Republishing, recycling own academic work will amount to 'self plagiarism': UGC tells researchers

Re-publishing or re-cycling one's own academic work will amount to "self plagiarism", the University Grants Commission (UGC) has said, warning academicians and researchers against the practice.

The commission has directed university vice chancellors that decisions in the case of promotions, selections, credit allotment and awarding research degrees must be based on an evaluation of the applicant's published work to ensure the work being submitted for promotion and selection is not self-plagiarised.

"Reproduction, in part or whole, of one's own previously published work without adequate citation and proper acknowledgment and claiming the most recent work as new and original for any academic advantage amounts to 'text-recycling' also known as 'self-plagiarism' and is not acceptable," UGC Secretary Rajnish Jain said in a letter to universities.

The UGC has defined self plagiarism as republishing the same paper already published elsewhere without due and full citation, and publishing smaller and excerpted work from a longer and previous without due and full citations in order to show a larger number of publications.

It has also been defined as reusing data already used in a published work or communicated for publication in another work without due and full citation; breaking up a longer or larger study into smaller sections and publishing them as altogether new work without due and full citation, and paraphrasing one's own previously published work without due and full citation of the original.

"Self-citations do not add any numbers to the individual's citation index or h-index in global academia. The UCC will be issuing a set of parameters to evaluate instances of text recycling and self plagiarism soon," Jain said.