Department of Information & Library Science, Tamkang University, New Taipei, Taiwan 淡江大學資訊與圖書館學系
ORCID: 0000-0002-4894-8031 wylin@mail.tku.edu.tw
Abstract
Cases of academic misconduct have not only drawn significant attention in the scholarly community but also surfaced as a discussion subject for the general public in recent years. This kind of ethic issue awareness makes huge splash to
a degree that never being seen before. Within these related academic ethic contentions, self-plagiarism is one of the subject that has received significant amount of concern but is still with great controversial point of view. Under
the academic ethic guidelines announced by Taiwan Ministry of Science and Technology, self-plagiarism and dual publication are listed out as two particular violations to emphasize their importance but with room for judgment within
different academic research fields. Therefore, the main purpose of this study is to explore the behavior of cognition, norm, and remedy on the self-plagiarism issue among journal editors within social science fields of Taiwan. Content
analysis of notes for contributors in 105 journals, and in-depth interviews to the editors of 13 journals indexed by TSSCI were conducted to reveal how they identify and type out self-plagiarism, followed by how they regulate self-plagiarism
and remedy it once related cases surfaced. This is a unique research of exploratory research on this hot issue that has not been performed in Taiwan. Data revealed by this study provide insight information to the self-plagiarism behavior
and could be used to strength the current related academic ethic regulations.
