Patterns of Text Reuse in a Scientific Corpus

TL;DR

This study systematically analyzes text reuse patterns in arXiv articles from 1991 to 2012, revealing insights into norms, aberrant behaviors, and the impact of reuse on scientific influence.

Contribution

It provides the first comprehensive measurement of text reuse in a large scientific corpus and identifies correlations between reuse and article influence.

Findings

Negative correlation between text reuse and citation count

Identification of aberrant authors with high reuse

Text reuse norms are more permissive than in other contexts

Abstract

We consider the incidence of text "reuse" by researchers, via a systematic pairwise comparison of the text content of all articles deposited to arXiv.org from 1991--2012. We measure the global frequencies of three classes of text reuse, and measure how chronic text reuse is distributed among authors in the dataset. We infer a baseline for accepted practice, perhaps surprisingly permissive compared with other societal contexts, and a clearly delineated set of aberrant authors. We find a negative correlation between the amount of reused text in an article and its influence, as measured by subsequent citations. Finally, we consider the distribution of countries of origin of articles containing large amounts of reused text.