However in most cases YOU own the copyright to your thesis, so you can grant yourself permission to use your work in a journal article.  :-)

Indeed it is.

All the ebst

However in most cases YOU own the copyright to your thesis, so you can grant yourself permission to use your work in a journal article.  :-)

Does writing same information in thesis and journal paper self plagiarism ?

Agreed with the comments shared by Sabah.  Paraphase from your thesis to journal paper is the right thing to do.  Also from your thesis to condense into one paper can be substituted by breaking down your thesis into numerous articles.  E.g. if you are doing a correlational research with 10 constructs (independent & dependent variables), you can extract 3-4 constructs to form one article & publish and other few constructs for other article etc.  Also you can change the methodology based on the same data collected e.g. instead of measuring mediating effects, you can adjust your conceptual framework / research model to measure moderating effects, multivariate analysis (multiple dependent variables), or use simple multiple regression etc. in line with additional literature reviewed.  Wishing you all the best.

I would think that it really depends on whether your thesis is published, that is, in the public domain or not. If your thesis isn't in the public domain all you are doing in writing for publication is presenting it to a different audience and copying and pasting straight into a journal paper is fine. It is your work and your words, so no problems there.

However if your thesis is 'published' and is in the public domain I agree with the comments above that you might need to rephrase or present the information differently.

I completely agree with David Schmidt. However, we need to be clear on what exactly is meant by the thesis being "in the public domain". If this means that the thesis is available online in your University's public library, I still do not think it is self-plagiarism if you use the work for a  "properly published" journal article.  It is your work and while you hold the copyright to the work, it is always the ideal thing to use your PhD or Msc thesis to generate a number of published journal articles for yourself after the studies and the award of degrees - a point already made by Han Ping Fung above. I think it is allowed because the thesis, even if available in your Uni's online lib or even traditional lib, cannot in the truest sense be deemed as "published". Having said that, all the author needs do is perhaps to acknowledge in an "Acknowledgement section" of the journal article that the article stems from his/her thesis from so and so University. After all, you are allowed to present parts of your thesis or full, to a conference and simply say that the work originates from your thesis.

Cheers, Heba.

Hi,

If the thesis and the paper are your own creation, then it is not considered plagiarism.

Paraphrase and refer to your thesis, make clear that you do not pretend to present new findings.

Although you paraphrase your own work and refer to it, it does seem strange that it is referred to as plagiarism as you are not really cheating... it is your work. I think there should be a good look at what is meant by plagiarism and this should be re looked at.  If English language happens to be your second language and you are expected o find other words to use to paraphrase your own work... that could be quite tasking. 

It all depends. If it's your own work, and if the journal does not demand purely original work, then it should be fine. Sometimes this practice is unethical, but I don't see it as any form of plagiarism. Plagiarism is when you copy someone else's labor for your own unearned gains, which would not be the case here!

I've seen symposiums which specify that only previously unpublished work can be presented. In that case, it should be obvious, your previous work won't do.

I've also seen symposiums which do not specify this, or even more clearly, are designed for PhD students to present some of their existing areas of research. In cases like these, no problem!

In American Psychological Association (APA) point of view: "Self-plagiarism: Just as researchers do not present the work of others as their own (plagiarism), they do not present their own previously published work as new scholarship (self-plagiarism).

There are, however, limited circumstances (e.g., describing the details of an instrument or an analytic approach) under which authors may wish to duplicate without attribution (citation) their previously used words, feeling that extensive self referencing is undesirable or awkward. When the duplicated words are limited in scope, this approach is permissible. When duplication of one's own words is more extensive, citation of the duplicated words should be the norm. What constitutes the maximum acceptable length of duplicated material is difficult to define but must conform to legal notions of fair use.

The general view is that the core of the new document must constitute an original contribution to knowledge, and only the amount of previously published material necessary to understand that contribution should be included, primarily in the discussion of theory and methodology. When feasible, all of the author's own words that are cited should be located in a single paragraph or a few paragraphs, with a citation at the end of each. Opening such paragraphs with a phrase like "as I have previously discussed" will also alert readers to the status of the upcoming material."

Hi,

Considering Pandi-Permual's writings, it seems that a thesis or a dissertation are not considered a published material, and a paper based on the thesis could be considered as  an original creation, since it does not encompass the thesis as a whole, but only its essence (the length of a journal paper is much much shorter than that of a thesis). The content of a dissertation is an original material, but if the author does not publish a paper based on his dissertation, it will accumulate dust on a library's shelf.

Thank you Avishag Gordon - my point exactly!

I believe that as long as the thesis is not published, the author can publish as many journal papers from it as possible. I think it is the point of the PhD work to eventually publish the results in scholarly journals.