I recently ran into a plagiarism problem.
I was in the process of submitting a book to a publisher and the publisher’s plagiarism search software found several instances of online content matching passages in my book. It took me the better part of 3 weeks to discover that the online content was from a patent I wrote from 8 years ago. Basically, I was plagiarizing my own work. Is that even possible?
Plagiarism is the practice of taking *someone else’s* work or ideas and passing them off as one’s *own*. By definition, then, you cannot plagiarize yourself. However, it’s always advisable for authors to provide citations to their prior published work if they want to use it again.