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Avoiding Self-Plagiarism: What Is It and How to Stay Clear of It

You may be aware of the “plagiarism” concept, in which an author copies another author’s work without a proper citation. But did you know that self-plagiarism also exists?

Not only does it exist, but self-plagiarism is seen as an academic offence, much like plagiarism. That’s why avoiding it is crucial. But what self-plagiarism is exactly? Why does it matter? And how exactly can we avoid it? Let’s find out in this guide!

What is Self-Plagiarism?

Self-plagiarism refers to copying a considerable portion of your own existing work without citing it properly. For example, if you own a blog website where you publish articles, you could copy two chunky paragraphs from one of your already-published articles and paste them into your latest article without citing it.

Self-plagiarism is essentially the same thing as normal plagiarism, with the source that gets plagiarized being the only difference here, which is the author themselves in this case compared to normal plagiarism where the plagiarized source is someone else.

If plagiarizing someone else is your concern, especially in academic writing, be sure to read our guide on eliminating plagiarism in academic content.

Unintentional Self-Plagiarism

When we plagiarize or self-plagiarize, the plagiarism counts whether we do it intentionally or unintentionally. For example, you may publish an article that self-plagiarizes one of your existing articles without intending it. That unintended plagiarism still counts as a violation.

So, whether you intend or not, plagiarism counts. That’s why you should avoid it in any case.

Why Does Avoiding Self-Plagiarism Matter?

You might be asking yourself, “Why does self-plagiarism matter? I mean, I’m copying myself! Is that an issue?”

Well, yes. Self-plagiarism is an issue. Because plagiarism is not just about violating someone’s ownership rights.

Generally speaking, many people think plagiarism is bad because it involves copying something that is owned by someone else, which means violating that person’s (intellectual) property rights. While it’s true, it’s only one of the reasons why self-plagiarism should be avoided. Let’s see some of the other reasons to avoid it:

Reasons for Avoiding Self-Plagiarism

Aside from violating property rights, here’s why avoiding plagiarism matters:

  • Honesty: Honesty in work could be defined as being true to yourself and others. Publishing self-plagiarized content without clarification means dishonest work as it presents your existing work as new while that’s clearly not the case.
  • Originality: Originality refers to creating new and unique content that’s not already published. Self-plagiarism makes content unoriginal since it’s just a copy paste without any disclosure. Thus, self-plagiarized content can bring down your reputation as an author or business in your audience’s eyes.
  • Academic or Professional Integrity: Copy-pasting your work is against academic and professional integrity — ethical principles that ensure your work is honest and trustworthy. Students, scholars, and professional writers are supposed to uphold their integrity when creating content, which means not presenting old content as new because it negatively affects how knowledge and information is shared and made to perceive.
  • Ethics: Aside from it being a professional requirement, avoiding dishonest work is a moral duty of every writer to avoid misleading their audience by presenting an old piece of content as new.
  • Redundancy: Redundancy refers to repeating the same thing over and over. Self-plagiarism leads to redundancy of your content, which can impact your site’s reputation both in the eyes of your audience and the search engine.
  • Legal Repercussions: In some cases, authors may have restrictions on reusing their content, like in academia for example. In such cases, self-plagiarism, or, a violation of said restrictions could lead to legal consequences, such as retraction of work or suspension from institute.

Thus, avoiding self-plagiarism is important to ensure honesty, originality, integrity, ethics, and avoid redundancy and potential legal consequences.

Now that we understand why avoiding self-plagiarism matters, let’s understand how we can avoid it:

How to avoid Self-Plagiarism

You can avoid plagiarizing yourself in the following three steps:

1. Cite Your Work

The first step in avoiding self-plagiarizing is citing your work. Citation helps prevent plagiarism when we copy a piece of text from elsewhere as it clarifies to readers that the content they’re reading is already published elsewhere.

A simple addition of a citation ensures your work is honest and trustworthy.

How to do it:

i. For academic content: The first step to citing a work is getting familiar with citation guidelines and formatting of your preferred style guide; different style guides, such as APA, MLA, and CMOS, have different guidelines for citing text.

You can also utilize online citation generation tools, which are a convenient way of generating citations for web posts.

ii. For non-academic content: Some websites prefer not to cite due to the technique’s formal nature. Instead, they want to keep things casual and more user-friendly. In this case, you can include a link of the post or page in question with some clarification as anchor text. For example, if I were to include a part of my previous post in my current post, I would include a link with the following anchor text: “Read full article here: Referenced article’s name.”

2. Copy Only What’s Necessary

There may be some cases where you have to include a part of your existing content into a newer post or assignment for some reason. In such cases, only copy what’s really necessary and avoid copying the rest.

However, regardless of how much is copied, a reference is still necessary.

3. Rephrase Your Text

Rephrasing means rewriting a piece of text, which is yet another way to reduce and avoid self-plagiarism.

Rephrasing ensures your text is not completely a copy-paste, which can prevent search engines from detecting their similarity.

It can also help adjust the tone and style of the copied content to match your current requirements, ensuring consistency throughout the writing.

How to do it:

You can rephrase your content by changing its word choice, sentence structure, and voice.

A good way to rephrase text is by reading it carefully and rewriting it from scratch. Doing so is better than tweaking the text from here and there by a few words’ margin. Rewriting the text from scratch is likely to result in more unique text.

If you’re not familiar with rephrasing, another option is using Rephraser.co — an AI text rewriter that rephrases your input text effectively without distorting its meaning. To use Rephraser, simply, visit Rephraser.co, paste your text in the input box, click the “Rephrase” button, and copy your rephrased text from the output box.

3. Compare The Rephrased Text

After rephrasing your text, consider comparing it with the original copy to ensure no similarities are left in the two.

Should you find some similarities, consider rephrasing it further until the desired results are achieved. This way, you can ensure your content is free of self-plagiarism.

Conclusion

Self-plagiarism refers to copying a considerable portion of your existing work without a proper reference. Self-plagiarism can occur even if you don’t intend to plagiarize. Self-plagiarized content may be considered dishonest, unoriginal, or lazy work, especially in academia where academic integrity is to be upheld. 

To avoid the issue, writers should cite or link to the post they reused, rephrase the copied text to make it different from the original one, and compare both to ensure no similarities are left in the two.