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Article published In: Linguistic Recycling: The process of quoting in increasingly mediatized settings
Edited by Lauri Haapanen and Daniel Perrin
[AILA Review 33] 2020
► pp. 120–135

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Reuse in STEM research writing

Rhetorical and practical considerations and challenges

 | North Carolina State University
 | California Institute of Technology
 | Georgia Southern University
 | Duke University
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Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial (CC BY-NC) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at rights@benjamins.nl.

Published online: 7 October 2020
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https://doi.org/10.1075/aila.00033.ans
Abstract
Text recycling (hereafter TR), sometimes problematically called “self-plagiarism,” 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 TR are not agreed upon and are currently being vigorously debated. As part of a federally funded (US) National Science Foundation grant, we have been studying TR patterns using several methodologies, including interviews with editors about TR values and practices (Pemberton, M., Hall, S., Moskovitz, C., & Anson, C. M. (2019). Journal editors’ views on text recycling: An interview-based study. Learned Publishing, 32(4), 355–366. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar) and digitally mediated text-analytic processes to determine the extent of TR in academic publications in the biological sciences, engineering, mathematical and physical sciences, and social, behavioral, and economic sciences (Anson, I. G., Moskovitz, C., & Anson, C. M. (2019). A text-analytic method for identifying text recycling in STEM research reports. Journal of Writing Analytics, 31, 125–150. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar). In this article, we first describe and illustrate TR 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 unsettled nature of TR 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.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.The repetitive nature of STEM writing
  • 3.To recycle or not to recycle
    • 3.1Professional integrity
    • 3.2Efficiency
    • 3.3Nature of the recycled material
    • 3.4Copyright
  • 4.Challenges of composing texts in STEM fields – with and without TR
  • 5.Composing STEM articles with TR
    • 5.1Citation
    • 5.2Notes or other annotations for readers
  • 6.Composing STEM articles that avoid TR
    • 6.1Rewording and patchwriting
    • 6.2Omit and point back to previous work
    • 6.3Consult the guidelines
  • 7.Discussion and conclusions
  • Notes
  • References
References (19)
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Cited by (2)

Cited by two other publications

Moskovitz, Cary, Susanne Hall & Michael Pemberton
2023. Common Misconceptions about Text Recycling in Scientific Writing. BioScience 73:1 ► pp. 6 ff. DOI logo
Kharasch, Evan D., Michael J. Avram, Brian T. Bateman, J. David Clark, Deborah J. Culley, Andrew J. Davidson, Timothy T. Houle, Yandong Jiang, Jerrold H. Levy, Martin J. London, Jamie W. Sleigh & Laszlo Vutskits
2021. Authorship and Publication Matters: Credit and Credibility. Anesthesiology 135:1 ► pp. 1 ff. DOI logo

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