Writing
Avoiding the Republication of the Same Article
We writers love to send our work around the globe and place it on the publishing map. In the blogosphere, it happens sometimes that the same article tries to land on a spot only to discover it already occupied by none else but itself.
A few weeks ago, I received an article on a health topic. It was pretty well-written piece and I accepted it at once for our Health category on Recovering the Self site. I formatted the article and posted it. Immediately after hitting the Publish button, looking at the URL of the post, it dawned on me that this was not the first time this same article was posted here. I discovered that it had been sent to me some five months earlier and I had posted it then. So why on earth this waste of time and effort in duplicating a post – something you don’t want as an editor of any site?
It’s essentially a question of memory, or a question about our memory – actually both. The writer sending me the article certainly didn’t remember that she had sent it my way and I can’t claim to have a memory powerhouse that can keep track of every piece approved and published. So what do we do to save ourselves from our memories?
The primary responsibility, in my humble opinion, rests with the writers. They can easily create a folder where they place the title of every article that was sent and published along with the name, date and URL of the publication. Arranging the titles alphabetically can help further with finding out with a quick look whether the same article they are about to send someone was already published.
On the editor’s end, the URL of a post shows whether it has been posted on the site before. But to save us the time and energy spent in posting, just running a search for the title or author of the article using the search tool on the site can reveal the status of the post in question. Alternatively, just searching your email for correspondence from the same article’s author may help catch the piece before it leaps at the spot already occupied by itself.
