My wife is currently finishing her PhD thesis.  The past few days have been interesting as she is currently losing her mental stability due to the compilation of the reference list.  References are crucial to any thesis, if you don’t know where the quotes come from you can’t use them!  However, much to her relief I introduced her to Google Scholar.  It is in beta testing just now, but it is very impressive and could prove to be crucial to students at college and university.  These websites are always best shown by example…  For instance, say you are searching for, oh lets say totally at random, a paper about glacial sediments written by Adam and Knight, the result would be here.  This service can not only help you find references when you mislay them but more importantly it can help you find papers on the subject that you are currently working on.

Much has been made in academic circles regarding students using the net for cheating in essays, whether this is through paying others to do their essays or just plagiarising large sections of other people work.  I feel that this advance (that has been out for some time now) by Google gives back some of the credit to the internet that other cheating students have taken away.  Cheating by students has been well documented, a quick search on Google will bring up many hits.  While doing some research for this post I found a service that teachers can use to submit student essays to, TurnitinUK. This service can be used to check if a student is plagiarising essays.  It enables institutions and staff to carry out electronic comparisons of students work against electronic journals and also other students work.  

This brings up two obvious questions that I hope someone out there could answer in a comment.  Do students at university (at least in the UK) now have to hand in their essays in electronic format?  Are essays stored that are submitted to the service, and if so, what other information is kept along with the essay.  

I would think that the answers to these questions could bring up many more interesting questions.  I also wonder if the students have to agree to their essay being submitted to this kind of scrutiny?  However, I digress, the point of the post (if not already obvious) is:

• keep control of your reference list
• don’t copy others work without giving credit