The Similarity Report That Flags Your Own Thesis — And Why That's Not a False Alarm
A researcher at KSU once forwarded me a similarity report showing 34% overlap on a paper she'd just submitted. She was confused, almost offended, she hadn't copied anyone. Then we traced the matches. Every flagged sentence came from her own PhD thesis, the same thesis her university had already published in its institutional repository months earlier. She'd assumed reusing her own words...