Self-plagiarism: reasons and motivations for academic plagiarism or text recycling

Abstract

Text recycling, sometimes known as "self-plagiarism," is a controversial kind of academic misconduct that has emerged as a new approach to manipulating the scientific incentive system. Many issues about text recycling have only been partially resolved, and there is still a lot of ambiguity. “While the terms of fair text re-use have been clarified as a result of this case, the scope and reasons of improper text recycling are still unknown.” We evaluated the degree of “problematic text recycling in four scientific areas: biochemistry and molecular biology, economics, history, and psychology, to get a better understanding of its prevalence.” We also looked at some of the possible reasons and motivations for writers to recycle their content by putting existing assumptions about the causes of text recycling to the test in the academic literature. To that goal, “950 journal articles were analyzed using the Turnitin plagiarism detection program, and the findings were then manually interpreted.” We saw a lot of “problematic text recycling, especially in economics and psychology, and it became evident that the degree of text recycling varied a lot across study fields.” Furthermore, we discovered that highly prolific writers are more inclined to recycle their work. Furthermore, “the study indicates how the prevalence of problematic text recycling is affected by the number of authors and the accessibility” of editing methods.