Brits tackle Net plagiarism

Some 25% of undergraduates had plagiarized using the Internet, according to an unnamed survey cited by the BBC. And that's a conservative figure, one university student is quoted as saying. So Northumbria University's Plagiarism Advisory Service is testing a plagiarism detection system that scans students' work against 4.5 billion Web pages. The candid student makes a good point about the need to use this type of software in school: Only recently have students been taught how to reference Web content properly in research papers. Students also deserve to know how limited the public Web actually is for source material and how to determine the value of the material they find on it. For more on this see "Librarians: Better than Google" in last week's newsletter and "Critical thinking: Kids' best research tool" in our 5/30/03 issue.