Researching English Papers Online
Credibility on the Internet
It is up to you to separate the good sources from the questionable.If you were walking along the street and found an interesting statement scrawled on a scrap of paper, would you be willing to stake your term paper grade on it? If you were forced to back up that point in a debate, and you blurted out, "I read that on a scrap of paper I found on the street," would you get away with it? Cyberspace is fairly crawling with sites written by graduate students, undergraduates, or even people who know virtually nothing about their topic.
Most libraries subscribe to services that permit patrons to use a web browser to search through databases of academic journals. It's possible that the only way your library offers a particular journal is through an online database. If the journal is peer-reviewed, it doesn't matter whether you found it online or on a library shelf.
- Ten Cs for Evaluating Internet Resources, a good article by Betsy Richmond, but sadly only available as a PDF (that should be the 11th C -- does the resource force the reader to download a proprietary viewer)
- Evaluating Information Found on the Internet, Elizabeth E. Kirk
Plagiarism
Plagiarism, whether intentional or unintentional, is a breach of professional or academic trust, in which a person takes credit for someone else's work. It comes from a Latin word meaning 'kidnapper,' because a plagiarist is one who makes off with another person's ideas.
Even if you paraphrase (using none of your source's original words) you must still cite your source in order to give the author credit for the ideas you are using.
It's still plagiarism if you "accidentally" fail to give proper credit. Depending on circumstances, penalties for plagiarism (and other forms of academic misconduct) can range all the way up to expulsion.
- How Not to Plagiarize, by Margaret Procter, University of Toronto
- Plagiarism Self-Test, by Dennis G. Jerz, for the University of Toronto.
Documentation
Avoiding plagiarism involves more than simply re-phrasing another author's work. There is nothing wrong with using another writer's exact words -- provided you give proper credit to the original author.- Documenting Sources from the World Wide Web, by the Modern Language Association of America.
- On-line bibliography entry generators: MLA style, Author-Date style; by Dennis G. Jerz.
Now that You Know What's Expected of You...
- Academic Writing Handouts (writing and research web pages)
- For general writing help, try these links:
- Writing Handouts (Jerz's curricular website)
- "I'm
writing my first university paper: What do I need to
know?"
(Margaret Procter, University of Toronto)
- Purdue University's Online Writing Lab
- Composition Resources (University of Toronto English Library)
- You can start your literary research at one of these popular web sites:
- Literary Resources on the Net (Jack Lynch, Rutgers)
- The Voice of the Shuttle (Alan Liu's vast collection of humanities links)
- Literary Criticism as a Toll for Interpreting Litearture
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