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To Cite or Not to Cite: Plagiarism in the Digital Age

Recently, in one of my grad classes at the University of Northern Iowa I had a little fun with the age-old question of whether or not to cite a source. I thought I would share it with you.

To cite or not to cite, that is the age-old question.

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth in this university a new method of citation, conceived in a library, and dedicated to the proposition that all references are created equal.

As I often tell people, let the word go forth that the torch has passed to a new generation of graduate students who are willing to pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, cite any source in order to assure the survival of and success of academic pursuit.

So, let me encourage you, ask not what references you should cite, cite which references you use.

After all,

Two books diverged in a yellow library
And sorry I could not cite both
And be one student, long I stood
And read down one as far as I could

To where it bored me with the statistics
Then I took the other volume just as fair
And having perhaps the better claim
Because it was shiny and wanted wear

Though for that, the passing there
Had worn them about the same.
And both that morning equally lay
On shelves no student had trodden back

Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet, knowing how way leads unto way
I doubted if ever I should come back
I shall be telling this with a citation

Somewhere ages and ages hence
Two books diverged in a yellow library
And I took the one less read
And that has made all the difference.

I hope you see the humor in this. I need to ask forgiveness to the following for the adaptation of their famous quotes: William Shakespeare, Abraham Lincoln, John F. Kennedy, and Robert Frost.

Plagiarism Goes Digital

When I was a high school and an undergraduate student in the 1980s, all of my research was completed in a library using hardcopy books and journals. Most references were copied onto 3x5 cards by hand. By it’s very nature, this made it difficult to plagiarize without fully knowing you were plagiarizing.

Unfortunately, in the age of the Internet, a lot of research is digital, and it is easy to cut and paste references. It’s simply too easy for students to plagiarize. This requires extra diligence on the part of the student to ensure careful citation or sources.

Fact Checking Goes Digital

One solution for students who question whether or not they need to cite is a service called “TurnItIn.com.” TurnItIn.com is a service schools and academic institutions can subscribe to that gives teachers access to a large and growing database of content. All a teacher needs to do is enter in a few passages from a student’s paper and TurnItIn will tell the teacher if it has been lifted from another source. Pretty neat!

TurnItIn also has a service for students that will “fact check” their papers for proper citation. It’s called WriteCheck, and here’s a brief description from TurnItIn’s web site:

WriteCheck compares every paper to a massive database of content from over 10,000 major newspapers, magazines, scholarly journals and books as well as a database of over 11.5 billion current and archived pages of web content, and more than 65 million previously-submitted student papers

There is a small fee for the service, but it may save a student a lot of embarrassment (or worse) if there are areas of his/her paper that are quoted without proper citation.

You can view a demo of WriteCheck by clicking here.

Here are some additional resources to help you answer the “to cite or not to cite” question:

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