Related You Tube Link:

Avoiding Self Plagiarism https://youtu.be/igtJ8o8XMLQ

I once reviewed a manuscript by senior person in my field. It was on a topic that he’d written on before. He cited himself, one article in particular, more than 60 times. That’s three times a page on average. Is this shameless self-aggrandizement? Or is it scrupulous attention to laying down the foundations of an idea and how it evolved? I argued in my review that with so much self-citing and so little reference to the works of others, it was a uphill climb to make a case that the manuscript was making an original contribution to the literature.

There are many ethical, scholarly reasons to self-cite, without self-plagiarizing. The most scholarly one is to position your work relative to others writing on the topic. Another is to provide the reader with the genealogy of how an idea or theory evolved or how one article you’d written builds on another. It is never to claim undue credit credit for an idea, a term, or a definition others have written about long before you entered the scene.

A misplaced self-cite can make you look hopelessly naive or, worse, downright foolish. For example, I have written extensively about fully integrated mixed method research. I did not invent the term. Tashakorri and Teddlie did that first in 2003. Others use the term. I have my own definition that I quote. But I do not cite myself every time I use the phrase, fully integrated mixed method research. Nor should you give yourself credit when the phrase “mixed methods” occurs just because you’ve written about.

Anyone who writes about fully integrated mixed method research I am likely to know. A sentence or phrase can represent an advance in what we know about it. It is misplaced modesty not to cite yourself when you have written on a topic. It is an an of scholarship to situate your own contribution relative to what others have written on the topic. That is where originality resides. In the tiny little drive.

Your spot on the spider web.