The term self-plagiarism is usually associated with re-using your own work, recycling slabs of material already published, cutting and pasting from one text to another, producing something which duplicates something that has already appeared elsewhere.

Self-plagiarism is not the same as stealing someone else’s work and passing it off as your own, that’s plagiarism. Nor is it the same as violating copyright – using other people’s text without permission, or even re-using your own work when the copyright has been signed over to someone else. We all know these practices are wrong, so if self plagiarism is like these, it must be too.

The idea of self-plagiarism is scary. We all know that plagiarists get punished if they are found out. They can be sacked, their work pulped or retracted. And universities and publishers are increasingly on the lookout for plagiarism, using automatic software to detect it. So the notion of plagiarising your own work carries with it the spectre of the surveillance and punishment.