Reduce reuse… and don’t recycle!

Many years ago, we all used to publish fully refereed conference papers. We leveraged audience feedback to submit improved manuscripts to journals. Once, an eagle-eyed reviewer spotted reused text in my journal submission. I cited the conference paper correctly, but being accused of self-plagiarism shook me to the bones. I never published a conference paper again.

Serving as co-editor-in-chief of Annals of Tourism Research gave me a new perspective on text reuse. Elsevier checks every submitted manuscript – excluding references – for plagiarism. Before we – the editors-in-chief – even read the abstract, we see text reuse statistics. Full reports look like the real (Fig.1a) and hypothetical examples (Fig.1b) in Figure 1: they highlight duplicate sections, and cite the original source. Unless the overall reuse percentage is tiny (<5%), and reuse from specific sources negligible (<1%), we inspect all highlighted sections.

Figure 1. iThenticate reports (taken/modified from: Randle & Dolnicar, 2019; Randle, Zhang & Dolnicar, 2019)

Fig.1a highlights individual words in red. That’s OK, unless they are specific terms coined by someone else. The pink section on top is also OK: a correctly cited direct quote. The short sentence about human ethics approval at the bottom – also in pink – could be reworded, but it is short. We can live with that. At least the authors obtained ethics approval! Fig. 1b contains a complete paragraph highlighted in purple, suggesting extensive verbatim text reuse. This breaches copyright law (Roig, 2019), unless the text is from the author’s thesis, abstract or preprint (Elsevier, 2019).

“But these are my own words,” some authors argue. They may be. But in terms of copyright law and rules on research integrity: reuse is reuse. Some authors feel they can “only express certain things in a limited number of ways.” As a consequence, text reuse frequently occurs in methodology sections (Roig, 2005). Rewriting the explanation of a method may seem like a waste of time. But it is better to be safe than sorry. If authors feel strongly about reusing what they believe is a perfect description of a method, they can include it as a direct quote.

The “reuse of one’s own words, ideas, or artistic expression … from preexisting material especially without acknowledgment of their earlier use” is called self-plagiarism (Merriam-Webster Dictionary, 2019). While “relatively simple to define in a qualitative sense, it can be extremely difficult to rule on in practice” (Giles, 2005, p. 258). Not surprisingly, therefore, many disciplines have identified (self-)plagiarism as a major issue (e.g. O’Hair & Neff, 2013). Rightfully so: more than two-thirds of authors copy-paste text from their earlier papers (Bretag & Mahmud, 2009).

Tourism researchers are pioneers. Just think of value co-creation! Let’s also lead the way in reducing text reuse, and refusing text recycling. As the examples above illustrate, text reuse is not a simple, binary problem, with a simple, binary solution. Much to my dismay. Our positions on how much (and what type of) text reuse is acceptable will differ. We will disagree on whether text reuse is “an issue of academic integrity, or one of intellectual laziness” (Bretag & Mahmud, 2009, p. 196). We will never achieve consensus on these matters. But we can (1) consciously choose not to reuse text; (2) clearly communicate to our students and co-authors that – as teams – we commit to not reusing text, and (3) run our manuscripts through plagiarism software before submitting them to a journal.

As times change, we must adapt. I stopped publishing conference papers many years ago. As of May 2019, I routinely check my own pre-submission manuscripts using plagiarism detection software. Why? Because I am human. I make mistakes. But I do not want to. I do not want to reuse and recycle text. I am proud of my research. It deserves to be presented as an original article.

References

Bretag, T., & Mahmud, S. (2009). Self-plagiarism or appropriate textual re-use? Journal of Academic Ethics, 7(3), 193.

Elsevier (2019) Policies and Ethics, https://www.elsevier.com/en-au/authors/journal-authors/policies-and-ethics, last accessed 24.4.2019.

Giles, J. (2005) Special report: taking on the cheats. Nature, 435, 258–259.

Merriam-Webster Dictionary (2019) Self-plagiarism, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/self-plagiarism, last accessed 25.4.2019.

O’Hair and J. Neff (2013) Is there “self plagiarism” and “salami” publishing in JASMS? Journal of the American Society of Mass Spectrometry, 24, 986–987.

Randle, M. & Dolnicar, S. (2019) Enabling people with impairments to use Airbnb. Annals of Tourism Research, 78, 278–289.

Randle, M., Zhang, Y. & Dolnicar, S. (2019) The changing importance of vacations. Annals of Tourism Research, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.annals.2018.11.010

Roig, M. (2005) Re-using text from one’s own previously published papers: an exploratory study of potential self-plagiarism. Psychological Reports, 97, 43–49.

Roig, M. (2019). Avoiding plagiarism, self-plagiarism, and other questionable writing practices: A guide to ethical writing. United States Department of Health & Human Services. Office of Research Integrity, https://ori.hhs.gov/index.php/avoiding-plagiarismself-plagiarism-and-other-questionable-writing-practices-guide-ethical-writing, last accessed 26.4.2019.