Republication of conference papers in journals?

Abstract

ABSTRACTConference proceedings are one of the most important forms of communication for computer scientists. This study investigated the policies of a large number of computer science journals with regard to the republication of papers which had already appeared in conference proceedings. Nearly one‐quarter of journal editors would not republish such papers other than in special circumstances (such as a special conference issue), and almost all of the remainder would do so only after substantial updating and expansion of the original paper. Many specified the amount of content that should be new: 30% was the proportion most frequently mentioned. Thus, many sections of text may be identical to the original paper. However, some journal editors do not appear to consider this self‐plagiarism provided the original publication is properly cited. Nevertheless, such (re)publication is likely to lead to high similarity scores in CrossCheck; in this field, therefore, journal editors need to exercise particular discretion when evaluating CrossCheck results.