Text Recycling and Excessive Attribution: A Pragmatic Perspective

Abstract

Text recycling—commonly referred to as self-plagiarism—is an issue that is currently garnering considerable attention with regard to its acceptability as a practice and questions of when, where, and how much of it can be permissible. Although the problem of self-plagiarism or excessive text recycling can, in the opinion of some, be circumvented by paraphrasing and the reordering of text, the practice does not constitute a legitimate means to generate new and original text. A possible means to moderate the problem of text recycling that is strongly recommended is a declaration statement explicitly stating and identifying the use of recycled text. Further problems with text recycling relate to questions as to who is the progenitor of any recycled text in question and therefore who is the owner, in a moral sense, of the text under scrutiny in cases of changing sets of authors. This leads to concerns over insufficient author attribution. On the other hand, excessive attribution can result if a too conservative mindset is adopted. Due care and cognizance of excessive/insufficient attribution are necessary to avoid such problems as well as a recognition of the concept of text ownership as described herein. Such concerns are not limited to text recycling but are present also for other types of contributions to a publication covering both mundane physical contributions (e.g., supply of materials, organisms, or apparatuses) and the continuing deployment of previously espoused or established metaphysical contributions (e.g., ideas, hypotheses, strategies, or concepts or the instigation of projects).