In my last article, I mentioned about the unusual and unexplainable mood swing that affects our daily routine. Frankly, I am yet to recover from that somewhat depressing mode and still finding it difficult to perform my daily tasks at the usual pace.
The other day, my supervisor happened to pass by my office and asked about the work I was doing. I informed him that I was preparing an extended paper for an upcoming student conference.
He was not impressed at all, as was evident from his facial expressions. He advised me to keep my work for acknowledged journals. According to him, due to the advancement in the plagiarism detection systems, doing such things is like playing with fire or walking on a double-edged sword.
Undoubtedly, the detection systems are serving the academia in detecting cheating students but they have complicated the process of publishing papers.
It is a rule that any work submitted as coursework, conference paper, journal …etc. cannot be used for any other academic purpose without proper referencing, and for people in academia they must know how tricky this might be. For example, if you chose a concept from your findings and wrote a paper about it to be published in an acknowledged scientific journal, you have to make sure that this work does not resemble any work submitted by you at any other conference or coursework and should be entirely original. This sometimes can be exhausting, some parts of one’s research are static to a certain extent like the research methodology and research context, and having to rewrite the whole part for each and every academic participation can be draining, but this is the new world. All works are going to be checked for plagiarism and those systems are accurate enough to check for the finest resemblances. My supervisor’s advice was to always choose conferences wisely and refrain from wasting novel parts of the research on unacknowledged conferences. According to him, it will be a shame to apply for a legitimate journal and then to discover that you need to rewrite the whole paper that you have read at a small students’ conference.
It is better to participate in small conferences with unpublished papers if possible or through any other means as those conferences are usually for students and they are great for exchanging ideas and sharing experiences, but it is better to choose wisely when it comes to uploading works as there is no way back after that.
—
@HatoonKadi
