Self-Plagiarism Original Work Explanation For your English class, you write an essay about costumes in Shakespeare’s plays: how Elizabethans made theatre costumes, and how those costumes influenced performance. You then submit that same paper for your History class. For your English class, you write an essay about costumes in Shakespeare’s plays: how Elizabethans made theatre costumes, and how those costumes influenced performance. For your History class, you write about the clothing industry in Elizabethan society. Your paper mostly analyzes industry and the economy. You briefly mention costume production for Elizabethan theatre, so you mention two facts about Shakespearean costumes that also appeared in your English class essay. You significantly develop those ideas in a new direction, so that they fit into your economic analysis. Submitting the same paper for two different courses is considered plagiarism. Teachers expect that your work will be original and written specifically for the assignment for their course. It’s fine to revisit ideas from previous papers and expand on those ideas, as long as you show significant development. You could drastically reframe your ideas for a new audience, or for a different subject area. The focus of each paper should be substantially different. For your Neuroscience course, you write a research paper on visual perception in children on the Autism spectrum. In your Developmental Psychology class, you are given a research assignment on the topic of Autism Spectrum Disorder. You mostly write an original paper, but you copy and paste one paragraph from your Neuroscience paper into this new assignment. For your Neuroscience course, you write a research paper on visual perception in children on the Autism spectrum. For your Developmental Psychology class, you quote one sentence from your own Neuroscience paper. The rest of your paragraph is original ideas that expand on your previous research, taking it in new directions. You mark the sentence you’ve re-used with quotation marks and a proper citation. Ex. In a paragraph about vocabulary, you might write: “In my paper ‘Visual Perception in Toddlers with ASD’, I found that children on the spectrum track their caregivers’ gaze significantly less than do neurotypical children (Smith 2018). This leads to differences in word learning, because children with ASD tend not to look at objects their parents point at.” Never copy and paste material from old assignments. Even if you try to edit your old work, the structure and flow of your ideas will be too similar to your old work. It’s okay to draw on ideas from old papers -- but those ideas should just be used as background support for your new ideas. You might quote a single sentence from an old paper in a paragraph, and then significantly expand on it, the same way you’d quote another author’s work. You conduct your own research experiment. The study looks at how teaching parents a new way to respond to their toddlers’ tantrums reduces stress for the parents, and improves the toddlers’ behaviour. You then publish two different articles: One on how the strategy improves the parents’ stress levels, and one on how the strategy impacts the toddlers’ behaviour. You conduct your own original research experiment, and write/publish one article on the results. Publishing two separate articles about the same research can deceive readers. It makes it look like you conducted two separate studies, with two separate samples, rather than just one. This is misleading, and can make future literature reviews and meta-analyses inaccurate. It is generally most appropriate to publish the results of one study in a single article.