The Citation Project: Preventing plagiarism, teaching writing * Publications

Smart Talk introduction:
Sandra Jamieson and Rebecca Moore Howard direct The Citation Project, a national study providing open access empirical data about how college students use sources when writing papers for composition courses. In PIL's interview, the researchers say of their latest results: "If your focus is on procedure and correct format, these papers are a great success. But if you look at this another way and remember for most of us, 'research' is about the discovery of new information and ideas, and synthesis of those ideas into deeper understanding, the majority of the papers failed.

Abstract
Instead of focusing on students' citation of sources, educators should attend to the more fundamental question of how well students understand their sources and whether they are able to write about them without appropriating language from the source. Of the eighteen student research texts we studied, none included summary of a source, raising questions about the students' critical reading practices. Instead of summary, which is highly valued in academic writing and is promoted in composition textbooks, the students paraphrased, copied from, or patchwrote from individual sentences in their sources. Writing from individual sentences places writers in constant jeopardy of working too closely with the language of the source and thus inadvertently plagiarizing; and it also does not compel the writer to understand the source.