Self-plagiarism (also known as "recycling fraud is the reuse of significant, identical, or nearly identical portions of one's own work without acknowledging that one is doing so or without citing the original work. Articles of this nature are often referred to as duplicate or multiple publication. In addition to the ethical issue, this can be a copyright violation if copyright of the prior work has been transferred to another entity. Typically, self-plagiarism is only considered a serious ethical issue in settings where someone asserts that a publication consist of new material, such as in publishing or factual documentation. It does not apply to public-interest texts, such as social, professional, and cultural opinions usually published in newspapers and magazines. In academic fields, self-plagiarism occurs when an author reuses portions of his own published and copyrighted work in subsequent publications, but without attributing the previous publication.
Identifying self-plagiarism is often difficult because limited reuse of material is accepted both legally (as fair use) and ethically.It is common for university researchers to rephrase and republish their own work, tailoring it for different academic journals and newspaper articles, to disseminate their work to the widest possible interested public. However, these researchers also obey limits: If half an article is the same as a previous one, it is usually rejected. One of the functions of the process of peer review in academic writing is to prevent this type of "recycling"
