# Citation sentence reuse behavior of scientists: A case study on massive bibliographic text dataset of computer science

## TL;DR

This study investigates the reuse of citation sentences among computer science researchers, revealing widespread copying behavior that increases with author maturity and varies across subfields, highlighting a nuanced form of scholarly plagiarism.

## Contribution

It introduces a novel perspective on scholarly plagiarism by focusing on citation sentence reuse and provides empirical evidence of its prevalence in computer science research.

## Key findings

- Massive copying of citation sentences observed.
- Copying tendency increases with author maturity.
- More copying in theoretical than applied fields.

## Abstract

Our current knowledge of scholarly plagiarism is largely based on the similarity between full text research articles. In this paper, we propose an innovative and novel conceptualization of scholarly plagiarism in the form of reuse of explicit citation sentences in scientific research articles. Note that while full-text plagiarism is an indicator of a gross-level behavior, copying of citation sentences is a more nuanced micro-scale phenomenon observed even for well-known researchers. The current work poses several interesting questions and attempts to answer them by empirically investigating a large bibliographic text dataset from computer science containing millions of lines of citation sentences. In particular, we report evidences of massive copying behavior. We also present several striking real examples throughout the paper to showcase widespread adoption of this undesirable practice. In contrast to the popular perception, we find that copying tendency increases as an author matures. The copying behavior is reported to exist in all fields of computer science; however, the theoretical fields indicate more copying than the applied fields.