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FULL TEXT We argue that misunderstandings related to plagiarism are embedded in attitudes toward another type of “plagiarism” that has rarely, if ever, been discussed in writing center research or tutoring guides–“self-plagiarism” or students’ reuse of their own previous writing for a new paper, assignment, or context. What should a tutor do, for example, if a student reveals that they have taken a portion of a paper written for an earlier class and included it as part of a new paper for a different course? We call this practice “text recycling” (TR) and have worked for several years as part of a large research group to better understand the practical, ethical, and legal issues involved when academic researchers reuse and/or repurpose their own writing. We offer a brief overview of some of our research, discuss how it might be relevant to tutoring sessions, and offer a few practical strategies for helping students make ethical decisions about recycling their previously written texts in their papers.
FULL TEXT While the ethical aspects of text recycling have received considerable attention, the legal aspects have been largely ignored or inaccurately portrayed. Copyright laws and publisher contracts are difficult to interpret and highly variable, making it difficult for authors or editors to know when text recycling in research writing is legal or illegal. We argue that publishers should revise their author contracts to make text recycling explicitly legal as long as authors follow ethics-based guidelines.
LINK FULL TEXT Experienced scientists know there is often a need to repeat some content from their papers, especially when the same methodological approach, experimental apparatus, or statistical analyses are used in related studies. Reusing material from one’s published article in a new article is one kind of text recycling. Others include reusing material from a published article in one’s dissertation, reworking a conference paper into a journal article, and translating one’s work into a different language. Given the wide variety of ways that scientists might recycle text, it isn’t surprising that they are often unsure about what is and isn’t appropriate. This essay explains common misconceptions about text recycling in scientific writing.
LINK Because science advances incrementally, scientists often need to repeat material included in their prior work when composing new texts. Such “text recycling” is a common but complex writing practice, so authors and editors need clear and consistent guidance about what constitutes appropriate practice. Unfortunately, publishers’ policies on text recycling to date have been incomplete, unclear, and sometimes internally inconsistent. Building on 4 years of research on text recycling in scientific writing, the Text Recycling Research Project has developed a model text recycling policy that should be widely applicable for research publications in scientific fields. This article lays out the challenges text recycling poses for editors and authors, describes key factors that were addressed in developing the policy, and explains the policy’s main features.
LINK FULL TEXT Like most scientists, chemists frequently have reason to reuse some materials from their own published articles in new ones, especially when producing a series of closely related papers. Text recycling, the reuse of material from one’s own works, has become a source of considerable confusion and frustration for researchers and editors alike. While text recycling does not pose the same level of ethical concern as matters such as data fabrication or plagiarism, it is much more common and complicated. Much of the confusion stems from a lack of clarity and consistency in publisher guidelines and publishing contracts. Matters are even more complicated when manuscripts are coauthored by researchers residing in different countries. This chapter demonstrates the nature of these problems through an analysis of a set of documents from a single publisher, the American Chemical Society (ACS). The ACS was chosen because it is a leading publisher of chemistry research and because its guidelines and publishing contracts address text recycling in unusual detail. The present analysis takes advantage of this detail to show both the importance of clear, thoughtfully designed text recycling policies and the problems that can arise when publishers fail to bring their various documents into close alignment.
LINK For authors seeking guidance on how to reuse their previously published material appropriately, resources are limited — and problematic.
LINK FULL-TEXT Because research in science, engineering and medical fields advances incrementally, researchers routinely write papers that build directly on their prior work. While each new research article is expected to make a novel contribution, researchers often need to repeat some material—method details, background and so on—from their previous articles, a practice called ‘text recycling’. 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. These inconsistencies make it difficult for readers to know precisely how the ideas or expectations articulated in one document relate to those of others. 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. For authors seeking guidance on how to reuse their previously published material appropriately, resources are limited — and problematic
LINK FULL-TEXT 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.
LINK FULL-TEXT When writing journal articles, STEM researchers produce a number of other genres such as grant proposals and conference posters, and their articles routinely build directly on their own prior work. As a result, STEM authors often reuse material from their completed documents in producing new documents. While this practice, known as text recycling (or self-plagiarism), is a debated issue in publishing and research ethics, little is known about researchers’ beliefs about what constitutes appropriate practice. This article presents results from an exploratory, survey-based study on beliefs and attitudes toward text recycling among STEM “experts” (faculty researchers) and “novices” (graduate students and postdocs). While expert and novice researchers are fairly consistent in distinguishing between text recycling and plagiarism, there is considerable disagreement about appropriate text recycling practice.
LINK FULL-TEXT Text recycling involves the verbatim reuse of text from one’s own existing documents in a newly-created text— such as the duplication of a paragraph or section from a published article in a new article. Although plagiarism is widely eschewed across academia and the publishing industry, the ethics of text recycling are not agreed upon and are currently being vigorously debated. In this article, we first describe and illustrate text recycling in the context of academic writing. We then explain and document several themes that emerged from interviews with publishers of peer-reviewed academic journals. These themes demonstrate the vexed and unsettle nature of text recycling as a discursive phenomenon in academic writing and publishing. In doing so, we focus on the complex relationships between personal (role-based) and social (norm-based) aspects of scientific publication, complicating conventional models of the writing process that have inadequately accounted for authorial decisions about accuracy, efficiency, self-representation, adherence to existing or imagined rules and norms, perceptions of ownership and copyright, and fears of impropriety.
FULL-TEXT Text recycling—the reuse of one’s own textual materials from one document in a new document—is a common but hotly debated and unsettled practice in many academic disciplines, especially in the context of peer-reviewed journal articles. Although several analytic systems have been used to determine replication of text—for example, for purposes of identifying plagiarism—they do not offer an optimal way to compare documents to determine the nature and extent of text recycling in order to study and theorize this as a practice in different disciplines. In this article, we first describe text recycling as a common phenomenon in academic publishing, then explore the challenges associated with trying to study the nature and extent of text recycling within STEM disciplines. We then describe in detail the complex processes we used to create a system for identifying text recycling across large corpora of texts, and the methods used to refine and test the system.
LINK FULL-TEXT While growing numbers of publishers are writing editorials and formulating guidelines on text recycling, little is known about how editors view the practice or how they respond to it. We present results from an interview-based study of 21 journal editors from a broad range of academic disciplines. Our findings show that editors’ beliefs and practices are quite individualized, rather than being tied to disciplinary or other structural parameters. While none of our participants supported the use of large amounts of recycled material from one journal article to another, some editors were staunchly against any use of recycled material, while others were accepting of the practice in certain circumstances. Issues of originality, the challenges of rewriting text, the varied circulation of texts, and abiding by copyright law were prominent themes as editors discussed their approaches to text recycling. Overall, the interviews showed that many editors have not thought systematically about the practice of text recycling, and they sometimes have trouble aligning their beliefs and practices. Many journals are not yet handling the issue in a consistent, transparent way.
LINK FULL-TEXT Text recycling, often called “self-plagiarism”, is the practice of reusing textual material from one’s prior documents in a new work. The practice presents a complex set of ethical and practical challenges to the scientific community, many of which have not been addressed in prior discourse on the subject. This essay identifies and discusses these factors in a systematic fashion, concluding with a new definition of text recycling that takes these factors into account. Topics include terminology, what is not text recycling, factors affecting judgements about the appropriateness of text recycling, and visual materials.
LINK FULL -TEXT This article presents results on beliefs and attitudes toward text recycling from a survey of over 300 journal editors and editorial board members from 86 top English-language journals in 16 different academic fields regarding text recycling in scholarly articles. Responses indicate that a large majority of academic gatekeepers believe text recycling is allowable in some circumstances; however, there is a lack of clear consensus about when text recycling is or is not appropriate. Opinions varied according to the source of the recycled material, its structural location and rhetorical purpose, and conditions of authorship conditions—as well as by the level of experience as a journal editor. Our study suggests the need for further research on text recycling utilizing focus groups and interviews.
LINK FULL-TEXT The past few years have seen a steady rise in the number of health science journals using plagiarism detection software to screen submitted manuscripts. While there is widespread agreement about the need to guard against plagiarism and duplicate publication, the use of such tools has sparked debate about text recycling—the reuse of material from one’s prior publications in a new manuscript. Many who have published on the topic consider all uses of text recycling anathema. Others argue that some uses of recycling are unavoidable and sometimes even beneficial for readers. Unfortunately, much of this discourse now merely repeats dogmatic assertions. I argue that progress can be made by acknowledging three points: First, citation standards for research writing in the health sciences will not mirror those of the humanities. Second, while it is impossible to draw a definitive line between appropriate and inappropriate uses of text recycling, some uses of the practice lie clearly on the legitimate side. Third, the needs of editors for information regarding recycled text are different from those of readers. Ultimately, calls for rewording and citation as alternatives or fixes for text recycling are unlikely to prove satisfactory to either readers or editors.
LINK FULL-TEXT Academicians generally consider it unethical to reuse text from published work without explicit attribution. However, in practice, the conventions and ethics associated with reusing text vary considerably across academic domains and genres. Although it may be anathema in the humanities, certain types of reuse are both common and acceptable in contemporary scientific discourse. The boundaries of acceptable practice are complex, however, so there is a strong temptation to ignore the topic in edu- cational settings. Because the fallout from innocent errors can be damaging, scientists must assume responsibility for determining what constitutes acceptable reuse in their domain and for instructing future scientists in these practices.
