Text recycling in STEM: A text-analytic study of recently published research articles
Text recycling in STEM: A text-analytic study of recently published research articles
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DOI：
10.1080/08989621.2020.1850284
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发表时间：
2020-11-27
期刊：
影响因子：
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通讯作者：
Moskovitz, Cary
中科院分区：
文献类型：
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作者：
Anson, Ian G.;Moskovitz, Cary
文本回收，有时被称为“自我剽窃”，是在新创作的作品中重新使用自己现有文档中的材料。在过去的十年中，文本回收已经成为研究伦理学中越来越多的争论，特别是在科学和技术领域。然而，人们对研究人员实际的文本回收实践知之甚少。我们在这里报告在STEM学科发表的研究文章中的文本回收的计算分析。使用我们在R中创建的工具，我们分析了来自8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研究小组经常从他们以前发表的文章中回收一些材料。平均而言，我们语料库中的论文每篇文章包含大约三个回收的句子，尽管少数研究团队（约15%）回收了更多的内容。这些发现在STEM学科中基本一致。我们还发现证据表明，研究人员表面上改变回收散文更经常比逐字回收。根据我们的研究结果，这表明回收一定数量的材料在STEM研究写作中是规范的，研究人员和编辑将受益于更适当和明确的指导，关于什么是合法的做法，以及作者应该如何报告回收材料的存在。
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.