The first thing that referees do is to send your key words to Google and Scholar. This catches out the plagiarists, and may show up your earlier work in the field, such as proposals, position papers, poster presentations, work-in-progress papers and drafts (together with your name). This is no big deal: the referees must just pretend they do not know your name and affiliation. In practice, this knowledge can speed up the review process, as the reviewer now knows what sort of problems to look out for in your text. Reviewing can never be totally blind. It is an ideal that reviewers would strive for. Rather refer to it as critical refereeing than to refer to it as blind refereeing.

The first thing that referees do is to send your key words to Google and Scholar. This catches out the plagiarists, and may show up your earlier work in the field, such as proposals, position papers, poster presentations, work-in-progress papers and drafts (together with your name). This is no big deal: the referees must just pretend they do not know your name and affiliation. In practice, this knowledge can speed up the review process, as the reviewer now knows what sort of problems to look out for in your text. Reviewing can never be totally blind. It is an ideal that reviewers would strive for. Rather refer to it as critical refereeing than to refer to it as blind refereeing.

I will comment on one dimension of the problem.  Publishing the working paper again as a scientific article would cause a problem in the plagiarism and similarities softwares, such as iThenticate.

How can your published working paper be a problem for publishing your finished paper if you quote this work in the paper?

Because of the fast evolution of knowledge all publications could be defined as working papers. Do you know a publication that has never been criticized?

As Mr. Mahfuz Judeh said, I will comment one (another) dimension of the problem: the Journal's Posting  Policies. Some Publishers have different approaches to the question. The quote below was extracted from Elsevier:

"In general, Elsevier is permissive with respect to authors and electronic preprints. If an electronic preprint of an article is placed on a public server prior to its submission to an Elsevier journal or where a paper was originally authored as a thesis or dissertation, this is not generally viewed by Elsevier as “prior publication” and therefore Elsevier will not require authors to remove electronic preprints of an article from public servers should the article be accepted for publication in an Elsevier journal.

However, please note that Cell Press and The Lancet have different preprint policies and will not consider articles that have already been posted publicly for publication. This is a rule agreed upon by The International Committee of Medical Journal Editors. Information on Cell Press policy on preprints is available, as is The Lancet preprint policy."

Ref: http://www.elsevier.com/about/open-access/open-access-policies/article-posting-policy#pre-print

I feel a working paper and a research paper are from two different genre, while working paper can be quite descriptive and elaborate the research paper has to be written as per the maximum length prescribed by the journal. One can bring one or more articles from a single working paper, without any plagiarism issues in my opinion. While there may be some common issues discussed but the way the problem has been tackled in the paper actually matter the most. Citing the working paper in the reference would also be appropriate as the source of some the points raised in the paper.

Thank you for your answers.

@Ian, my point exactly. Posting an article you submit for publication as working paper would expose your identity to the reviewers. This may introduce bias depending on the professionalism of the reviewer.

@Mathala, if the working papers are acknowledged as publication, even quoting the raw version in the published version can still be considered as auto-plagiarism since the content may have significant match (such as when checked using iThenticate, as mentioned by Prof. Mahfuz Judeh).

@Henk, by publish, I do mean publishing it as an ?academic? literature since several platform offers repository for working papers, such as SSRN or Repec. Even though I am rather unsure whether publishing said working paper on said platform cannot be termed as simply 'sharing an idea or thought over the internet'.

On another note, I am wondering the citability of working papers. What is your opinion about citing a working paper as reference in a research paper?

Please state your role in this matter (e.g. as an Author, Editor, Reviewer, Student, Supervisor). You may state more than one role (e.g. Author AND Reviewer, Editor AND Supervisor) You may also have different opinion for different role (e.g. as an Editor my opinion is A but as a Supervisor my opinion is B).

Copying and pasting your own text from an unfinished and unpublished paper on your computer is quite legitimate. We all do it, and there is no need to even to state where we got the material from. Only trouble is we can only do it once, because after that it is published, and normal protocols of quoting yourself must be done to avoid plagiarism.

However: Beware that nobody pips you to the publication post! He who publishes first gets all the credit. There are other thinking people out there with the same access to literature and data sources as you. Some have better funding. The journal editor will not accept a second paper "revealing" what has already been revealed in public. Publishing in the research world means "formally made public". So that excludes talking to your supervisor or research group.

However, publishing does include posting on the Web, where anybody can Google for it, and leapfrog your work.

Working papers of other people may be cited if it is the only source, but only with their permission, because they would not like half-baked ideas being attributed to them. (I am wearing all my hats.)

To summarise. Take your working paper, and get it up to standard as soon as possible. The submission date is critical to claim ownership of your idea.

I think yes..

when I was submitting a paper, I had problem with the journal, the cause: my own working paper, because they use a plagiarism software.

@Pablo:

How did to manage with the problem? Did they understand that the match was with your own paper?

I came across this comment by Berk Ozler. He does not like working papers which he describes as 'sweat pant' stuff that, because they are not usually subject to peer review, may be inappropriate or incomplete.

http://blogs.worldbank.org/impactevaluations/working-papers-are-not-working

This has been something of concern for many researchers I know as well. The idea of posting a working paper, if it is in a complete form could be problematic either in terms of others deciding to use some of the information without properly citing the material. Yet I have seen many people provide active research agendas by regularly posting working papers and requesting feedback.

My institute recently placed my unpublished manuscript as a working paper having a unique ID. When I finalized the manuscript and submitted it to the Journal of Cleaner Production, the Cheif Editor Jiri Jaromir Klemeš informed me that they cannot consider our paper for publication because it is similar to a single source 68%. Thought I informed her that its all from my own working paper indicating that my work is zero percent similar to other source. I also argued that working paper is one of the stages in publishing of a journal paper. He however indicated this as Elsevier's policy and advised my institute to "think twice before placing a manuscript as working paper". Though I am not convinced with the answer but I move a head because authors are not at all powerful like editors and publishers :(

I avoid telling other people aboput the details of my research and papers until they are published. Why let others know my insights and methodology before publication?

@Junaid, what a story. I'm so sorry to hear about that. It looks like publishers have some work to do to look closely at the work itself to confirm where the information came from.