Much of the material in this lecture is to appear in a chapter entitled “Prob-lems of Explanation in Linguistics” in Explanations in Psychology, edited byR. Borger and F. Cioffi (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1967), alongwith interesting critical comments by Max Black.

authors can use their own words as a means of resistance against publishers who technically own the author’s words in today’s ‘property rights’–oriented

However, in the present era of publishing, those rights are consistently being called into question. Gennaro (2012) is particularly frank about how copyright law has come to privilege publishers at the expense of those who created the work in the first place: ‘Once you have transferred copyright to a journal [in order to publish] you cannot ethically use the words that you have written in another journal article; you no longer own those words’ (p. 109). Nevertheless, Bently (1994) remarks on Roland Barthes’ contention that once text has been published, the words no longer belong to that author or anyone else for that matter.

Despite, or perhaps as a result of, this wide variation of what is seen to constitute self-plagiarism, there is much debate about the concept. The very definition of plagiarism as theft causes many to argue that one cannot steal from one’s self, and therefore, self-plagiarism is an oxymoron (Cronin, 2013) which purposefully ‘invoke[s] the pejorative tone of the root-word’ (Clarke, 2009: Section 2, paragraph 4). Some contend that self-plagiarism is academic fraud or misconduct (e.g. Bretag and Carapiet, 2007; Martin, 2013), while others have argued that scholars can, do, and even should reuse their written words and ideas, within reason and without citation

As a form of perceived transgression, self-plagiarism has instigated a change in guidelines of leading professional associations regarding ethical publishing behavior in organization and management studies. Honig et al. (2014) note that the Academy of Management’s code of ethical conduct has changed from ‘an implicit recognition that a certain amount of self-plagiarism is acceptable, as long as “different audiences and outlets” are employed’ (p. 128) to a more stringent and explicit exhortation to cite any and all words and ideas published, unpublished, or electronic, even if they are one’s own (Martin, 2013).

That process is one of the more rewarding aspects of our profession. It's an opportunity to take good ideas and make them better by a series of feedback-and-revision loops. That process, I'm certain, reminds us of some pretty basic truths about learning and the intellectual life: That good ideas must be articulated and tested in public forums, for example, or that every presentation must be tailored to fit its specific audience, or that even our best ideas should be considered provisional ones, always pending new information.

This information was not explicitly stated in either article, but the sample and community description makes it clear that the participants of these studies are the same people, though the sample sizes differ slightly (ns = 85 and 86). However, this redundancy did not produce any analysis problems because the correlation matrix in the Grigorenko et al. (2001) article was not positive definite.