Attitudes toward text recycling in academic writing across disciplines

ABSTRACT

Text recycling, the reuse of material from one’s own previously published writing in a new text without attribution, is a common academic writing practice that is not yet well understood. While some studies of text recycling in academic writing have been published, no previous study has focused on scholars’ attitudes toward text recycling. This article presents results 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.

KEYWORDS:

• Academic honesty
• academic publishing
• academic writing
• research ethics
• self-plagiarism
• text reuse
• writing in the disciplines

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to gratefully acknowledge the contributions of Steven Jefferson, TuanDat Nguyen, and Tasha Thomas to the production of this article. This work is part of ongoing research now funded by the National Science Foundation. Further research on this project is funded under the NSF Cultivating Cultures for Ethical STEM program (CCE STEM: NSF15528).

Notes

1. In recent years, research has continued its investigations into the “crisis” of student plagiarism, focusing on such topics as the frequency with which undergraduate and graduate students plagiarize (Brown, 1995; Flowerdew and Li, 2007; Park, 2003), the impact of online technologies (Flowerdew and Li, 2007; Scanlon, 2003), the reasons why students choose to plagiarize (Chen and Chou, 2017; Childers & Bruton, 2016; Granitz & Loewy, 2007; Sutherland-Smith, 2005), and the degree to which different cultural codes and social constructions of textual ownership influence plagiarism behaviors (Chien, 2014; Heckler & Forde, 2015; Wheeler, 2014).

2. While the term “self-plagiarism” is widely used, we prefer the ethically neutral term “text recycling.” Cary Moskovitz describes the essential problem with the term “self-plagiarism” in this way: “Self-plagiarism is increasingly used as a label for [textual] reuse; however, that term is problematic for two reasons: It labels as deviant all occasions of a practice that is often legitimate, and it excludes common examples of replication that do not involve reusing one’s own material” (Moskovitz 2016, p. 5).

3. In some fields, such as biomedical studies, text recycling, redundant publication, and “salami slicing” (when researchers publish their results as many small individual papers rather than as a single comprehensive study) have become so pervasive that many editors, journals, and professional organizations have condemned all such practices as unethical (see, for example, the Office of Research Integrity’s statement about “Self-Plagiarism” [2017] and BioMed Central’s editorial guidelines for text recycling [2017]).

4. “Journal editors should consider publishing a retraction article when: There is significant overlap in the text, generally excluding methods, with sections that are identical or near identical to a previous publication by the same author(s)” (https://publicationethics.org/text-recycling-guidelines).

5. A 2015 article by Aad et al. (2015) about the Large Hadron Collider in Physical Review Letters, in fact, credited 5,154 co-authors. This practice is sometimes referred to as “hyperauthorship.”

6. We only included journals for which all published articles contain an English-language version. This eliminated two multi-lingual international journals in the field of classics. We made this choice in order to eliminate the variable of language from our study and to avoid sending the survey to someone whose work on a journal is primarily or exclusively on submissions in a language other than English. We did include journals based outside of Anglophone countries when the journal was published entirely in English.

7. NANO Letters was classified as a top journal in both chemistry and physics.

8. All quotations in this section from survey respondents are reproduced exactly, preserving mistakes, inaccuracies, and irregularities in grammar, spelling, and syntax.