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detection software has opened up scrutiny of scientific publications to non-experts and text that has
been copied and pasted without proper attribution” (Chaddah, 2014). This issue can now be raised
even on social media.

We must give credit wherever it is due, rather than paraphrasing and avoiding giving credit! It is best
to quote from an earlier work, delineating with quotes the text corresponding to idea you are using,
rather than paraphrasing. This is especially true if we are building on earlier published research,
or using it as a template. As an example from a paper we published (Roy, et al., 1998), we quoted
(verbatim, clearly delineated) from a 1973 paper of others in the main part of our paper. We believed
(and apparently so did the reviewers!) that this did not reduce the importance of our contribution.
Quoting from a 25-year old landmark paper probably put our work in proper perspective!

Self-plagiarism or text-similarity by the same authors. It is quite possible that text written in an earlier
paper gets embedded in one’s subconscious, especially when we are seriously pursuing a problem
where we have made some very novel or original contributions. We then do not give up working on
a problem after one publication; we pursue the same problem in a series of papers. In such a situation
there is bound to be overlap or unwarranted repetitiveness in the introductory section. Often the
results of an earlier paper are incorporated in subsequent results to make the current report complete.
A common comment from a reviewer seeking ‘completeness’ in a manuscript, is that the reader cannot
keep looking up the same authors’ earlier works. This is particularly true if a new concept or protocol
was introduced in the first paper. The reviewer rightly asks that the second paper must introduce
or justify the findings of an earlier paper in the subsequent paper. We must refer to earlier works;
we must quote and cite the earlier papers as needed, to ensure that self-plagiarism is avoided. This
happened with us (Roy, et al., 2007) where we were asked to reproduce a schematic we had published
earlier in the same journal (Kumar, 2006). The schematic introduced our new ideas that had to be re-
discussed in the text. Therefore, the earlier paper was cited several times in the later paper. Since both
the papers were in the same journal, there were no copyright issues. Copyright is another issue that
must be taken care of if one is submitting papers on an ongoing research theme, to different journals.

In all cases it is only ethical to make the reviewers aware of what is new and what is not. With such
transparency one does not risk the manuscript being rejected. In a co-authored paper (Lakhani, et al.,
2011) we reused figures showing our previously researched data after slight modification. The figure
caption (and the text) clearly stated where the data had first appeared. There was, of course, substantial
new work to advance new conclusions. The reviewers accepted the advances and the papers were
published.

Reusing text within quotations, rather than paraphrasing, is also a particularly good idea if a new
phrase or keyword has been introduced in earlier papers, especially so if we want that keyword or
phrase to stick in literature and, hopefully get associated with our names. We introduced a new
phrase that reformulated the Critical State Model for the magnetic response of hard superconductors
(Chaddah, et al., 1989). We reasserted this in quotation marks, with an elaborate justification, as we
applied this to a case where the original formulation of the Critical State Model was difficult to solve
(Bhagwat and Chaddah, 1992). This helped us much later in necessitating a correction when another
author used our reformulation without giving us credit (Tulapulkar, 2002)!
We need to take special to prevent charges of self-plagiarism when we report some results at a
Conference, and then include those results in a subsequent submission to a journal. The paper that
appears in the Conference Proceedings, and the paper that appears in the regular journal, are two
publications on the same work. There is bound to be some repetition, and the later publication must
cite the former. The sequence of events dictates that the paper in the regular journal must cite the

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