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— First text analytics results to be presented at 8th International Conference on Writing Analytics

Three members of the TRRP will share our first findings on STEM researchers actual recycling practices in a talk titled “Text Recycling in STEM Disciplines: Results from a Text Analytic Study” at the 8th International Conference on Writing Analytics, 5-6 September 2019, Winterthur, Switzerland. Here is the abstract:

Text recycling (TR), sometimes called “self-plagiarism”, is the reuse of text verbatim from one’s own existing documents in a newly- created text. In a (US) federally-funded grant, we have been studying TR patterns using several methodologies. In one strand of  this research, we have created a tool in R to analyze large corpora of published articles to determine the extent of TR occurrence. In this presentation, we briefly describe the goals of the project and the analytic system we have developed. We then share the results of an analysis of 400 published papers associated with eight disciplines. Results show the frequency of TR across disciplines in articles generated from the same grants. These results demonstrate that substantial variation exists in text recycling practices across disciplines and individual authors. We conclude by speculating about the causes of these patterns, especially as they have evolved over time.