Hi folks,

Hope everyone is doing well. I realise that there is already a thread on this from a few years ago but the responses varied and I'm just wondering has anyone here ever copied and pasted a paragraph (or two or three) from their PhD thesis and used it in a journal article that they then got published? Is this accepted? I have read through the submission guidelines of various journals and they typically say that the author must ensure the "submission has not been previously published and is not under consideration for another journal" but what about if your submission involves paragraphs from your own PhD thesis? Is that permitted? The thesis isn't really a "published" work is it? Anyone know for sure? I don't know who to ask about this as the profs in my dept don't even seem to know (!!!) bar emailing the editors in advance and I didn't really want to do that. It's going to be a pain to have to reword every single thing!
Many thanks folks.

J

PhD doesn't count as publication.

You are not supposed to copy and paste from your PhD thesis and it is classed as plagiarism.

This is what we were told in a plagiarism seminar we had to attend at my university.

Thank you both DocInsanity and TreeofLife for your replies but the replies are both different :-) This is what I mean about varying responses. I guess to be on the safe side I should try and reword every single thing! I was worried about whether it would be classed as 'self-plagiarism' to cut and paste from my thesis. It just seems crazy though when we pump so much effort into our theses to then have to rework everything yet again for a journal!
Thank you both again.

I tried to reword only about 50% from a section of my thesis. Interestingly, the editor and reviewers provided further suggestions to the extent that my paper does not look quite the same as my original thesis. In general, published papers are of higher quality as compared to student's thesis.

This is of interest for me as well. May it be that the answer differs depending on what you aim to do with your thesis? I have colleagues who published their theses at the end of the PhD (most in the humanities), and others who didn't (most in sciences), but published the thesis material in form of articles/chapters along the way..

Almost each of my thesis chapters is also published (or in the pipeline) as article/book chapter. Even though in the thesis you have more narrative and more data, there are large blocks of texts that are simply the same. My sup told me to do so, and at the beginning of each chapter to acknowledge that parts of the texts have been published in X and Y.

At the end of my PhD I won't publish the thesis as a whole, it will only remain in the Uni archive..

Other experiences??
Thanks
wanderingbit

Thank you MeaninginLife and wanderingbit. I have heard of the possibility of doing that, wanderingbit, but I guess this is where the issue complicates more for me as I am not quite finished my PhD yet though will do in the coming months so I imagine I won't have received word back from the journals by the time I submit thesis so I think maybe my best option is to reword everything. I can't write at the start of a chapter that it's been accepted for publication if the publishers haven't answered me yet. It's a tricky one and there never seems to be a clearcut answer. It's a heck of a lot of extra work to reword your own work like this though but as, MeaninginLife says, perhaps they make so many changes that it looks completely different anyway ;-) Would be interested to hear from anyone who can confirm that they copied and pasted and all was fine.

You need to check the regulations of the university. And also those of the journal. As well as self-plagiarism there is the issue of copyright. Once you submit to certain journals you would be handing over the copyright to them. That being the case you might then have to ask their permission to use those overlapping extracts in your thesis if you hadn't published that yet.

In short, you're best off just rewording.

Hi HazyJane, thank you. Yep, I think I'm resigned now to just rewording but it means a lot of extra work that I wasn't anticipating. Really disappointed though given all the work that goes into writing a thesis and then none of it can be used for anything else. Thanks folks. Glad I asked before I copied and pasted anything.