A preliminary study to identify the extent of self-plagiarism in Australian academic research

This paper reports on the preliminary findings from a pilot project which sought to identify self-plagiarism in Australian academic publications. Ten Australian authors were selected at random from top published authors on the Web of Science (Social Science and Humanities) database. Evidence of textual re-use was collected from 269 electronically available published journal articles using the text matching software program, Turnitin. Self-plagiarism was defined for this study as “10% or more textual re-use of any one previous publication by the author without attribution”. The preliminary findings suggest that textual re-use is widespread in academic research, with 60% of the authors in the sample having committed self-plagiarism in at least one of their published papers in the period 2003-2006.