Text recycling in STEM: A text-analytic study of recently published research articles

Standardizing terminology for text recycling in research writing

“…A few additional clarifications are in order. First, research from the TRRP has shown that, while researchers in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) fields often recycle sentences verbatim, they frequently alter the material (Anson & Moskovitz, 2020). The line between altered text recycling and true paraphrase is not easily drawn.…”

“…But what constitutes ‘one's own’ is not a simple matter in many research fields. An analysis of author overlap in pairs of publications from research groups showed that less than 7% had identical authors (Anson & Moskovitz, 2020). Text‐recycling policies that address only instances with identical authorship of source and destination documents are thus of limited value.…”

“…Whereas a translation involves the wholesale recycling of an entire paper, it is much more common for researchers to recycle small portions of their prior work. In an analysis of 400 STEM published research reports produced under 80 U.S. National Science Foundation grants (Anson & Moskovitz, 2020), the majority of articles contained some amount of material recycled from the research group's prior publications, but most of these contained only a few recycled sentences, and few contained more than 20. When researchers recycle material from a published research article to a new paper that presents novel findings, the acceptability of the act depends on factors such as the amount of material, the nature of that material (e.g., description of a statistical test vs. presentation of results) and so on.…”

Text Recycling And Salami Slicing

“…However, as the researchers in the Text Recycling Research Project point out, in the United States copyright infringement is not necessarily a likely outcome of reusing a few sentences of your own words due to "fair use" standards (Text Recycling Research Project, 2021). Members of the Text Recycling Research Project did a study of over 400 articles to see how much text recycling was occurring and found that in general, authors only reused on average three sentences and this was most likely to be seen in the Methods section of a paper (Anson & Moskovitz, 2020).…”

STEREO: Scientific Text Reuse in Open Access Publications

“…In quantitative research, the use of templates as an efficient way of reporting new results on otherwise standardized workflows is common 2 . As science often progresses incrementally, authors may also reuse their texts across (different types of) subsequent publications on the same subject (also called "text recycling") [2][3][4] . Likewise, in interdisciplinary research, reuse across publications at venues of different disciplines has been observed to promote the dissemination of new insights 5,6 .…”