  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.
