Abstract
Text recycling, often called “self-plagiarism”, is the practice of reusing textual material from one’s prior documents in a new work. The practice presents a complex set of ethical and practical challenges to the scientific community, many of which have not been addressed in prior discourse on the subject. This essay identifies and discusses these factors in a systematic fashion, concluding with a new definition of text recycling that takes these factors into account. Topics include terminology, what is not text recycling, factors affecting judgements about the appropriateness of text recycling, and visual materials.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Change history
11 June 2018
The correct legends of figures 1, 2, 5, 12, 13 and 14 read.
Notes
Even within the art world, however, scholars have wrestled with the issue of self-plagiarism. As early as 1984—well before concerns about text recycling were widespread in the sciences—philosopher David Goldblatt published, “Self-Plagiarism,” an essay that asks whether new works by an established artist that closely follow the artists established style without adding new artistic ideas can legitimately be called works of art (Goldblatt 1984). “Self-plagiarism,” writes Goldblatt, “occurs when the artist takes from the aesthetically significant features of his/her previous work, and presents them under the false assumption that they are creatively original and that aesthetic progress has been made, while the successful self-plagiarism is received, discussed and evaluated by artworld members as if it were.” The artistic sensibilities of repurposing from others as contrasted with recycling one’s own material may best be understood by these words of Picasso: “We must pick out what is good for us where we can find it- except from our own works. I have a horror of copying myself.” (Goldblatt 1984, p. 71).
This type of artistic recontextualization is distinctly different from that described by Yongyan Li in ‘Standing on the Shoulders of Giants’: Recontextualization in Writing from Sources (2015). Li uses the term to describe how an experienced scientist reframes citations from reference lists of other authors to fit his or her own work.
These examples also show that judgments about some factors cannot be readily decoupled from others.
Jason Borenstein and Adil Shamoo have given a useful overview of issues related to the growing number of authors per paper (Borenstein and Shamoo 2015).
From a legal/copyright perspective, all authors listed on a publication have equal rights [Deborah Parrish, personal communication]. But the ethics and expectations for text recycling are not the same as copyright law.
While the number of authors used in the cases discussed here—two or three per text—is useful in conceptualizing the various potential concerns, it does have one important limitation: some approaches to addressing multiple-author concerns may be viable for such numbers but unworkable at a larger scale. But should our thinking about these cases be the same for a three-authored paper as for one with one hundred authors? For example, expecting formal permission from Author C in Case 2 is not inherently problematic; but would we also expect such permissions if 20 out of 100 authors of the source paper were not authors of the follow-up paper?
While not as common as for graduate students, undergraduate students and programs may face the same concerns. See, for example, Moskovitz (2015).
An additional paper on text recycling (Horbach and Halffman 2017) was published as the present article was undergoing revision. This paper is limited, in this author’s view, in its approach to text recycling as inherently problematic, framing the practice as “academic misconduct” and “a new way to game the reward system of science” rather than as a neutral practice that can be used either properly or improperly. Nevertheless, it is a valuable contribution to the limited scholarship to date.
References
Aad, G., et al. (2015). ATLAS collaboration, CMS collaboration. Physical Review Letters, 114, 191803.
Academic Stack Exchange. (2014, June 24). Re-using text from a grant proposal in a paper (or vice versa). Academic Stack Exchange. https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/24009/re-using-text-from-a-grant-proposal-in-a-paper-or-viceversa. Retrieved 10 Feb 2017.
Academic Stack Exchange. (2016a, Nov 28). Is submitting papers based on classwork papers self-plagiarism? Academic Stack Exchange. https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/80592/is-submitting-papers-based-on-classwork-papers-self-plagiarism/80605#80605. Retrieved 15 Mar, 2017.
Academic Stack Exchange. (2016b, July 22). Is it a self plagiarism to reuse a section of my previous paper in a new paper? Academic Stack Exchange. http://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/73162/is-it-a-self-plagiarism-to-reuse-a-section-of-my-previous-paper-in-a-new-paper. Retrieved 10 Feb 2017.
American Psychological Association. (2010). Publication manual of the American Psychological Association (6th ed.). Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.
Andreescu, L. (2013). Self-plagiarism in academic publishing: The anatomy of a misnomer. Science and Engineering Ethics, 19(3), 775–797.
Association for Computing Machinery. (2010, July). ACM policy and procedures on plagiarism. (A. f. Machinery, Producer) Retrieved from http://www.acm.org/publications/policies/plagiarism#_ftn2.
Association of Bone and Joint Surgeons. (2017). Guidelines for authors. Clinical Orthopaedics and Related Research. http://www.clinorthop.org/uploads/1496338933954-General%20Author%20Guidelines%2005-2017.docx. Retrieved 9 Sept 2017.
Barabas, M.-E. (2016, August 24). Text recycling: Don’t be trashy–defining the line. (N. Microgravity, Producer, & Macmillan Publishers Limited: Springer Nature). npj microgravity community. https://npjmicrogravitycommunity.nature.com/users/13856-marie-elizabeth-barabas/posts/11507-text-recycling-don-t-be-trashy-defining-the-line. Retrieved 3 May 2017.
BioMed Central. (2013). How to deal with text recycling. http://media.biomedcentral.com/content/editorial/BMC-text-recycling-editorial_guidelines.pdf. Retrieved 17 Dec 2016.
Bird, S. J. (2002). Self-plagiarism and dual and redundant publications: What is the problem? Science and Engineering Ethics, 8(4), 543–544. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11948-002-0007-4. Accessed 12 Sept 2017
Bird, S. B., & Sivilotti, M. L. (2008). Self-plagiarism, recycling fraud, and the intent to mislead. Journal of Medical Toxicology, 1(2), 69–70.
Borenstein, J., & Shamoo, A. E. (2015). Rethinking authorship in the era of collaborative research. Accountability in Research, 22(5), 267–283.
Bouville, M. (2008). Plagiarism: Words and ideas. Science and Engineering Ethics, 14(3), 311–322.
Bretag, T. & Mahmud, S. (2009). Self-plagiarism or appropriate textual re-use? Journal of Academic Ethics, 7(3), 193–205.
Bretag, T., & Carapiet, S. (2007). A preliminary study to determine the extent of self-plagiarism in Australian academic research. Plagiary: Cross-Disciplinary Studies in Plagiarism, Fabrication, and Falsification, 2, 1–15.
Bruton, S. V. (2014). Self-plagiarism and textual recycling: Legitimate forms of research misconduct. Accountability in Research, 21(3), 176–197.
Carver, J., Dellva, B., Emmanuel, P., & Parchure, R. (2011). Ethical considerations in scientific writing. Indian Journal of Sexually Transmitted Diseases, 32(2), 124.
Chandrasoma, R., Thompson, C., & Pennycook, A. (2004). Beyond plagiarism: Transgressive and nontransgressive intertextuality. Journal of Language, Identity & Educatio, 3(3), 171–193.
Dance, A. (2012). Authorship: Who’s on first? Nature, 489(7417), 591–593.
Gneezy, A., Gneezy, U., Nelson, U., & Brown, A. (2010). Shared social responsibility: A field experiment in pay-what-you-want pricing and charitable giving. Science, 329, 325–327.
Gneezy, A., Gneezy, U., Riener, G., & Nelson, L. (2012). Pay-what-you-want, identity, and self-signaling in markets. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 109, 7236–7240.
Goldblatt, D. (1984). Self-plagiarism. The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 43(1), 71–77.
Goldsmith, K. (2013, July 23). Being dumb. The Awl. https://www.theawl.com/2013/07/being-dumb/. Retrieved 9 Sept 2017.
Guriel, J. (2015, March 25). A poet turned Michael Brown’s autopsy report into click-bait as performance art. New Republic, Mar 25, 2015. https://newrepublic.com/article/121364/how-should-we-think-about-kenneth-goldsmiths-poetic-remixes. Retrieved 10 Aug 2017.
Halupa, C. (2014). Exploring student self-plagiarism. International Journal of Higher Education, 3(1), 121–126.
Halupa, C., & Bolliger, D. U. (2013). Faculty perceptions of student self plagiarism: An exploratory multi-university study. Journal of Academic Ethics, 11(4), 297–310.
Halupa, C., & Bolliger, D. U. (2015). Student perceptions of self-plagiarism: A multi-university exploratory study. Journal of Academic Ethics, 13(1), 91–105.
Han, X. (2015, November 30). When you’re writing two or more papers using the same dataset, how do you go about writing the methods section. Academic Stack Exchange. https://www.researchgate.net/post/When_youre_writing_two_or_more_papers_using_the_same_dataset_how_do_you_go_about_writing_the_methods_section. Retrieved 17 Dec 2016.
Harris, K. M. (2007). Design features of Add Health. Retrieved from http://www.asanet.org/research-and-publications/journals/social-psychology-quarterly/social-psychology-quarterly-add-health.
Haviland, C. P., & Mullin, J. (2009). Who owns this text? Plagiarism, authorship, and disciplinary cultures. Logan, UT: Utah State UP.
Higgins, J. R., Lin, F. C., & Evans, J. P. (2016). Plagiarism in submitted manuscripts: Incidence, characteristics and optimization of screening—Case study in a major specialty medical journal. Research Integrity and Peer Review, 1, 13.
Horbach, S. S., & Halffman, W. (2017). The extent and causes of academic text recycling or ‘self-plagiarism’. Research Policy. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.respol.2017.09.004.
Howard, R. M. (1995, November). Plagiarisms, authorships, and the academic death penalty. College English, 57(7), 708–736.
Howard, R. M. (2000). The ethics of plagiarism. In M. A. Pemberton (Ed.), The ethics of writing instruction: Issues in theory and practice (pp. 79–89). Stamford, CT: Ablex.
IEEE. (2017). Proceedings of the IEEE. Retrieved from http://proceedingsoftheieee.ieee.org/.
Imperial College London. (n.d.). Plagiarism detection by publishers. Retrieved from Imperial College London: Library Services. https://www.imperial.ac.uk/media/imperial-college/administration-and-support-services/library/public/Plagiarism-detection-by-publishers.pdf.
Ithenticate. (2011). The ethics of self plagiarism.. https://www.ithenticate.com/hs-fs/hub/92785/file-5414624-pdf/media/ith-selfplagiarism-whitepaper.pdf. Retrieved 28 April 2017.
Journal of the Electrochemical Society. (2011, September). Instructions to authors. Retrieved from Journal of the Electrochemical Society. http://www.electrochem.org/dl/support/assets/jes_inst.pdf.
Kravitz, R., & Feldman, M. (2011). From the editors’ desk: Self-plagiarism and other editorial crimes and misdemeanors. Journal of General Internal Medicine, 26(1), 1.
Li, Y. (2015). ‘Standing on the Shoulders of Giants’: Recontextualization in writing from sources. Science and Engineering Ethics, 21, 1297–1314.
Lyon, A. (2009). “You Fail”: Plagiarism, the ownership of writing, and transnational conflicts. College Composition and Communication, 61(2), 222–239.
Lowe, N. K. (2003). Editorial: Publication ethics: Copyright and self-plagiarism. Journal of Obstetric, Gynecologic, and Neonatal Nursing, 32, 145–146.
Marymount University. (2016). Marymount University community standards division of student affairs. Retrieved from http://my.marymount.edu/my.marymount.edu/media/Offices-and-Resources/Planning%20and%20Institutional%20Effectiveness/2016-2017-Community-Standards.pdf.
Mayo Clinic. (2017). Mayo clinic proceedings. Retrieved from Elsevier. www.journals.elsevier.com/mayo-clinic-proceedings.
Moskovitz, C. (2015, December 25). Plagiarism or text recycling? It depends on the context. Retrieved from https://blog.oup.com/2015/12/plagiarism-text-recycling/.
Moskovitz, C. (2017). Text recycling in health sciences research literature: A rhetorical perspective. Research Integrity and Peer Review, 2(1), 1.
Office of Research Integrity. (2015). Self plagiarism (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services). Office of Research Integrity. https://ori.hhs.gov/plagiarism-13. Retrieved 28 April 2017.
Parker, C., Amsden, J., Peng, Q., Stoner, B., & Glass, J. (2015). Achieving excellence in graduate research: A guide for new graduate students. Advanced Science, 2(10), 1500203. https://doi.org/10.1002/advs.201500203.
Petersen, A. M., Pavlidis, I., & Semendeferi, I. (2014). A quantitative perspective on ethics in large team science. Science and Engineering Ethics, 20, 923–945.
Raut A., Cunningham, G., Parker, C., Klem, E., Stoner B., Deshusses, M., & Glass, J. (2013). Electrochemical disinfection of human urine for water-free and additive-free toilets using boron-doped diamond electrodes. ECS Transactions, 53(17), 1–11.
Raut, A., Cunningham, G., Parker, C., Klem, E., Stoner, B., Deshusses, M., & Glass, J. (2014). Disinfection of E. coli contaminated urine using boron-doped diamond electrodes. Journal of the Electrochemical Society, 161(12), G81–G85.
Robinson, S. R. (2014). Self-plagiarism and unfortunate publication: An essay on academic values. Studies in Higher Education, 39(2), 265–277. https://doi.org/10.1080/03075079.2012.655721.
Roig, M. (2006). Avoiding plagiarism, self-plagiarism, and other questionable writing practices: A guide to ethical writing. Retrieved from The Office of Research Integrity. https://ori.hhs.gov/images/ddblock/plagiarism.pdf.
RTS,S Clinical Trials Partnership. (2011). First results of phase 3 trial of RTS, S/AS01 malaria vaccine in African Children. New England Journal of Medicine, 365(20), 1863–1875.
RTS,S Clinical Trials Partnership. (2012). A phase 3 trial of RTS, S/AS01 malaria vaccine in African Infants. New England Journal of Medicine, 367(24), 2284–2295.
RTS,S Clinical Trials Partnership. (2014). Efficacy and safety of the RTS, S/AS01 malaria vaccine during 18 months after vaccination: A phase 3 randomized, controlled trial in children and young infants at 11 African sites. PLoS Medicine, 11(7), e1001685.
RTS,S Clinical Trials Partnership. (2015, July 4). Efficacy and safety of RTS,S/AS01 malaria vaccine with or without a booster dose in infants and children in Africa: Final results of a phase 3, individually randomised, controlled trial. The Lancet, 386(9988), 31–45.
Schultz, D. (2013). Eloquent science: A practical guide to becoming a better writer, speaker, and atmospheric scientist. Boston, MA: Springer.
Schultz, R., Rauber, R., & Heideman, K. (2015, February). Policy on plagiarism and self-plagiarism (P. P. Disclaimer, Editor, & A. M. Society, Producer). Retrieved from American Meteorological Society. https://www.ametsoc.org/ams/index.cfm/publications/ethical-guidelines-and-ams-policies/plagiarism-and-self-plagiarism/.
Science. (2015, July 2). Editorial policies (A. A. Science, Producer). http://www.sciencemag.org/authors/science-editorial-policies. Retrieved 2 Sept 2017.
Tuling, S., Dala, L., & Toomer, C. (2013). Lee-side flow structures of very low aspect ratio cruciform wing-body configurations. Journal of Spacecraft and Rockets, 50(6), 1134–1149.
Tuling, S., Dala, L., & Toomer, C. (2014). Two-dimensional potential method simulations of a body-strake configuration. Journal of Spacecraft and Rockets, 51(2), 468–477.
U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. (2016). Best practices for designating authorship (U. E. Agency, Producer). Retrieved from https://www.epa.gov/sites/production/files/2016-07/documents/faqs_epa_best_practices_designating_authors_2016.pdf.
Zhang, Y., & Jia, X. (2012). A survey on the use of CrossCheck for detecting plagiarism in journal articles. Learned Publishing, 25(4), 292–307. https://doi.org/10.1087/20120408.
Zhang, Y., & Jia, X. (2013). Republication of conference papers in journals? Learned Publishing, 26, 189–196. https://doi.org/10.1087/20130307.
Acknowledgements
I want to thank Susanne E. Hall for her insightful comments and useful suggestions on an earlier draft of this manuscript. This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation Cultivating Cultures for Ethical STEM program under grant no. CCE-1737093.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Additional information
The original version of this article was revised:
Permission information has been included in the correct legends of figures 1, 2, 5, 12, 13 and 14. See Correction for full figure legends.
Fig. 1 First page of The New England Journal of Medicine article showing authorship as a research group rather than as individual authors. From RTS,S Clinical Trials Partnership (2011). Reprinted with permission from Massachusetts Medical Society.
Fig. 2 Appendix from The New England Journal of Medicine article listing authors. From RTS,S Clinical Trials Partnership (2011). Reprinted with permission from Massachusetts Medical Society.
Fig. 5 Images of top of first page for journal article and conference proceedings. Reproduced by permission of The Electrochemical Society.
Fig. 12 Example of exact duplication of visual. Photographs of test system in two publications: conference proceedings (ECS Transactions) on left; journal article (Journal of The Electrochemical Society) on right. Reproduced by permission of The Electrochemical Society.
Fig. 13 Example of recycling of a table. Composition of synthetic urine in two publications: conference proceedings (ECS Transactions) on left; journal article (Journal of The Electrochemical Society) on right. Reproduced by permission of The Electrochemical Society.
Fig. 14 Example of recycling figure with new data. Conference proceedings (ECS Transactions) on left; journal article (Journal of The Electrochemical Society) on right. Note difference in data presented: 5% vs. 2% fecal matter. Reproduced by permission of The Electrochemical Society.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Moskovitz, C. Text Recycling in Scientific Writing. Sci Eng Ethics 25, 813–851 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11948-017-0008-y
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11948-017-0008-y