Academics under pressure to publish reams of work are plagiarising their own material in order to hold onto their posts, research indicates.

The practice gains academics an unfair advantage over more scrupulous colleagues in a “publish or perish” climate and undermines the pursuit of original knowledge, researchers say.

Text-scanning machines, used to spot identical chunks of words, found that 60 per cent of scholars had recycled passages from their own work but failed to reference the fact.

Researchers from the University of South Australia found that out of 269 papers on the Web of Science, a database of social science and humanities journals, 161 included examples of self-plagiarism. An author is deemed to have self-plagiarised when 10 per cent or more of the article was reused from a previous publication without citation.

Dr Tracey Bretag who carried out the research said: "I think we ask more of our students than we do of ourselves," she said.

"This issue underpins everything we do as academics. Are academics here to churn out paper after paper saying the same thing over and over again? Academic work is supposed to be original knowledge creation. But as long as you reward this behaviour, it is very hard to change it."

Studies in medicine and health sciences have found dual-publication rates of up to three per cent.

John Barrie, who developed the technology behind Turnitin, the plagiarism-detection software, said self-plagiarism is a "huge" problem.

"Academics receive tenure based on their publications - it is publish or perish. That system creates this massive conflict of interest," he said.

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