The lowest form of flattery: characterising text re-use and plagiarism patterns in a digital library corpus

Abstract

The re-use of text-particularly misuse, or plagiarism-is a contentious issue. Technological approaches to identifying student plagiarism are now widespread, but academic publications do not typically come under such scrutiny. It is common knowledge that plagiarism occurs, but we do not know how frequently or extensively, nor where in a document it is likely to be found. This paper offers the first assessment of text re-use in the field of digital libraries. It also characterises text re-use generally (and plagiarism specifically) according to location in the document, author seniority, publication venue and open access. As a secondary contribution, we suggest future routes towards more rigorous plagiarism detection and management.

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