With AERA proposal deadlines looming near, I have a question for any readers of this blog: How much of prior conference presentations can be used in a new proposal? What if it was presented at a different conference? What if it wasn’t published as part of the proceedings?
I am new to academia, so I want to make sure I understand what is right and ethical in this kind of situation. The policy for journal articles is clear and set out in the APA manual, but it is not so clear for presentations. On the one hand, I see how a researcher should be expected to be coming up with new material. On the other hand, there are so many conferences now that the likelihood of someone from one conference attending your same presentation at another conference is rare, and so is it really a problem?
To be clear, I understand the argument that the research continues to evolve, and the audiences are different, so the presentations would be somewhat different anyway. That is true. But with articles, you can only reuse a very small portion of prior research–say 10 or 20%, I’d have to look it up to be sure. But if you present at two conferences in the same year on basically the same study, the two presentations are likely to be more like 80% similar.
I’m very interested in what anybody thinks about this topic, and what principles might guide our practice. To add to the discussion, Inside Higher Ed has an article arguing that there is a generation gap on this issue, with younger professors/students feeling that "double dipping" is more acceptable. One person commenting (no, that Rick is not me) on the article asks, "Is the purpose of presenting a paper to inform and educate the audience? Or is it to advance one’s own career? If it’s the former, then double-dipping is acceptable. If it’s the latter, then no."
On the other side of the debate, Miguel Roig has an excellent article arguing against any double dipping.
Neither of these articles is in the field of education or instructional technology, so what is our profession\’s opinion on this?
Tags: research, self-plagiarism
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Interesting question and issue. If you are informing the audience– say 1 is a research conference and 1 is a educational leaders (AACTE etc), an effective presentation would be catered to meet the individual needs of the audience- that is the project may be the same, but the findings, implications and amount of the context would be different. If it were 2 research conferences (especially months apart) like AERA, AECT it would make sense to update the findings and have a “different” presentation, so there is no “double dipping” of the same article or presentation.
One big turnoff of a couple world-renowned keynoters is that when I’ve heard them at 2-3 conferences over a 3-4 yr span, some of them recycle and repeat the exact same presentation. For the price of a keynote you’d imagine that they could at least come up w/ some original material!
Drew, I completely agree about keynotes. It seems to me too that if you are getting paid several thousand dollars, that you could come up with some new material. I also agree that sometimes the conferences are so different that the presentations are different to meet the needs of the audience.
But what about two research conferences? That’s more my dilemma here. Specifically, I’m thinking about AERA this month (as you might expect). I have a presentation accepted at AECT that is the main foundation of my research right now, so I’d like to present it at AERA too. AERA is so big, that the likelihood of people that saw me at AECT seeing me at AERA seems very small. I’d love to share the same presentation again to get some more feedback from people and to cross-pollinate the ideas among some new folks. But on the other hand, I don’t want to be accused of self-plagiarism, and I haven’t seen any guidelines on navigating this. Which is why I’m asking for opinions. Thanks for yours!