Thursday, 17 September 2015

citations - How to mention a completely rewritten article in PhD thesis?


First of all, I am from Europe. At my university are hardly any regulations of the form of my PhD thesis, especially nothing that concerns the following question:


I published a paper as a first author together with my supervisor. I have rewritten my work of the paper, the structure, each sentence, and all images, because I didn't want to give a Journal the copyright of a part of my PhD thesis. However, the original methods and ideas are still the same. Currently, this rewritten paper is one chapter of my dissertation and I have not cited the paper.


Would you recommend to let the reader know that the ideas of this chapter have been published in a journal?




Edit: Thank you for the answer, here are some remarks that didn't fit in the comment section:





  1. I asked the journal, they responded:



    Permission is granted for you to use the material requested for your thesis/dissertation subject to the usual acknowledgements and on the understanding that you will reapply for permission if you wish to distribute or publish your thesis/dissertation commercially. You must also duplicate the copyright notice that appears in the Wiley publication in your use of the Material.



    However, I didn't want to duplicate the copyright notice of the journal in my thesis.




  2. I will now mention that the chapter is based on the publication. I thought its fine to not cite yourself, because it was mentioned in the first comment of the question How to reuse complete paper for my thesis? that it is common in UK to rewrite the article so heavily that citation is not needed anymore.






Answer




because I didnt want to give a Journal the copyright of a part of my PhD thesis



Have you checked the copyright agreement? Various academic publishers explicitly make an exception of their exclusive right of publication of the material (although graphics might be a different question) for the author's educational theses.



Would you recommend to let the reader know that the ideas of this chapter have been published in a journal?



Yes, this is absolutely required. Otherwise, you are committing self-plagiarism, which is considered a form of academic fraud. This could have severe repercussions during your later career. The reason is that if no citation is given for something non-trivial and substantial, the reader will assume it is new and has not ever been published before it appeared in your thesis.


A good idea to handle this is to add a remark in the beginning of the respective chapter(s) that says that the following text is partially/largely based upon your journal article.



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