assess such things are now in the face of, there may not be other feasible, somehow more reliable methods. In turn, the number of applications reflects developments – among them the great expansion of higher education, both in historically rich countries and as countries once too poor to support large numbers of students have grown vastly richer – that are certainly not all to be regretted. Recourse to bibliometric methods has undoubtedly been extended much beyond cases where they are truly unavoidable. It is right to seek to reverse this. But even success in that task would leave many of the relevant pressures in operation.
As for self-plagiarism, let me close with a modest suggestion, which works within the norms that obtain in the current political economy (as some may say) of the academic world. This is simply that there should be no prejudice against the reasonable re-use or simultaneous use of material, even if extensive. Given the current norms, we may have to put up with the requirement that such re-use or simultaneous use be accompanied by a note indicating which parts of a publication wholly or partly overlap with other publications. (Quotation marks, in this case, seem unnecessary, and may be imperspicuous or inconvenient for both authors and readers if the material is extensive or interwoven with new text.) But it is wasteful and stupid to expect authors to put what they have previously written into different words just for the sake of doing so, if what they have previously written – an exposition of a theory or an argument or a method or an event that they discuss in multiple publications, say – remains perfectly adequate.
Very cautious authors, at least those who hope to become ministers in Germany or presidents of Ivy League universities, may still think it worthwhile never to say anything twice in the same words. They will be grateful for AI. For most, however, the norm that I have suggested should be reasonable for getting by in this political economy.
E. E. Sheng is a doctoral student in philosophy at Merton College, Oxford.
