Can You Commit Plagiarism on Yourself

I’m sure many people are baffled about the concept self-plagiarism. I mean surely you can’t blatantly rip off your own thoughts and your own knowledge? The act of plagiarism is to shamelessly copy from someone else after all, at least that’s how most people define the act of plagiarism in general. It is most certainly frowned upon in general. In fact many colleges adapt the 80 percent to twenty percent rule, where if more than twenty percent of the work is borrowed from other sources, then it is considered to potentially be plagiarism, no matter how properly it would be cited. Yet, we go to the art of self-plagiarism. Where its exactly what it says on the tin. We plagiarize are own work. So in a sense, we steal work from ourselves.

Its not too difficult to see why the concept of self-plagiarism is one that gives people a little bit of a headache to properly define. In many ways, you can in fact plagiarize yourself and while this is not such the horrific violation that it would be for more traditional forms of plagiarism, it is a rather dubious practice to say the least. Some would argue that the act of self-plagiarism while not frowned upon is a rather horrific breach of ethics. There are some yet who would argue if self-plagiarism is even a proper way to describe the act of recycling your own work. There have been numerous debates about this and it is likely to never be resolved.

Of course there are many checks against the practice of reusing your work, whether or not it could be considered plagiarizing yourself at any rate. Many magazines and newspapers require rights to articles written for their magazine. You still get paid a percentage, but you cannot plop that article down in numerous magazines. The same goes for many Internet writing websites, who do make it clear that when you first post your work on the website, for it to be something that has not been written previously on another website. Websites such as Triond and Factoidz are two of the more prominent websites that require terms like this.

In addition, schools frown heavily upon turning in an essay that is previously written, even if it was something that you wrote yourself. By frowning heavily on, we naturally mean fail the person without fail every single time. Schools are one of the places that have the strictest of codes on plagiarism. This includes plagiarism that is enacted upon yourself by yourself. It can make your head spin but they know what they are doing.

Whether you can technically plagiarize yourself or not, it is rather safe to say that reusing your own work is a very sketchy and perhaps unethical thing to do.