From Campus Technology:
Where are students finding the materials they plagiarize in their papers? According to a new study, WIkipedia tops the list for both secondary and college students. But as a category, encyclopedia sites are among the least popular sources, coming in behind four other types of information outlets, including both academic sites and paper mills.
The study, Plagiarism and the Web: A Comparison of Internet Sources for Secondary and Higher Education Students, analyzed more than 33.5 million papers–about 9 million from secondary students and 24 million for post-secondary students–submitted to the Turnitin service from iParadigms over a one-year period (June 2010 to June 2011). In those papers, iParadigms’ researchers found 128 million “content matches” from a wide variety of Web sources.
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