Abstract:

Although plagiarism in students’ work has been broadly studied and written about, as well as widely discussed and researched topic in recent years, Self‐plagiarism within the Academia remains taboo.

Self-plagiarism occurs when authors reuse part of previously published works in subsequent research papers. At times it happens that the secondly published paper is simply a retitled and reformatted version of the original one, but more frequently it is assembled from bits and pieces of previous work. In more severe situations the author publish in different languages without changing anything, but rather translating. It also happens that papers are republished with no reference to the initial works.

Academics’ opinions on the matter are divided. On one extreme of the line are have those who claim that the total repetition of previously written and published work without citation is a fraude and lack of scientific integrity, some other claim that it is perfectly acceptable to use the same research work to attend as many conferences as they desire, as “ they wrote it”.

Being a not very recent trend in most fields, the first time self-plagiarism was addressed as lack of scientific integrity, was in the laže 90s, close to the turn of the century.

Several studies have proven that the re utilization of the same text in both published papers and conference abstracts and proceedings is frequent amongst the Academia.

The present paper will address both perspectives and give a legal insight on the matter, by means of literature review and case analysis as well as the legal standpoint t in the matter.

A random sample of papers, by Portuguese authors, will be put through an accurate plagiarism detector and the results will be analyzed as per content correspondence, bibliography and similarity. The authors will use iThenticate software. The analyses will be limited to the Social Sciences, specifically Law.
The choice for Social Sciences as the subject of research is related to the small relevance that is given to plagiarism within these fields ok knowledge, when compared to other fields of science. Institutionally, plagiarism in these fields, especially Law, is highly accepted and frequent, not being considered of significant importance. The authors tend to disagree.

The present paper will present an analysis of Portuguese Legal Science Research and its results, aiming at clarifying the concept and the correct use of one's intelectual property.

Keywords:

Academia, plagiarism, fraud, self-plagiarism, law.