Ways to Avoid Self-Plagiarism

Home » About Plagiarism » Ways to Avoid Self-Plagiarism

Date: January 7, 2013

Writers and researchers are usually the ones who tend to do self-plagiarism the most. They think of their content to be their personal belonging and something nobody else can use, but themselves. Well, that is not true. They should minimize reuse of their research or content at various places, and even if they do, they should always give a reference of their research conducted earlier or content published earlier. The initial post must be mentioned in both cases.

Avoid “Benefit of Doubt”

Since it’s about the same person probably writing or researching about the same topic, there is much probability that same words, sentences and findings might be mentioned. The many different ways to avoid self-plagiarism include using software tools available in the market for free. Since it’s difficult to check all the previous work and find out if any work is being repeated, it’s very much convenient to have the recent work checked by some plagiarism software. It would pull out any matches with your own or anybody else’s work if found to be published before.

If you find out, after using the plagiarism-checking software, that some or much of your work has already been published, you can highlight those parts and either replace them with some recent or updated information or at least give reference in order to avoid self-plagiarism or simple plagiarism. However, believing that since you are not aware of the fact that same information has already been posted anywhere before or not and thinking that you can take benefit of doubt is a mistake.

Benefit of doubt makes sense when there’s no other option; for content, you definitely have an option of checking your work through a plagiarism-checking tool. Nowadays, due to competition in the market, there are a lot of website that offer such plagiarism-checking services absolutely free for all users.