Home » 2021 » February

Monthly Archives: February 2021

New taxonomy for text recycling published in Learned Publishing

Cary Moskovitz published “Standardizing terminology for text recycling in research writing” in  Learned Publishing. 

While increasing awareness of text recycling has led to the proliferation of policies, journal editorials, and scholarly articles addressing the practice, these documents tend to employ inconsistent terminology—using different terms to name the same key ideas and, even more problematic, using the same terms with different meanings.  This paper first clarifies the problems with current terminology, showing how key terms are used inconsistently across publisher policies for authors, guidelines for editors, and textbooks on research ethics. It then offers a new taxonomy of text‐recycling practices with terms designed to align with the acceptability of these practices in common research writing and publishing contexts. You can read the article here:  FULL-TEXT.

New publication in Accountability in Research

Ian Anson and Cary Moskovitz have published “Text recycling in STEM: A text-analytic study of recent NSF-sponsored research reports” in Accountability in Research.  
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. 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.

Read it here:  FULL-TEXT