Stephen Black wrote:
> Not so fast, integrity-breath. There may be less there than you
> think. I don't know what ABI/Inform is, but "full-text Periodical
> Abstracts" sounds like a deliberately ambiguous way of saying "we
> search abstracts, not text".
That'd be a big problem, yup. What I meant though was that in looking at the
site I realized that it searches through _webpages_, not just term papers available
for sale. It's not at all unusual for one or two of my students each semester to turn
in papers that directly "lift" text from online sources like this one:
http://www.alzheimers.org/unraveling/09.htm
I believe that the Turnitin tool would detect that kind of plagiarism, and if
so, it would be at least somewhat useful to me. But it does sound as though it's not
going to find plagiarism from journal articles, which is probably a more common in my
students' papers than plagiarism from websites (though that's all speculation, because
of course I don't know how much plagiarism I'm failing to detect).
--------------------
That being said, though, unless your students are very different from mine,
the major issue here is not students' integrity, but rather students' understanding of
what they're supposed to do when they write term papers using sources. The one or two
students I mentioned who plagiarize from these sites list the sites in their Reference
lists, which tells me that at least in those cases, the students' problem is
understanding, not ethics. For those students, at least, discussions of ethics will be
completely irrelevant.
Paul Smith
Alverno College
Milwaukee
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