Unpublished Thesis by Publication flagged as plagiarism by a journal editor. What to do?
After submitting a manuscript, the editor flagged a large portion as self-plagiarism. Turns out the journal uses TurnItIn and it scraped my alma mater's thesis repo.
Thing is, in Australia it's really common to do a thesis by compilation which contains a series of manuscripts intended for submission - my thesis is online, but my old uni says it's not considered published so I shouldn't need to cite it and that it's not plagiarism.
I've already reached out to the editor and explained the format and intention of the thesis, (this has happened before and other editors have understood this process), but I'm anticipating the worse. My options could be:
- Have the editor understand and move the manuscript on for review.
- Completely rewrite the article.
- Redact that chapter of my thesis, so it's technically not available (even though it's not published) - with this option, I'm worried TurnItIn will retain the old version, and even if the chapter is not available, it'll still falsely flag as plagiarised.
Anyone else run into this situation? Did you have to rewrite? Is redacting a suitable solution?