Writing Thesis: Copying from published papers
A general answer for this problem can not be given here with 100%. Here some hints:
The problem you might be running in is called self plagiarism and different institutions allow/forbid different approaches here. If you are planning to write the thesis like this (which is absolutely your right) then:
- It is essential for you to get the guidelines of your university before starting to write (and save them somewhere where you will still be able to find them even years later)
- Check the policy of the journals that you have published in - most journals allow to re-use published material in your thesis but make sure to also print out these guidelines and keep them.
Checking with the university and the journals (and to have written proof of it!) might save you many troubles later. Because if someone later claims that you commited self plagiarism then you can always cite the official guidelines that were in place at the time when you wrote your thesis.
You should also check with your supervisor but just having his/her oral Ok might not be enough many years later.
Others have already told you that a university can require novelty for a thesis in the sense that results published as papers do not count towards the thesis work.
However, the setting I've seen more often is that publication as paper (or conference presentation, poster, etc.) do not hurt the thesis novelty requirement but that no material that has been submitted for any other exam (e.g. Master thesis) can be used for the exam/thesis in question. I'll answer for this scenario.
Must one's own work be cited in a thesis?
- In consequence of that novelty requirement, any material that was submitted for other exams has to be cited as such (i.e. like any other citation) - otherwise it would be self-plagiarism.
- OTOH, having peer-reviewed publications of the thesis material would usually count in your favor, so it is in your best interest to cite them as such even if is your own thesis work ("The results of this section have been published as [publication]").
In my (long form, but other language) thesis I numbered my publications with a prefix to mark them, and put them also in a separate reference list (the thesis application anyways required a list of my publications). - Publications of the thesis work where you have co-authors must be cited unless you manage to leave out the contributions of your coauthors in the long-form thesis.
pitfalls there may be to simply copying from papers that I have previously published in order to form large sections of my thesis.
The remaining pitfall then is copyright of the paper.
- If you retained copyright for the paper, you're fine with reusing from the publisher's point of view.
- Many journals that require you to sign over copyright to them do allow thesis use in that license contract. Others require you to obtain a license (usually highly automated process). All this is pretty streamlined nowadays because it's neede for the boilerplate theses.
=> read the copyright agreements and act accordingly - Also your legislation may say that you retain certain rights (i.e. clauses in the copyright agreement that take those rights away are void).
- Worst case (you don't have a license to reproduce the required parts of the paper), you'll have to reword the content of the paper and to re-format tables and figures.
I'd consider a publisher with such terms a legitimate reason to not publish there any thesis-relevant work.
What I have seen is:
- to state in the first paragraph of a chapter / section, that this chapter / section was already published as a paper, your paper, and you properly cite it.
- You don't make a verbatim copy, but you can lead closely to the paper. Often you want to give more details in a PhD thesis compared to a paper, so it is less difficult than it may sound.
This does only work, if you wrote the paper. Otherwise you are almost-copying someone's else work, which is wrong.
If you intend to follow this idea, ask your adviser whether it is ok.