Patterns of text reuse in a scientific corpus

Significance In the modern electronic format it is both easier to reuse text and easier to detect reused text. This is the first comprehensive study of patterns of text reuse within the full texts of an important large scientific corpus, covering a 20-y timeframe. It provides an important baseline for what is regarded as standard practice within the affected research communities, a standard somewhat more lenient than that currently applied to journalists, popular authors, and public figures. 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 to 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.