"Retrofitting" sources There seems to be a sort of craze about having as many references as possible. Among the students at my university, it has become common practice to write a passage of text and later figure out if someone else has done something similar and attribute it to them, changing the original text if necessary.

Is this in any way, shape or form appropriate? It seems rather contradictory to me, since you are attributing your own work to other people, even if they came up with it first. The author did not have prior knowledge of this.

I suppose you could simply claim it as your own and note that someone else has come up with it, as well. Is this necessary? It is your own work, after all, even if somebody else came up with something remarkably similar.

Many problems have straight-forward solutions that you can easily come up with. I am asking this now, because I am writing my bachelor's thesis and have come up with some of those straight-forward solutions myself. I just now found, by chance, papers on exactly that subject and, reading them, realise just how similar our approaches are.

What would be the best way to handle situations like these?

Meta: I'm not happy with the title. If you can think of a better one, feel free to edit and remove this notice.
Among the students at my university, it has become common practice to write a passage of text and later figure out if someone else has done something similar and attribute it to them


Indeed, that seems to be a constant part of paper writing: A portion of what you have made up has been done by others the same way before. In my opinion, this is often because it is simply impossible to always know all details of previous work (that is by no means always "related" to your own work in its overall topic) by heart, and because it is often more straightforward to just do something oneself rather than dive into the literature that may or may not contain something vaguely similar.

Sometimes, it gets apparent even only afterwards that an aspect of one's work is non-obvious enough to be mentioned elsewhere.

In the end, it is simply a question of benefits vs. drawbacks:

Drawbacks


You do attribute your own work to someone else. Thereby, even though you may have spent some energy to develop or define something, you


falsely pretend to have relied on someone else's work
misrepresent the effort you may have invested for your work



Benefits


You secure yourself against claims of plagiarism. While you cannot possibly copy anything you do not know, the suspicion that you did actually know some previous work but failed to mention them can arise when certain of your ideas resemble those mentioned in other papers. As such, it is less cumbersome if you just pretend you are replicating someone else's work.
Usually, the statements subject to this phenomenon do not nearly seem complex enough to warrant the mention as a contribution. Hence, you do not lose much by not mentioning you were the actual source for a specific aspect of your work.
Citing in such situations strengthens your work. While the contribution of the cited aspects would be minor, showing that you build your actual contributions on top of proven practices makes your actual core contribution more convincing.


In particular, the last point is a major benefit compared to the drawback. This is reflected in your observation that some are


  changing the original text if necessary


Given that the original ideas are not a significant contribution that needs to be promoted, anyway, replacing them with a possibly better method that is truly taken from another source is fully reasonable and can help to further improve the overall document.

EDIT: To put this answer in relation to jakebeal's answer: I mainly interpreted the question to refer to the "third branch of possibilities":


They are writing down original text that they think is novel. Only later, they realize or find out others have done the same (possibly, in a completely different field or context, or with a completely different terminology, so finding the other work is likely a result of pure chance rather than an expected event).