Anson Ian G, Moskovitz Cary
Department of Political Science, University of Maryland Baltimore County, Baltimore, MD, USA.
Thompson Writing Program, Duke University, Durham, NC, USA.
Account Res. 2021 Aug;28(6):349-371. doi: 10.1080/08989621.2020.1850284. Epub 2020 Nov 24.
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.
文本复用，有时也被称为“自我抄袭”，是指在新创作的作品中重复使用自己现有文档中的材料。在过去十年中，文本复用在研究伦理领域，尤其是在科学技术领域，已成为一个备受争议的行为。然而，对于研究人员实际的文本复用行为却知之甚少。我们在此报告对STEM学科已发表研究文章中的文本复用情况进行的计算分析。我们使用在R语言中创建的一个工具，分析了来自八个学科集群的80个联邦资助研究项目的400篇已发表文章的语料库。根据我们的分析，STEM研究团队经常从他们之前发表的文章中复用一些材料。我们语料库中的论文平均每篇包含约三个复用句子，不过少数研究团队（约15%）复用的内容要多得多。这些发现在STEM各学科中总体上是一致的。我们还发现有证据表明，研究人员对复用的文字进行表面修改的情况比逐字复用更为常见。基于我们的研究结果，即表明在STEM研究写作中复用一定量的材料是常态，研究人员和编辑将受益于关于什么构成合法行为以及作者应如何报告复用材料存在情况的更恰当、明确的指导。
