Author Archives: cmosk

New publication in the Journal of Technical Writing and Communication

Cary Moskovitz & Susanne Hall. Text Recycling in STEM Research: An Exploratory Investigation of Expert and Novice Beliefs and Attitudes. Journal of Technical Writing and Communication, March, 2020. https://doi.org/10.1177/0047281620915434  LINK     FULL-TEXT
When writing journal articles, STEM researchers produce a number of other genres such as grant proposals and conference posters, and their articles routinely build directly on their own prior work. As a result, STEM authors often reuse material from their completed documents in producing new documents. While this practice, known as text recycling (or self-plagiarism), is a debated issue in publishing and research ethics, little is known about researchers’ beliefs about what constitutes appropriate practice. This article presents results of an exploratory, survey-based study on beliefs and attitudes toward text recycling among STEM “experts” (faculty researchers) and “novices” (graduate students and postdocs). While expert and novice researchers are fairly consistent in distinguishing between text recycling and plagiarism, there is considerable disagreement about appropriate text recycling practice.

TRRP at the 2020 Association for Practical and Professional Ethics meeting

In February, members of the TRRP gave two presentations at the 2020 annual meeting of the Association for Practical and Professional Ethics in Atlanta, GA. Cary Moskovitz presented “The Text Recycling Research Project: The Challenges and Our Approach” as part of the Responsible Conduct Of Research-Research Integrity Consortium pre-conference workshop. Chris Anson, Ian Anson and Michael Pemberton joined Cary to present a panel session, “Findings from the Text Recycling Research Project.”

Presentation at AMWA 2019

Cary Moskovitz and Susanne Hall presented “Text Recycling in Scientific Research Writing” at the American Medical Writers Association Medical Writing & Communication Conference in San Diego, CA on Nov 7, 2019.

New publication out today. Text recycling: Views of North American journal editors from an interview-based study.

Michael A. Pemberton, Susanne Hall, Cary Moskovitz & Chris Anson. Text Recycling: Views of North American Journal Editors from an Interview-Based Study. Learned Publishing, 2019. DOI: 10.1002/leap.1259
Results from an interview-based study of 21 journal editors from a broad range of academic disciplines. Our findings show that editors’ beliefs and practices are quite individualized, rather than being tied to disciplinary or other structural parameters.

— First text analytics results to be presented at 8th International Conference on Writing Analytics

Three members of the TRRP will share our first findings on STEM researchers actual recycling practices in a talk titled “Text Recycling in STEM Disciplines: Results from a Text Analytic Study” at the 8th International Conference on Writing Analytics, 5-6 September 2019, Winterthur, Switzerland. Here is the abstract:

Text recycling (TR), sometimes called “self-plagiarism”, is the reuse of text verbatim from one’s own existing documents in a newly- created text. In a (US) federally-funded grant, we have been studying TR patterns using several methodologies. In one strand of  this research, we have created a tool in R to analyze large corpora of published articles to determine the extent of TR occurrence. In this presentation, we briefly describe the goals of the project and the analytic system we have developed. We then share the results of an analysis of 400 published papers associated with eight disciplines. Results show the frequency of TR across disciplines in articles generated from the same grants. These results demonstrate that substantial variation exists in text recycling practices across disciplines and individual authors. We conclude by speculating about the causes of these patterns, especially as they have evolved over time.

Text Recycling Project featured at COPE European Seminar

Three members of the TRRP will be featured speakers at the Committee on Publication Ethics European Seminar in Leiden, Netherlands, Sept 23, 2019. Here is the abstract:

Text recycling research project
Text recycling is an increasingly important and controversial issue in scholarly communication, yet little actual research has been conducted and it is rarely addressed in the ethical training of researchers. The Text Recycling Research Project is the first large scale investigation of the topic. The aim of the NSF-supported project is to better understand text recycling, to help build consensus among stakeholders, and to promote ethical and appropriate practice.

  • What do gatekeepers across academic fields believe about appropriate text recycling practice? Michael Pemberton, Georgia Southern University. Professor of Writing and Linguistics, Director of the University Writing Center, and Editor of Across the Disciplines
  • What do STEM researchers actually do in practice? Cary Moskovitz (Lead PI), Duke University. Associate Professor of the Practice and Director of Writing in the Disciplines, Thompson Writing Program
  • When is text recycling legal and when does it violate copyright or contract law? David R Hansen, Associate University Librarian for Research, Collections and Scholarly Communications, Lead Copyright and Information Policy Officer, Duke University Libraries
https://textrecycling.org/author/cmosk/
textrecycling.org
crawl=CC-MAIN-2020-16
41101
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:UFJ7B7O6TITFKLJ7DJDEYNV4TR2FKATB
<urn:uuid:700b2b09-8780-4e3c-8c9e-b0cc9f7a9e62>
2020-04-08T15:32:01Z
192.0.78.24
text/html
sha1:Q2VCXH5OI6VDWMKSNSQFMUKHVLDVZIOC
<urn:uuid:332d55a8-39ba-44d6-922e-176790f816a7>
https://textrecycling.org/author/cmosk/
response
<urn:uuid:24bfea95-5c96-441c-a7fb-079721866f4e>
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2020-16
publisher: Common Crawl
description: Wide crawl of the web for March/April 2020
operator: Common Crawl Admin (info@commoncrawl.org)
hostname: ip-10-67-67-170.ec2.internal
software: Apache Nutch 1.16 (modified, https://github.com/commoncrawl/nutch/)
robots: checked via crawler-commons 1.1-SNAPSHOT (https://github.com/crawler-commons/crawler-commons)
format: WARC File Format 1.1
conformsTo: http://iipc.github.io/warc-specifications/specifications/warc-format/warc-1.1/