Letter to the Editor

Mason, Diana J.

doi:10.1016/j.outlook.2005.06.002

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Volume 53, Issue 4 , Pages 171-172, July 2005

Letter to the Editor

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To the editor

I was disappointed to open the letters section of the March/April 2005 issue of Nursing Outlook and not see any letters in response to your editorial of January/February 2005 on plagiarism and self-plagiarism. This is a serious matter that deserves the kind of dialogue you challenged us to have.

As the editor-in-chief of the American Journal of Nursing (AJN) for nearly 7 years, I have had numerous discussions about these issues with the journal’s editorial and legal staff. Early on, I discovered that I was not clear about what constitutes plagiarism and self-plagiarism. How is it that I graduated from 3 leading schools of nursing without an accurate understanding of plagiarism? I’m convinced that schools are not doing an adequate job of teaching these violations of ethical and legally responsible writing to students and discussing its implications for faculty, clinicians, and others who are writing for professional publications.

Because of the resources available to AJN, we fact-check manuscripts during editing and often uncover plagiarism. I believe that most of the time the author simply does not understand the parameters of plagiarism and its legal and ethical implications. Consider the following examples:

•One author quoted exactly and extensively (about 60% of the paper) from a government Web site. Though she included the citation, she did not put quotation marks around the verbatim passages. When confronted with the facts, she said that she thought government writings were in the public domain and didn’t need to be quoted.

•Another author of a manuscript on a bioterrorism topic cited an article on the same topic from the Journal of the American Medication Association (JAMA). When we checked her paper against the JAMA article, we discovered that she had reworded each sentence from the article but the order of sentences and paragraphs was the same. While she had eliminated some paragraphs and added additional material specific to nurses in her paper, she believed that she had not plagiarized because she had “paraphrased” and cited the JAMA article. In fact, this is a common misconception, even among academics. It is simply not sufficient to change a few words in each sentence. Copyright covers the sequencing and arrangement of words, sentences, paragraphs, and tables, not just direct quotes.

Logue¹ has provided some excellent tips for academics who want to stem plagiarism by students.

The issue of self-plagiarism is more challenging, particularly for specialists and researchers who are writing often on a focused topic. Here is the argument that many, including me, have put forth: “Why do I have to rewrite the literature review and methods section of my research paper if I’m publishing a second paper on additional data I collected during my study? My time is precious and my priority is disseminating this important work, not trying to be a literary or journalistic icon. I shouldn’t have to rewrite everything each time. And even if I’m not cutting-and-pasting from one paper to the next, I’m likely to word a discussion of the methods section close to the same way I did in the first paper.”

Some of the AJN staff who are journalists have argued that it’s simply intellectually dishonest to not tell the reader that you’ve written the exact same thing in another publication. AJN managing editor Joy Jacobson says, “These ethical concerns matter just as much to me in my work as nursing ethics matter to nurses.” But even if you believe that biomedical publishing should be held to a different, lower standard, holders of copyright (usually publishers) can mount a legal challenge to your self-plagiarism.

So what are the options for very busy nurse authors?

•Retain copyright to your writings (and risk not getting them published, since many publishers are reluctant to accept such arrangements except in isolated cases). This is not an option at many journals, including AJN, except on rare occasions.

•Cite the original work and put quotations around any passages that are worded or sequenced the same. If such passages are long, you will need to get reprint permission from the holder of copyright on the original work.

•Refer the reader to the original work and simply summarize what you wrote there.

•Write fresh each time and check back to make sure you’ve not self-plagiarized.

•Have a colleague take the lead on one paper and you lead the writing of the other paper. I recently read 2 papers that were written in this manner and could find absolutely no self-plagiarism, even for the background and methods sections. The second paper reported on a subset of the data from the first paper, so discussed the same methodology and literature but in a very different way.

•The International Academy of Nursing Editors (INANE) could convene a meeting of publishers of nursing journals to discuss the extent of self-plagiarism that the publishers are willing to tolerate. As Joy Jacobson asked me: Is it okay to plagiarize a sentence but not a paragraph? A paragraph but not a page? A page but not a whole article?

There may very well be other options that I’m not seeing. These issues are not unique to nursing. Scholars and journalists are losing jobs because of plagiarism and self-plagiarism. And as Joy Jacobson pointed out to me, the public has become very distrustful of journalists; if nurses are to retain their standing as the most trusted professionals, don’t they have to be trustworthy in all of their work, including their writing?

Joy Jacobson is in the process of determining the journal’s policy on plagiarism. In doing so, she will be interviewing nursing and medical scholars, nurse ethicists, working journalists, and other leaders in the field. She would appreciate hearing from nurse authors on this topic: jjacobso@Lww.com.

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