Ethics and Text Recycling

Paper ID #11150 Ethics and Text Recycling Dr. Marilyn A. Dyrud, Oregon Institute of Technology Marilyn Dyrud is a full professor in the Communication Department at Oregon Institute of Technology and regularly teaches classes in business and technical writing, public speaking, rhetoric, and ethics; she is part of the faculty team for the Civil Engineering Department’s integrated senior project. She is active in ASEE as a regular presenter, moderator, and paper reviewer; she has also served as her campus’ representative for 17 years, as chair of the Paciﬁc Northwest Section, and as section newsletter editor. She was named an ASEE Fellow in 2008. Currently, she is on two division boards, Engineering Technology and Engineering Ethics, and has served as Zone IV chair. In 2010, she received the McGraw Award, and in 2013, the Berger Award. In addition to ASEE, Marilyn is active in the Association for Practical and Professional Ethics as proceedings editor and the Association for Business Communication, serving on the editorial boards of two journals and editing a teaching section for ABC’s pedagogical journal. c American Society for Engineering Education, 2015 Ethics and Text Recycling Introduction Recently, as I was working on a proceedings for a professional conference, I read a very interesting paper, but there was one catch: the authors had already published it in a different venue. Although there were some minor cosmetic changes, it was essentially the same paper. I raised the issue with the general editor, and we decided to contact the authors, indicating that we could not publish the piece unless it were thoroughly revised. Given the topic, this would be a challenge. We have not, to date, heard from the authors. Many of us who serve professional journals in review or editorial capacities have probably discovered similar papers. In academia, the pressure to publish is high, and sometimes authors take shortcuts by including blocks of information from their other published works. While building upon prior work is a time-honored tradition, can the same be said about re-using the exact verbiage? Or what about authors who mistakenly assume that they “own” their work, even after signing a copyright transfer? This paper examines the issue of “self-plagiarism,” or, perhaps more accurately, recycling old text. Specifically, the paper focuses on definitions, common trends and policies, cases, and ethical considerations. Solutions are beyond the scope of this paper. Definitions Defining plagiarism is fairly easy; for the past two decades, the Office of Research Integrity has used the following as an operational definition: “the theft or misappropriation of intellectual property and the substantial unattributed textual copying of another’s work.”1 But when it comes to defining “self-plagiarism,” things are more opaque. The phrase itself is almost meaningless, as Stephanie Bird, among others, points out: “Self-plagiarism is not possible, since ‘plagiarism’ refers to claiming the words and ideas of another as one’s own.”2 The concept is not, as some suggest, “a relatively new evil.”3 As Callahan notes, it can be traced back more than a century, to an 1893 letter submitted to the Atlantic Monthly.4 Current times have seen a renewed interest, perhaps due to the emergence of detection software used by many journals to identify plagiarized material. A review of the rather substantial literature shows that self-plagiarism, or text recycling, assumes several guises: Redundant/piecemeal: Using sections of previously published text in a “new” article; may involve both data and narrative recycling5, 6, 7 Dual/duplicate: Publishing the same article in multiple journals2, 8 Salami-slicing: Fragmenting data from a single study to produce several articles that typically repeat sections, such as the literature review and methodology; also referred to as “least publishable units”5, 7, 9 Meat-extending: Taking old material and expanding it by adding new information; also referred to as “data augmentation”5, 7 Cryptomnesia: Unconsciously repeating information from previous publications 5 Miguel Roig, who has written extensively on the topic, notes the difficulty of agreeing on a definition after examining editorials written about plagiarism: “Some editors find it acceptable to re-use some material while others discourage any form of re-use. The latter finding is troublesome because a type of text recycling acceptable to one editor may constitute an instance of self-plagiarism to another one.” Roig also notes the difficulty of paraphrasing highly technical language or stock phrasing.10 After all, suggests Catriona Fennell, who is affiliated with Elsevier (Amsterdam), “there are only so many ways you can describe how to run a gel.”11 Re-using language or equations standard in a specific field constitute legitimate exceptions to strictures against text recycling. A problematic area involves translations: while some may view translating an article from one language to another as intellectually suspect and perhaps a case of duplicate publication, Wen and Gao offer a compelling argument that this practice actually “maximize[s] the effectiveness of academic communication and equalize[s] the rights of creating, distributing and accessing knowledge.”12 Furthermore, they note, that moving from one language to another involves more than simply translating the words. It may include adding extra background information, completely revising the scope of the literature review, and, in general “reposition[ing] the research in an international context.”12 Trends and Policies According to Atwood, the practice of text recycling is growing at an alarming rate: Bretag and Carapiet’s study “found that 60 per cent of authors in a random sample of 269 papers from the Web of Science social science and humanities database had self-plagiarised at least once in the period 2003-06.”13 More recently, Martin has indicated a significant increase in articles written about text recycling, from 170, in 2000, to 820 in 2012. The number of editorials on the issue is also increasing.8 Reuse of text occurs in virtually all academic fields, although it tends to be more prominent in technical areas, particularly science fields. An examination of the literature reveals a number of studies conducted on the issue, most revealing disturbing trends. Davis, for example, looked at articles published between 1989 and 2003 in 67 journals in the library and information science fields affiliated with Emerald University Presses; he discovered 409 cases of duplicate publication, some appearing simultaneously in different Emerald journals, and 5 cases of triplicate publication.14 A similar study by Laririève and Gingras, involving articles published over a 27-year period (1980-2007) using Reuter’s Web of Science database, reveals comparable results, identifying nearly 10,000 duplicate papers out of more than 18 million, for a rate of .05%. About 2,500 duplicates dealt with engineering and technology, and physics-related papers accounted for another 1,679; together these fields represent about one-third of the duplicate papers. Furthermore, the number of duplicate papers has been steadily rising since the mid-1990s.15 The true number of duplications may be higher because the study only looks at exact matches and does not account for variations in titles, authors, and minor changes in content. In a fervent 2008 editorial published in Nature, authors Errami and Garner describe their examination of the MedLine database: by extrapolating data from a limited sample of 67,000, they conclude that approximately 117,000 articles in the entire database are duplicates, and the number has been increasing since 1975 in the biomedical field. They further note that duplicate publication is “a global activity,” although the US accounts for the highest number.16 While in the past, entities associated with scholarly publication have only mentioned “regular” plagiarism, commentary regarding self-plagiarism now seems to be the norm. Style Manuals Within the past few years, several of the major style manuals have added information regarding plagiarism and, most significantly, self-plagiarism. For the first time in its 123-year history, the American Psychological Association has included a statement on self-plagiarism in its publications manual, a resource widely used in business, the social sciences, and medical fields: “Just as researchers do not present the work of others as their own (plagiarism), they do not present their own previously published work as new scholarship (self-plagiarism).”17 Likewise, the Chicago Manual of Style has added comments regarding plagiarism in its most recent edition. A quick glance through the 15th edition reveals no information related to plagiarism, whereas the 16th edition has two sections that mention plagiarism and citation, both located in the chapter on author responsibilities: section 4.68 discusses contractual agreements with publishers, and 4.85 details “the importance of attribution.”18 Professional Organizations Most of the major engineering societies include material relating to plagiarism and self- plagiarism in their publication policies. IEEE, which has a very clear and fully developed policy on plagiarism, has added sections dealing with text recycling: “The verbatim copying or reuse of one’s own research . is considered another form of plagiarism or self-plagiarism; it is unacceptable.”19 The ACM now includes self-plagiarism in its “Policy and Procedures on Plagiarism,”

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