Off The Shelf

A lot of learners start their research on the web, perhaps with a search engine such as Google. Type in just about any topic and you’re sure to get hundreds, if not thousands, of results.

But how good are those results? With most search results you are taken to a web page full of links, statements of responsibility, and other information you can use to evaluate the legitimacy of the resource. But not all search results take you to full websites.

One type of result that that can be especially confusing is the PDF. Click it in your Google results list and an entire article appears, but there’s very little information beyond what’s on that PDF image of the page. There may be a name, title, and text, but nothing else.

Why is this problematic?

You have no idea what the “article” actually is. It could be any of the following:

• a paper presented at a conference.
• a research report from a respected think tank.
• an article published in a journal.

OR

• the random thoughts of some guy with an internet connection.
• a lazy freshman’s half-plagiarized term paper.
• outright lies meant to confuse others or push a particular agenda.

OR

• a self-published article by someone who knows a lot about the topic, but has no formal credentials.
• a research paper by an advanced graduate student.
• an article that was rejected by the journals the author submitted it to.

It’s obvious that the articles from group one are worthy of consideration for your research. Group two should be avoided at all costs. But what about group three? And how do you know which category a PDF article fits into?

A good rule of thumb is to only use resources by people who are more credible on the topic than you are. If you can’t tell, err on the side of caution.

To help you make that determination, try to learn as much as possible about the author and origin of the article. Here are some tricks you can try:

• Check Google Scholar to see if anyone has cited it.
• Look closely at the web address. Check the root address of the site to learn more about the author or sponsoring body.
• Google the author’s name and look for other publications or a CV.
• Examine the PDF for information that would indicate it was originally published in a journal or presented at a conference. Then confirm that fact with the conference’s website or journal’s table of contents.

One word of caution: many learners restrict their searches to .edu sites. While that can be helpful, only real evaluation of a website will tell you if you’ve found something from a world-reknowned professor or his worst student. Both can post to .edu websites.

- Erin

Think plagiarizing can be considered an innocent mistake? These stories may cause you to think again about copying and pasting that bit from an article or website.

Plagiarizing can carry extreme repercussions both on the job and concerning a degree in progress or already granted. Plagiarism is rarely considered an innocent mistake, especially in academia and publishing where people are expected to understand the rules and respect the intellectual property of another. Excuses are usually not accepted and it can be challenging to rebuild a reputation after one is caught plagiarizing.

Romance novelist Cassie Edwards learned this the hard way. In her novel Shadow Bear Edwards lifted passages from a book about Ferrets written by Paul Tolme. Ferret references in a romance novel?!? This humorous article written by the plagiarized author discusses how Edwards worked ferrets into a conversation between Lakota Indian Shadow Bear and a pioneer woman. While Edwards claimed “she didn’t know she was supposed to credit her sources” this excuse was not enough to save her publishing deal with Signet Books.

Another case of career-ending plagiarism comes from prominent newspaper, The New York Times. Journalist Jayson Blair plagiarized by fabricating details including fake quotes from interviews. The situation wounded the credibility of the New York Times and heads rolled because of it. Jayson Blair was of course fired, but two editors also resigned due to their alleged bad management that allowed this to happen. In this case plagiarism not only affected the plagiarizer, but his managers (the editors) also found themselves in hot water.

An Austrian report titled “Report on dangers and opportunities posed by large search engines, particularly Google” cites examples of people losing their jobs and revocation of degrees for plagiarizing on a thesis or dissertation. The report cites the definition of plagiarism from the software program turnitin.com, which specializes in scanning documents to find instances of plagiarism. Below is that definition as quoted in the report:

“All of the following are considered plagiarism:

• turning in someone else’s work as your own
• copying words or ideas from someone else without giving credit
• failing to put a quotation in quotation marks
• giving incorrect information about the source of a quotation
• changing words but copying the sentence structure of a source without giving credit
• copying so many words or ideas from a source that it makes up the majority of your work, whether you give credit or not”

While citing sources often feels like a pain, the pain of not crediting another’s work can be felt for years.

-Sommer