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When writing journal articles, science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) researchers produce a number of other genres such as grant proposals and conference posters, and their new 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 of from an exploratory, survey-based study on beliefs and attitudes toward text recycling among STEM “experts” (faculty researchers) and “novices” (graduate students and post docs). While expert and novice researchers are fairly consistent in distinguishing between text recycling and plagiarism, there is considerable disagreement about appropriate text recycling practice.
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Standardizing terminology for text recycling in research writing
Abstract 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.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1737093
- PAR ID:
- 10450981
- Publisher / Repository:
- Wiley Blackwell (John Wiley & Sons)
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Learned Publishing
- Volume:
- 34
- Issue:
- 3
- ISSN:
- 0953-1513
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- p. 370-378
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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