Is Self-Plagiarism a Scourge of the Academy?

This piece was originally posted on SAGE’s Management Ink blog and is resposted here with the permission of Management Ink Editor Cynthia Nalevanko.

In the March 2014 issue of Human Resource Development Review, editor Jamie L. Callahan explores this controversy in her editorial, “Creation of a Moral Panic? Self-Plagiarism in the Academy”:

More and more publications are appearing about issues of self-plagiarism, and much debate has ensued about the “scourge of self-plagiarism” (Green, 2005). In 2005, [Lelia] Green noted that a Google search of the keyword “self-plagiarism” resulted in 8,000 hits; in 2010, [Christopher] Brown-Syed found 38,000 hits; and in 2013, I conducted the same Google search and found 82,500 hits. This exponential increase in dialogue about an issue infrequently appearing in the annals of our field warranted some exploration; in particular, to what extent might the label of self-plagiarism constitute a moral panic generated by those who stand to gain from identifying such an infraction? Thus, in this editorial, I hope to raise awareness of what is being called self-plagiarism and to problematize the concept and its implications.

You can read the editorial by clicking here.