Text recycling, also known as self-plagiarism, is when sections of the same text appear in more than one of an author’s own publications (overlap of text with an author’s own previously published work).

The editors of Bezpieczeństwo. Teoria i Praktyka / Security: Theory and Practice will consider each case of text recycling on an individual basis, both in a submitted manuscript and a published article. The decision will depend on the degree and nature of the overlap.

For example, it may be appropriate to have overlap in a methods section of a research article (i.e. referring to a previously used method, with citation of the original article). However, undisclosed overlap, or overlap in the results, discussion, or conclusions is unacceptable. Where overlap is considered to be minor, authors may be asked to re-write overlapping sections, and cite their previous article(s). More significant overlap may result in rejection of the manuscript.

If text recycling is discovered in a published article, it may be necessary to publish a correction (when the original publication is not referenced in the subsequent publication; but there is still sufficient new material in the article to justify its publication) or to withdraw the article (when the recycled text reports previously published data and there is insufficient new material in the article to justify its publication).