Attitudes towards self-plagiarism I am planning to write several papers exploring various aspects of the same scientific question. Each of these papers must have an introduction which motivates it and explains the relationship between the problem and what others have studied in the past.
It would be fantastic if I could simply copy-and-paste the same introduction, or, at least, 90% of it.  This seems to me to be ethically unproblematic. After all, I need to say the exact same things every time, and I certainly don't mind the self-plagiarism. Am I hurting the reader in any way? I suppose I might be, if the reader desired an introduction which consists of original material, but that is an odd desire, isn't it? Its the research, the stuff that follows the intro, that is original.
Sadly, I have gotten wind that the majority of the research community apparently does not agree with the sentiments expressed in the previous paragraph. This leads me here to ask a series of related questions:

To what extent is self-plagiarism in non-technical bits considered acceptable? I often see authors recycle paragraphs but I have never seen anyone cut-and-paste the entire section outright.
I'd be particularly interested in learning whether norms on this vary across different scientific communities.

How often do scholars find themselves trying to same the same thing in different words to avoid self-plagiarism?

Supposing I insert a sentence to the effect of: &quot;The introductory section 1.2 is taken verbatim from the author's earlier paper [1].&quot; How likely are journal editors and reviewers to complain about this?


By the way, I am fairly certain they would be very likely to complain about a sentence to the effect of &quot;We refer the reader to [1] for motivation to study this problem and a discussion of its relation to prior work.&quot;
Firstly, quoting any work, including your own, without explicit attribution of the quote, is going to earn you a very bad reputation for plagiarism sooner or later. Just say no.

Secondly, and to state the obvious, the introduction is there to introduce the rest of the paper. As each paper will be unique, so should the introduction be: the point is to lead the user into the paper, rather than to give a grounding in the whole subject area.

Thirdly, why not wrap up all of the things you want to say in all of the papers' introductions, into a single review paper?  It would contain all of the literature review, motivations, unsolved problems, areas for future research, that you want to reference in your other papers. And then, those other papers can just briefly &amp; concisely properly reference and quote the relevant bits of that review paper in their introduction. It won't be as brief as "for review and motivation, see my paper DOI:ABC.DEF.GHI", but you should be able to distil the review paper down to a paragraph or two for each subsequent paper, and those words will be unique for each subsequent paper, drawing only on the elements you need for that paper.