Text recycling in STEM: A text-analytic study of recently published research articles.
Abstract
Text recycling, sometimes called "self-plagiarism," is the reuse of material from
one's own existing documents in a newly created work. Over the past decade, text recycling
has become an increasingly debated practice in research ethics, especially in science
and technology fields. Little is known, however, about researchers' actual text recycling
practices. We report here on a computational analysis of text recycling in published
research articles in STEM disciplines. Using a tool we created in R, we analyze a
corpus of 400 published articles from 80 federally funded research projects across
eight disciplinary clusters. According to our analysis, STEM research groups frequently
recycle some material from their previously published articles. On average, papers
in our corpus contained about three recycled sentences per article, though a minority
of research teams (around 15%) recycled substantially more content. These findings
were generally consistent across STEM disciplines. We also find evidence that researchers
superficially alter recycled prose much more often than recycling it verbatim. Based
on our findings, which suggest that recycling some amount of material is normative
in STEM research writing, researchers and editors would benefit from more appropriate
and explicit guidance about what constitutes legitimate practice and how authors should
report the presence of recycled material.
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Journal articlePermalink
https://hdl.handle.net/10161/21783Published Version (Please cite this version)
10.1080/08989621.2020.1850284Publication Info
Anson, Ian G; & Moskovitz, Cary (2020). Text recycling in STEM: A text-analytic study of recently published research articles.
Accountability in research. pp. 1-23. 10.1080/08989621.2020.1850284. Retrieved from https://hdl.handle.net/10161/21783.This is constructed from limited available data and may be imprecise. To cite this
article, please review & use the official citation provided by the journal.
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Show full item recordScholars@Duke
Cary Moskovitz
Professor of the Practice in the Thompson Writing Program
Cary Moskovitz is Director of Writing in the Disciplines in the Thompson Writing Program.
He also directs the Duke Reader Project and the Text Recycling Research Project.

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