Avoiding plagiarism,
self-plagiarism, and other questionable writing practices: A guide to ethical
writing
Text
recycling
Programmatic research often involves publishing papers describing empirical investigations that use nearly identical or identical methodologies. Similarly, the background literature reviewed in one paper may be similar or exactly the same as that of related papers by the same author/s. Therefore, it is possible to have two or more papers describing legitimately different observations that contain almost identical methodology, literature reviews, discussions, and other very similar or even identical textual material. Given the enormous pressure to publish felt by many researchers and the ease with which text can be manipulated with word processing software, these situations present unique challenges because of the allure to simply use as templates portions of text written for previously published papers and include the recycled material in a new paper. Thus, we define text recycling as a writer’s reuse of portions of text that have appeared previously in other works.
As with the problem of inappropriate paraphrasing, the question of how much a writer may recycle from his/her previous writings has not been generally addressed in the writing literature. In fact, of the concepts reviewed so far, text recycling is perhaps the most problematic because few, if any, official guidelines exist and because when it does occur, it is generally not found to be consistent with the principles of ethical writing. Given that the present instructional resource is grounded in those very principles, some sensible guidelines can be derived.
