Scientific papers increasingly repeat recent work since 2021
More of the same? Are scientific papers losing originality?
Digital Libraries
Summary
Scientific papers are growing rapidly, but it’s unclear if they stay original or just repeat earlier work. The authors looked at over 26,000 papers from 2015 to 2025 and found that before 2021, papers stayed equally unique in their writing. After 2021, parts of papers started to resemble earlier work much more, and this wasn’t just because of a few papers but happened across many. They also found this pattern in the ideas expressed, suggesting that scientific writing is becoming less distinct from what came before, at least in one measurable way.
What this means in practice
- •For academic publishers: Develop tools to detect repetitive text patterns in submitted papers to maintain originality standards.
- •For research integrity offices: Monitor the originality trends in publications to identify shifts toward repetitive reporting and inform policy decisions.
Authors
Ilan Doron-Arad, Elchanan Mossel
Abstract
Scientific output is growing rapidly, but it is unclear whether the expanding literature remains original or is increasingly repeating itself. Originality has many dimensions. One dimension can now be measured directly: how textually distinct a paper is from the work that came before it. Using semantic language models, we screened more than 26,000 full-text papers across eight fields in the CORE database (2015--2025) for passages resembling recent literature. We compared every paper against a fixed-size sample of earlier work, so increases in resemblance are not a by-product of literature growth. We find that the share of a paper's text resembling recent work was stable before 2021, then rose sharply, more than tripling by 2025. The increase came not from a few papers borrowing more heavily but from resemblance spreading across the literature: more papers now contain passages that echo recent work, and almost none of this growth is explained by cited work. We also found an analogous increase in passages expressing the same scientific idea. The pattern held across robustness checks and replicated in a second, independent database. Along this one measurable axis of originality, scientific writing has become less distinct from the work preceding it.