Don’t Do Self Plagiarism | UGC

Recently UGC(University Grant Commission) published a notification in its website regarding the increasing number of self-plagiarism in the academic community.

In the interests of Indian academia, to promote Indian research, UGC recently released the public notice under the University Grants Commission (Promotion of Academic Integrity and Prevention of Plagiarism in Higher Educational Institutions) Regulations, 2018.

Under this notification, the plagiarised work form academics do not acquire any credibility or value in the evaluation of academic promotions, selections, credit allotment, the award of research degrees.

What is Text Recycling?

Text reproduction/ Text recycling/self-plagiarism is, without adequate citation or proper acknowledgement, anyone reproducing a part of the work or the whole work and claim as the most recent work as new
and original. This activity is considered to be a self-plagiarism. And it is not acceptable.

Highlights of UGC self-plagiarism Notification

UGC highlighted 5 more points to clarify what kind of works are considered to be a self-plagiarism.

1. Republishing the same paper already published elsewhere without due and full citation.
2. Publishing smaller/excerpted work from a longer and previous work without due and full citations in order to show a larger number of publications.
3. Reusing data already used in a published work, or communicated for publication, in another work without due and full citation.
4. Breaking up a longer/larger study into smaller sections and publishing them as altogether new work without due and full citation
5. Paraphrasing one’s own previously published work without due and full citation of the original. That is self-citation. UGC also clearly mentioned that Self-citations do not add any number/s to the individual’s citation index or h-index in global academia.

Still, there are many questions arising regarding this notification.

Soon, UGC will be issuing a set of parameters to evaluate instances of text recycling/self-plagiarism.

Please comment your view about this notification.

Official Notification: UGC