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Self-Citation: A guide on how to use it effectively

A thesis conclusion summarizes your dissertation and highlights the scope for further research. Learn what it is and how to write it.

Academic writing involves citing sources to provide evidence for arguments and ideas presented in a paper. Self-citation, a practice of citing one’s own work, is often used in academic writing. However, it can be a controversial practice, and there are ethical considerations to take into account when using it. In this article, we will explore the definition of self-citation, reasons for using it, and strategies for avoiding it. We will also discuss the impact of self-citation on research quality and academic integrity.

What is Self-Citation?

Self-citation is a common practice in academic writing that involves citing one’s own previously published work in a new publication. It can include citing articles, books, book chapters, conference papers, or any other type of publication that the writer has authored. Self-citation can be done in text or in the reference list. The primary goal of self-citation is to establish a link between a writer’s current research and their previous work. It can be used to build on previous findings, reinforce arguments, or demonstrate continuity in a writer’s research.

Reasons for Self-Citation

Self-citation can serve some purposes, including:

• Building on previous findings: Self-citation can be used to show how a writer’s new research builds on their previous work. By citing their own work, writers can establish a link between their current research and their previous findings.
• Reinforcing arguments: Self-citation can be used to support arguments made in a new publication. By citing their own work, writers can provide additional evidence for their claims.
• Demonstrating continuity: Self-citation can be used to demonstrate continuity in a writer’s research. By citing their own work, writers can show how their research has evolved over time.

Ethics of Self-Citation

Ethical self-citation requires authors to cite their own work only when it is relevant and necessary to support the argument of the current publication. It should be transparently labeled and based on high-quality research.

The Pros and Cons of Self-Citation

Some of the pros of self-citation include:

• Establishing credibility: Self-citation can help establish the author’s expertise in a particular field and build credibility as a researcher.
• Building a research agenda: Self-citation can be an effective way to build a research agenda, by connecting multiple works and establishing a clear research trajectory.
• Enhancing visibility: Self-citation can increase the visibility of an author’s work and help to establish their reputation in the field.

Some of the cons of self-citation include:

• Over-reliance on one’s own work: Overuse of self-citation can create the impression that a writer is not engaging with the broader literature in their field.
• Inflating the importance of one’s own work: Self-citation can create the impression that a writer is overly focused on their own research and not interested in the work of others in their field.
• Undermining the integrity of the citation process: Self-citation can be seen as an attempt to boost one’s own citation count, which can undermine the credibility of the citation process.

How Self-Citation Impacts Academic Integrity

Self-citation can have both positive and negative impacts on academic integrity. It can be a legitimate and appropriate way to acknowledge the contributions of previous work, establish a research trajectory, and demonstrate expertise in a particular field. On the other hand, self-citation can also be abused, leading to concerns about academic integrity and the objectivity of research.

Here are some ways in which self-citation can impact academic integrity:

• Bias: Self-citation can create a bias towards an author’s own work, potentially leading to a lack of objectivity and a skewed representation of the state of the field. This can undermine the credibility of the research and raise questions about its validity.
• Manipulation: Self-citation can be seen as a way to manipulate citation metrics and boost an author’s own profile, rather than as a legitimate way to acknowledge previous work. This can lead to concerns about academic integrity and ethical behavior.
• Excessive self-citation: Excessive self-citation can suggest a lack of engagement with the broader field, and may be seen as an attempt to inflate citation metrics rather than as genuine engagement with the work of others. This can undermine the credibility of the research and reduce its impact.
• Justification: Self-citation should be justified by a genuine need to reference previous work, rather than as a way to promote one’s own ideas. Authors should carefully consider whether their own work is the best source to support their arguments and provide context for their research.

Methods of Avoiding Self-Citation

While self-citation can be useful in academic writing, it is important to avoid over-reliance on one’s own work. Here are some strategies for minimizing self-citation:

Strategies for Minimizing Self-Citation

Use a diverse set of sources.

To avoid over-reliance on one’s own work, it is important to use a diverse set of sources in academic writing. This can include literature reviews, empirical studies, and other types of publications that are relevant to the research question.

Use third-person references

Instead of citing themselves, writers can use third-person references to describe their previous work. For example, instead of saying “In my previous study…” a writer could say “Smith (2010) found that…”

Consider the relevance of previous work

Before citing one’s own work, writers should consider whether it is truly relevant to the research question. If it is not, then it may be better to avoid self-citation altogether.

Best Practices for Citing Sources

When citing sources, it is important to follow best practices to maintain academic integrity. Here are some practices for citing sources:

• Accurately citing sources: It is important to accurately cite sources to give credit to the original authors and to avoid plagiarism.
• Using a consistent citation style: Using a consistent citation style throughout a paper can make it easier for readers to find the sources cited and can improve the overall readability of the paper.
• Including a reference list: Including a reference list at the end of a paper is essential to provide readers with a complete list of sources cited in the paper.

Impact of Self-Citation on Research Quality

Self-citation can have an impact on the quality of research. If self-citation is overused or used inappropriately, it can undermine the credibility of a writer’s research. However, if used appropriately, self-citation can strengthen a writer’s argument and demonstrate continuity in their research.

One potential benefit of self-citation is that it can help to establish a writer’s expertise in a particular area. By citing their own work, writers can demonstrate their knowledge of a particular topic and their contribution to the field. This can be particularly important for early-career researchers who are trying to establish themselves in their field.

Another potential benefit of self-citation is that it can help to build a writer’s citation count. While citation count is not the only measure of research impact, it is often used as a proxy for the impact of a writer’s research. By citing their own work, writers can increase their citation count, which can be beneficial for their academic careers.

However, it is important to note that citation count should not be the primary motivation for self-citation. Self-citation should only be used when it is relevant and appropriate to the research question.

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Academic Skills: Writing: Reusing Your Work and Citing Yourself

As you progress in your Walden program, you may find that you research and write about a topic more than once. This is typical as you engage with key concepts and specialize in your field of study. See the information and best practices on this page to ensure you follow APA citation guidelines and Walden policy if you plan to reuse past written work.

Your Published Writing

If you have published your writing outside of the Walden classroom—in a journal or even in a local newsletter or blog—and would like to reuse portions of it or refer to the findings or ideas in that work, you will need to cite yourself.

Follow APA’s guidelines for citing and referencing published works.

Your Previous Coursework

If you are considering reusing your previously submitted Walden coursework in a new course or term, review the following best practice and policy sections.

Best Practices for Reusing Work

• During your studies at Walden, you may write on the same topic for a second, third, or fourth time; regardless, your writing should reflect new approaches and insights into that topic to demonstrate intellectual growth.
• Your writing submitted for previous Walden courses will show up in the Turnitin Similarity Report when reused. Contact your faculty if you plan to reuse your work to avoid concerns about possible plagiarism. Additionally, you could cite your unpublished writing (see How to Cite Your Unpublished Work below).
• Your faculty for your current course can guide you about whether reusing your previous writing seems appropriate for a particular assignment or writing task.

Walden University’s Policy on Reusing Work

The following comes from the Walden Student Code of Conduct :

Walden Students’ Use of Their Own Scholarly Work

• Students may reuse their work without an expectation that previously awarded grades or credit will attach to the new assignment. Any work previously published by the student must be appropriately cited if reused. 
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How to Cite Your Unpublished Work

Although not required in the policy above, in rare instances, you may need to or want to cite your unpublished Walden coursework.

If you cite or quote your previous work, treat yourself as the author and your own written document as the source. For example, if Marie Briggs wanted to cite a paper she wrote at Walden in 2022, her citation might look like this:

Briggs (2022) asserted that previous literature on the psychology of tightrope walkers was faulty in that it "presumed that risk-taking behaviors align neatly with certain personality traits or disorders" (p. 4).

And in the reference list:

Briggs, M. (2022). An analysis of personality theory [Unpublished manuscript]. Walden University.

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FAQ: How should I cite my own work?

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If you want to re-use portions of a paper you wrote for a previous assignment or course, you need to take care to avoid self-plagiarism. The APA Manual (7th edition, p. 21) defines self-plagiarism as “the act of presenting one's own previously published work as original." This includes entire papers, and also slightly altered work. Self-plagiarism is a violation of SNHU’s Academic Honesty Policy ( Online Student Academic Integrity Policy This link opens in a new window ,  Campus Student Academic Integrity Policy This link opens in a new window ). To avoid self-plagiarism, you should request approval from your instructor to use portions of your prior work, and you also need to provide a proper citation within your paper.

If you are citing your own writing from a paper submitted for a previous course, then you would generally cite it as an unpublished manuscript. Here are specific examples of how it works in the three major citation styles:

Please check with your instructor to verify if you can use a previous work as it may violate academic integrity, honor codes, etc. If you are permitted to quote or paraphrase from earlier work, students should cite the work, following the unpublished work template (Section 10.8, p. 336). You can change “Unpublished manuscript” to “Unpublished paper” or another phrase.

Reference Page General Format

Author, A. A. (Year). Title of the work [Unpublished paper]. Department Name, University Name.

Reference Page Example

Fisher, J. D. (2021). This is the title of my paper [Unpublished paper]. English Department, Southern New Hampshire University.

In-Text Example

(Fisher, 2021)

According to the MLA Style site, authors should cite their work the same way they would cite any other source (book, article, etc.). In the text you can refer to yourself (e.g. "In my work...").

Works Cited General Format

Author Last name, Author First Name. "Title of Your Paper: Subtitle of Your Paper." Date. Name of the Course, Institution, Type of Work.

Works Cited Example

Lee, Cody. "My Student Paper: Why I Like This Subject a Lot." 9 Sept. 2021. New Media: Writing and Publishing, Southern New Hampshire University, student paper.

In-Text Citation Example

See the MLA Style pages Citing Your Own Work This link opens in a new window and How do I cite an unpublished student paper? This link opens in a new window for more information.

Chicago Style

Per the Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition), unpublished works such as theses and dissertations are cited like books, with the exception that titles of unpublished works appear in quotations, not italics. Also, the type of paper, the academic institution, and the date follow the title.

For published works, please consult the Chicago Style Table of Contents This link opens in a new window for the type of source and follow the formatting guidelines associated.

Bibliography General Format

Author Last Name, Author First Name. "Title of Paper." Essay, Southern New Hampshire University, Year.

Bibliography Example

Wendell, Richard. "This Is the Title of My Paper." Essay, Southern New Hampshire University, 2021.

Note Example

2. Richard Wendell, "This Is the Title of My Paper" (essay, Southern New Hampshire University, 2021), 4.

More Information

• Citing Your Sources  (Shapiro Library) research guide.  

Further Help

This information is intended to be a guideline, not expert advice. Please be sure to speak to your professor about the appropriate way to cite sources in your class assignments and projects.

Campus Students

To access Academic Support, visit your Brightspace course and select “Tutoring and Mentoring” from the Academic Support pulldown menu.

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To access help with citations and more, visit the Academic Support via modules in Brightspace:

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What is self-citation and what does it have to do with academic integrity?

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When it comes to a researcher’s own work, attribution is necessary to avoid self-plagiarism or duplicate plagiarism . Such attribution is called self-citation . Self-citation is an act of academic integrity when expanding on previous research or referring to previously published work. There are legitimate reasons to self-cite; work is largely, especially in scientific research, cumulative and it’s important to attribute prior foundational work.

But when the calculation of impact factor becomes a primary driving factor, self-citation may venture into the murky territory of self-promotion. This behavior has become a burgeoning concern within the research community.

For many researchers and research journals, a critical indicator for academic reputation is impact factor , a score based on the number of citations an article garners.

Excessive self-citation with the intention of raising one's impact factor is considered unethical and falls under the subset of citation manipulation . In a 2019 study, COPE explicitly states, “When any of the above parties, editors, board members, reviewers, or authors add or request to add citations where the motivations are merely self-promotional this aim violates publication ethics and is unethical. Additionally, whether or not they are requested, citations to the editor’s work should not be added in the belief that this will increase the likelihood of the publication being accepted” ( 2019 ).

The scientific community has called out egregious examples of excessive self-citation. According to a study in PLoS Biology this month , Nature stated one example of a computer scientist who “received 94% of his citations from himself or his co-authors up to 2017." He is not alone. The data set, which lists around 100,000 researchers , shows that at least 250 scientists have amassed more than 50% of their citations from themselves or their co-authors, while the median self-citation rate is 12.7%” ( Van Noorden & Chawla, 2019 ).

Excessive self-citation, simply put, is very easy to spot.

On the part of the researcher, self-citation may be motivated by a desire for publication and an increase in impact factor, which in turn, expands future opportunities for publication. And it may be motivated, on the part of the journal, to raise its journal impact factor (JIF)—or it may be that the journal is highly specific in its topic choices ( Sanfilippo et al., 2021 ).

The link between self-citation and academic integrity is explicit: citations, and thus self-citations, raise the academic reputation of a researcher or journal in the form of the impact factor score, which is a very visible indicator of reputation.

But excessive self-citation can backfire, as many community members become more aware of this form of abuse—because the number of citations is also a very visible indication of whether or not self-promotion occurs.

What isn’t as transparent is the motivation behind self-citation that defines self-promotion. And what number—if any—of citations then accurately correlates between legitimate self-citation and self-promotion.

Researchers are working to define what the threshold for excessive self-citation may be. The line between legitimate and excessive self-citation can vary, even according to academic disciplines. But researchers are now examining the balance between building on prior work and recognizing others’ influence ( Szomszor, Pendelbury, & Adams 2020 ).

There have been multiple proposed solutions to unethical and excessive self-citation. Justin Flatt proposed publishing a self-citation index to raise transparency into such behavior ( 2017 ). He expanded with 2020 research that further urged tracking of self-citation with defined goals, clarifying, “Instead of curation, we should adopt methods that utilize all the citation data, but in a way that carefully accounts for factors such as self-citation, collaboration, and ‘citation farms.’ Only then can we begin to fully appreciate authors’ behavior and performance in relation to citation records: ( Kacem, Flatt, & Mayr, 2020 ).

“But the idea of publicly listing individuals’ self-citation rates, or evaluating them on the basis of metrics corrected for self-citation, is highly contentious,” according to an article in Nature . “COPE argued against excluding self-citations from metrics because, it said, this ‘doesn’t permit a nuanced understanding of when self-citation makes good scholarly sense’” ( Van Noorden & Chawla 2019 ).

That said, Switzerland expanded its Code of Conduct to include “citation-farming,” or excessive self-citation as scientific misconduct with sanctions in May 2021.

Rising awareness of self-citation abuse is part of the solution— just as with many academic integrity concerns, awareness is the fundamental driver for mitigating misconduct. And the world of research is both working on policies as well as objective measurements to mitigate excessive self-citation and uphold academic integrity.

Self-Citation

Self-Citation Podcast

Self-citation transcript.

Greetings everyone. This is Kurtis Clements with another effective writing podcast. In this episode, I am going to shed some light on self-citation—that is, instances when one would want to cite him or herself in academic work in an effort to avoid plagiarism.

What’s this you ask? Students sometimes want to know if they can cite themselves in a paper or assignment they are working on—that is, they want to know if they can use content they’ve written for one class in another—and while this is a relatively uncommon practice—students aren’t, after all, experts in the fields in which they write papers—protocol exists.

Let’s say that you are working on a paper about cogs and wheels, a subject that you have written about in a couple of prior classes. In fact, you’ve discovered some terrific content about cogs and wheels and have even written several particularly strong paragraphs in a previous paper that you think will fit into your current assignment. You decide to copy and paste two full paragraphs from a previous paper into your new paper. Have you just committed plagiarism?

The answer: yes and no.

What? How can this be? Simply put, the topic of self-citation and plagiarism can be confusing, so let’s break it down. You plagiarize yourself when you reuse work that you have used elsewhere without making anyone aware of this reuse of old content. When you turn in a paper for a class, the expectation is that this work is original and created specifically for a given assignment. If it is not original, it is unethical, and in cases of copyright issues (that is, you are reusing old content not for a class but for publication), it’s illegal. You must not mislead your reader, editor, or professor.

Generally, you can use small portions of your previous work if you cite it properly. This is called self-citation. The citation is required because it must be clear that this work or writing exists somewhere else and that the words or ideas are not original to the current paper or production. If you quote or paraphrase your ideas from a previous paper, in APA, you would cite yourself as the primary author and the work as an unpublished paper. For this self-citation, you must include both an in-text and reference citation like you would for any other source in your paper.

Please take special note of what I said above: It’s ok to use small portions of your previous work. In most cases of university academic writing, “small portions” means a sentence or two. What?!

That’s right: If you do cite yourself—that is, if you use content that you wrote for a previous paper—do so rarely and reuse content sparingly. Why? You ask. Think of it this way: If you are choosing to cite your previous work, it should be because you want to build on an idea you came up with in a previous paper. You should not cite previous work in order to only write a new paper faster.

However, with that said, the real question to think about is should you be using your previous work to begin with? To quote yourself does not lend credibility to your paper unless you are a known and published scholar in the field about which you are writing. Most students don’t fall into this category. Therefore, it is better for the validity of the paper and for student learning to avoid citing yourself unless you truly have an important idea of yours to build upon from a previous paper. Make sense? I am not saying don’t use your own content from a previous paper, but I am saying do so purposefully.

In order to cite yourself, if you decide it is appropriate for your paper, you can either refer to yourself in the third person, Clements (2013) stated, for example, or, if the assignment allows for a more casual personal reference, you could write, “As I discussed in a previous paper. . .” Again, you would include both an in-text and reference citation like you would for any other source in your paper.

One word of caution: You do not want to cite yourself citing someone else. If you want to reuse a quotation or a source from a previous paper, you need to cite that original source again. For example, let’s say you found a scholarly, peer-reviewed resource from an expert in the field, a Dr. Pickle, and you quoted Dr. Pickle in a paper. If you want to reuse that quote, don’t cite yourself, cite Dr. Pickle, who is the expert. This might mean that you have to go find that article again, but it is a best practice to cite—as best as one can—only original sources.

One final reminder: Keep in mind that if you choose self-citation, you should do so to build upon your ideas from a previous paper, not simply reuse the same content in another context. Got it? Good. Oh, I would be remiss if I didn’t also say that when citing yourself, it is wise to consult the course syllabus and/or your professor beforehand just to make sure citing yourself will be ok.

In closing, I want to give special thanks to Melody Pickle, yes the Dr. Pickle from the example; she is real and an expert and her help on this script has been significant.

Happy writing, everyone!

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APA Style 7th Edition: Citing Your Sources

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Adapted from American Psychological Association. (2020). Publication manual of the American Psychological Association (7th ed).  https://doi.org/10.1037/0000165-000

Formatting:

• Italicize the title
• Identify whether source is doctoral dissertation or master’s thesis in parentheses after the title

See Ch. 10 pp. 313-352 of APA Manual for more examples and formatting rules

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Self-citation examples

Format: in text citation   The essay examined the importance of information literacy skills for undergraduate students (Surname, Year).

Format: reference   Student surname, Initials. (Year of submission)  Title of essay/assignment . [Unpublished essay/assignment]. Module title. Module code. Institution.

Example: in text citation  

The essay examined the importance of information literacy skills for undergraduate students (Siddall, 2018).

Example: reference   Siddall, G. (2018)  The importance of information literacy within Higher Education.  [Unpublished essay]. Information literacy. INF2244. University of Northampton.

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🤔 What is an APA Citation Generator?

An APA citation generator is a software tool that will automatically format academic citations in the American Psychological Association (APA) style.

It will usually request vital details about a source -- like the authors, title, and publish date -- and will output these details with the correct punctuation and layout required by the official APA style guide.

Formatted citations created by a generator can be copied into the bibliography of an academic paper as a way to give credit to the sources referenced in the main body of the paper.

👩‍🎓 Who uses an APA Citation Generator?

College-level and post-graduate students are most likely to use an APA citation generator, because APA style is the most favored style at these learning levels. Before college, in middle and high school, MLA style is more likely to be used. In other parts of the world styles such as Harvard (UK and Australia) and DIN 1505 (Europe) are used more often.

🙌 Why should I use a Citation Generator?

Like almost every other citation style, APA style can be cryptic and hard to understand when formatting citations. Citations can take an unreasonable amount of time to format manually, and it is easy to accidentally include errors. By using a citation generator to do this work you will:

• Save a considerable amount of time
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In academia, bibliographies are graded on their accuracy against the official APA rulebook, so it is important for students to ensure their citations are formatted correctly. Special attention should also be given to ensure the entire document (including main body) is structured according to the APA guidelines. Our complete APA format guide has everything you need know to make sure you get it right (including examples and diagrams).

⚙️ How do I use MyBib's APA Citation Generator?

Our APA generator was built with a focus on simplicity and speed. To generate a formatted reference list or bibliography just follow these steps:

• Start by searching for the source you want to cite in the search box at the top of the page.
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Daniel is a qualified librarian, former teacher, and citation expert. He has been contributing to MyBib since 2018.

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What is a thesis?

What is a dissertation, getting started, staying on track.

A thesis is a long-term project that you work on over the course of a semester or a year. Theses have a very wide variety of styles and content, so we encourage you to look at prior examples and work closely with faculty to develop yours. 

Before you begin, make sure that you are familiar with the dissertation genre—what it is for and what it looks like.

Generally speaking, a dissertation’s purpose is to prove that you have the expertise necessary to fulfill your doctoral-degree requirements by showing depth of knowledge and independent thinking.

The form of a dissertation may vary by discipline. Be sure to follow the specific guidelines of your department.

• PhD This site directs candidates to the GSAS website about dissertations , with links to checklists,  planning, formatting, acknowledgments, submission, and publishing options. There is also a link to guidelines for the prospectus . Consult with your committee chair about specific requirements and standards for your dissertation.
• DDES This document covers planning, patent filing, submission guidelines, publishing options, formatting guidelines, sample pages, citation guidelines, and a list of common errors to avoid. There is also a link to guidelines for the prospectus .
• Scholarly Pursuits (GSAS) This searchable booklet from Harvard GSAS is a comprehensive guide to writing dissertations, dissertation-fellowship applications, academic journal articles, and academic job documents.

Finding an original topic can be a daunting and overwhelming task. These key concepts can help you focus and save time.

Finding a topic for your dissertation should start with a research question that excites or at least interests you. A rigorous, engaging, and original dissertation will require continuous curiosity about your topic, about your own thoughts on the topic, and about what other scholars have said on your topic. Avoid getting boxed in by thinking you know what you want to say from the beginning; let your research and your writing evolve as you explore and fine-tune your focus through constant questioning and exploration.

Get a sense of the broader picture before you narrow your focus and attempt to frame an argument. Read, skim, and otherwise familiarize yourself with what other scholars have done in areas related to your proposed topic. Briefly explore topics tangentially related to yours to broaden your perspective and increase your chance of finding a unique angle to pursue.

Critical Reading

Critical reading is the opposite of passive reading. Instead of merely reading for information to absorb, critical reading also involves careful, sustained thinking about what you are reading. This process may include analyzing the author’s motives and assumptions, asking what might be left out of the discussion, considering what you agree with or disagree with in the author’s statements and why you agree or disagree, and exploring connections or contradictions between scholarly arguments. Here is a resource to help hone your critical-reading skills:

http://writing.umn.edu/sws/assets/pdf/quicktips/criticalread.pdf

Conversation

Your dissertation will incorporate some of the ideas of the other scholars whose work you researched. By reading critically and following your curiosity, you will develop your own ideas and claims, and these contributions are the core of your dissertation. However, your dissertation will also acknowledge the work of scholars who came before you, and you must accurately and fairly attribute this work and define your place within the larger discussion. Make sure that you know how to quote, summarize, paraphrase , integrate , and cite secondary sources to avoid plagiarism and to show the depth and breadth of your knowledge.

A thesis is a long-term, large project that involves both research and writing; it is easy to lose focus, motivation, and momentum. Here are suggestions for achieving the result you want in the time you have.

The dissertation is probably the largest project you have undertaken, and a lot of the work is self-directed. The project can feel daunting or even overwhelming unless you break it down into manageable pieces and create a timeline for completing each smaller task. Be realistic but also challenge yourself, and be forgiving of yourself if you miss a self-imposed deadline here and there.

Your program will also have specific deadlines for different requirements, including establishing a committee, submitting a prospectus, completing the dissertation, defending the dissertation, and submitting your work. Consult your department’s website for these dates and incorporate them into the timeline for your work.

Accountability

Sometimes self-imposed deadlines do not feel urgent unless there is accountability to someone beyond yourself. To increase your motivation to complete tasks on schedule, set dates with your committee chair to submit pre-determined pieces of a chapter. You can also arrange with a fellow doctoral student to check on each other’s progress. Research and writing can be lonely, so it is also nice to share that journey with someone and support each other through the process.

Common Pitfalls

The most common challenges for students writing a dissertation are writer’s block, information-overload, and the compulsion to keep researching forever.

There are many strategies for avoiding writer’s block, such as freewriting, outlining, taking a walk, starting in the middle, and creating an ideal work environment for your particular learning style. Pay attention to what helps you and try different things until you find what works.

Efficient researching techniques are essential to avoiding information-overload. Here are a couple of resources about strategies for finding sources and quickly obtaining essential information from them.

https://owl.purdue.edu/owl/subject_specific_writing/writing_in_literature/writing_in_literature_detailed_discussion/reading_criticism.html

https://students.dartmouth.edu/academic-skills/learning-resources/learning-strategies/reading-techniques

Finally, remember that there is always more to learn and your dissertation cannot incorporate everything. Follow your curiosity but also set limits on the scope of your work. It helps to create a folder entitled “future projects” for topics and sources that interest you but that do not fit neatly into the dissertation. Also remember that future scholars will build off of your work, so leave something for them to do.

Browsing through theses and dissertations of the past can help to get a sense of your options and gain inspiration but be careful to use current guidelines and refer to your committee instead of relying on these examples for form or formatting.

DASH Digital Access to Scholarship at Harvard.

HOLLIS Harvard Library’s catalog provides access to ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global .

MIT Architecture has a list of their graduates’ dissertations and theses.

Rhode Island School of Design has a list of their graduates’ dissertations and theses.

University of South Florida has a list of their graduates’ dissertations and theses.

Harvard GSD has a list of projects, including theses and professors’ research.

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Self-citation occurs in an article when an author references another of their own publications. This can be a legitimate way to reference earlier findings; but self-citations can sometimes be unduly made in attempt to inflate an individual's citation count.

Occasionally you might be asked to provide an article citation count excluding self-citations, this could be simply a preference from some communities to exclude self-citations from a citation count.

The Bibliometrics Service can provide citation data with self-citations excluded for staff and students upon request. Please email the Bibliometrics Service  with details of the query. Alternatively, instructions are provided below for anyone wishes to retrieve this data using the Web of Science.

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• In the ‘Cited Author’ field, enter the name of the author of the paper you wish to receive the report for. Then narrow down the search by changing the second field from ‘Cited Work’ to ‘Cited Title’ and enter the title of the article. Alternatively, select ‘Cited DOI’ and enter the DOI of the article using the ‘Cited DOI’ field. The DOI is a string of digits, usually beginning 10.111 that can be found on the published article. Then click ‘Search’
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• Select the box next to the name of the author and any co-authors. Then click Exclude
• Click ‘Create Citation Report’ on the top right. The citation report provides some basic metrics and the cited references at the bottom of the page. Note if you export this file you will receive citation report for these citing papers, not the cited paper of your original enquiry
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Computer Science > Computation and Language

Title: direct alignment of language models via quality-aware self-refinement.

Abstract: Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) has been commonly used to align the behaviors of Large Language Models (LLMs) with human preferences. Recently, a popular alternative is Direct Policy Optimization (DPO), which replaces an LLM-based reward model with the policy itself, thus obviating the need for extra memory and training time to learn the reward model. However, DPO does not consider the relative qualities of the positive and negative responses, and can lead to sub-optimal training outcomes. To alleviate this problem, we investigate the use of intrinsic knowledge within the on-the-fly fine-tuning LLM to obtain relative qualities and help to refine the loss function. Specifically, we leverage the knowledge of the LLM to design a refinement function to estimate the quality of both the positive and negative responses. We show that the constructed refinement function can help self-refine the loss function under mild assumptions. The refinement function is integrated into DPO and its variant Identity Policy Optimization (IPO). Experiments across various evaluators indicate that they can improve the performance of the fine-tuned models over DPO and IPO.

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