Reflection on Reproducing a Figure Across Publications

Let’s imagine that with many many hours of effort you have managed to produce a creative figure that effectively communicates theoretical insight about a phenomenon. You publish the figure in one article that reports on the research that led to development and, no doubt, endless rounds of refining it. Now, you would like to take a step forward to write additional articles about your project. Is it ethical to reproduce your own figures in subsequent publications with appropriate attribution? Does it require copyright permission.

Yes, under certain circumstances, it is entirely ethical to reproduce a figure in more than one publication. It can be strategic.

Yes, copyright rules apply to re-using a figure without modification.

All the same rules about copyright apply to reproducing a table or figure from something you’ve published. A good deal of intellectual capital went into the construction of the figure. Additional publications referring can be strategic. It provides visibility for your work and broadens the audience for it. When informed by the literature, a series of inter-related articles, each with its own distinct intellectual contribution, helps to build a research agenda.

Using the same figure or table across multiple publications that all present the same argument is another matter. Even with appropriate attribution to its original source and copyright permission, reproducing a figure or table in multiple publications with no value-added raises questions about self-plagiarism and risks threatening your credibility as a scholar.

For an academic’s career to progress, it’s not sufficient to recycle one good idea. In each publication, you are responsible for pinpointing the contribution of your own work and how it fits in the wider body of knowledge about the topic. No one else can do this for you. Your own understanding can advance by allowing yourself to wander into reading in unfamiliar disciplines to see how similar concepts are understood.

As you reuse a copyrighted figure or table you developed, it’s critical to be explicit about describing in what way each publication builds on each other.