STEREO: Scientific Text Reuse in Open Access Publications

TL;DR

The paper introduces Webis-STEREO-21, a large dataset of over 91 million instances of scientific text reuse across 4.2 million open-access papers, enabling extensive analysis of reuse patterns.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive, high-coverage dataset with detailed metadata, addressing limitations of previous datasets for studying scientific text reuse.

Findings

Over 91 million cases of text reuse identified

Dataset covers diverse scientific disciplines

Facilitates both qualitative and quantitative research

Abstract

We present the Webis-STEREO-21 dataset, a massive collection of Scientific Text Reuse in Open-access publications. It contains more than 91 million cases of reused text passages found in 4.2 million unique open-access publications. Featuring a high coverage of scientific disciplines and varieties of reuse, as well as comprehensive metadata to contextualize each case, our dataset addresses the most salient shortcomings of previous ones on scientific writing. Webis-STEREO-21 allows for tackling a wide range of research questions from different scientific backgrounds, facilitating both qualitative and quantitative analysis of the phenomenon as well as a first-time grounding on the base rate of text reuse in scientific publications.