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Do Online Resources Destroy Student Research Papers? by John Jaeger, Reference Librarian Posted: July 11, 2001 Article appeared in "The Compass," April 2001

David Rothenberg wrote a fascinating article entitled “Hope the Web Destroys Student Research Papers” that appeared in the February 1998 issue of The Education Digest.  Rothenberg was an associate professor of philosophy at the New Jersey Institute of Technology, and he saw the growing presence of the Internet as a very mixed blessing to the academic community.  While acknowledging the presence of good academic Internet sites and the vast potential for online academic materials in the future, he argued that the Internet as a whole was damaging to the entire student research process.  He noted that student papers he had received in the past year, which used numerous internet sites as resources, were far less creative and reflected less independent thinking than ones from previous semesters; he attributed this to the Internet’s influence on the students’ research processes.

Rothenberg expressed these ideas with funny, creative phrases and statements.  Here are a few: “Search engines, with their halfbaked algorithms, are closer to slot machines than library catalogues.”1  “…a paper consisting of summaries of summaries is bound to be fragmented and superficial, and to demonstrate more of a random montage than an ability to sustain an argument through 10 or 15 doublespaced pages.”2  “The placelessness of the Web leads to an ethereal randomness of thought…chance holds sway, and it more often misses than hits.”3

Rothenberg’s insights came in 1998, when the Internet was a vital presence, but when online databases were still in their early stages.  He may well have had online databases partly in mind when he wrote, but I doubt he could have imagined the way full text online resources would grow, covering newspapers, journals, and collections of books.  Back in 1998, Union had one newspaper database (Newsbank) and one journal database (Proquest).  Now, we have not only Proquest and Newsbank, but also two other journal databases (Tennessee Electronic Library and Wilsonweb), a huge E-Book collection (NetLibrary), two large business databases (Standard and Poor’s and Value Line), a large education resources database (ERIC Documents Online), and a massive literature database (Gale Literature Resource Center).  Larger institutions, such as the University of Illinois, may well have twenty or forty such full-text resources.   What might Rothenberg say now in 2001, with the proliferation of all these full-text electronic tools that come through the Internet?  He would probably see this development as one more nail (or several nails) driven into the coffin of the student research paper.

Online Resources as Destructive?

Rothenberg, as a teaching faculty, early on offered some significant concerns, and numerous librarians have raised arguments along these very lines in library-related journal articles.  One area of problems concerning online resources relates to the search process.  In the old days, one had a topic in mind and then had to dig through numerous volumes of bound journal indexes to find relevant articles.  After you found the potentially good article citations, you then had to find the bound (or microfiche) journal volumes, examine the content, and then print out the good articles page by page.  Finding books beyond the scope of the library involved this same kind of searching through large bound volumes.  This very process made the searcher more mentally involved in searching and more familiar with the material being searched.  With the advent of online indexes and online full-text collections, searching for information is now so much easier and faster.  One has almost immediate access, onscreen, to large amounts of information. 

This ease of access makes it tempting to take “shortcuts” in research.  One type of shortcut is in locating articles—students can simply choose the first items they come across rather than carefully examine everything available.  Likewise, since the electronic articles and books allow students to find specific material that relates to their paper topics, there is no absolute necessity of reading through large portions of those articles or books.  A major temptation is to view this electronic material as a vast data stream from which students simple draw from (cut and paste) without any concern about the original sources or about arguments presented in those sources.  The ultimate shortcut temptation  is outright plagiarism.  After all, if one is simply lifting information without concern for its larger context in an author’s work, why the necessity to cite the material at all?  Online resources make it easy and tempting to plagiarize; the abundance of online materials makes it harder for the one plagiarizing to be caught doing so.

Other problems with electronic resources are also very real.  The library computer “workstations” often seem more like “social stations.”  There is as much talking at the library computers as there is at the library tables, probably in part resulting from the freedom from rigorous thinking that the databases provide.  Also, the electronic resources can make students dependent, rather than independent researchers.  If the Internet is running very slowly or is down entirely, they do not know how to do research through the bound volumes.  Likewise, having become used to instantaneous information online, students do not have a high level of patience when searching for specific, harder-to-find material.  I often get reference questions from students who gave up searching after only a few minutes of effort.  This academic laziness fostered partly by the electronic resources probably carries over into the actual student paper writing process; having become accustomed to instantaneous access in research, they probably are tempted to write their papers without long reflection and care.

Online Resources Used in Conjunction with Other Resources

Some of the problems and concerns mentioned above are simply part of academic life in the 2000s and not easily remedied.  Online resources are certainly not going away anytime soon, and the instantaneous access they provide also part of modern research.  Plagiarism is a greater threat now than it was in times past, before the development of full-text online resources and especially online research paper download sites. 

There are, however, several things that teaching faculty can do to help the student research process and, in the process, probably receive better papers.  As noted in the above heading, online resources need to be “used in conjunction with other resources.”  I offer four suggestions that help keep online resources used properly and in balance with other resources.  First, having students to include several bound books as sources for their research papers is important.  While online books can be particularly helpful in searching for specific data within a book, they are not so helpful for reading in large blocks of material.  Students need the experience of reading and evaluating significant sections of text and then gleaning from that material good ideas for their papers.  Until the e-books are made downloadable onto Rocket E-Books or other such devices, only bound books can provide this reading experience.

Second, having students to use material from reference books can also be helpful.  Finding material in this collection requires a bit more effort and thinking skill than is shown in punching up a few words on a computer screen.  Reference books, with their organized, logical arrangement and their massive amount of information, require the researcher to analyze material in a thorough manner.  Reference books also teach patience, because while the truth may be out there, it often takes time to find it.

Third, having students to use journal articles from online databases in a rigorous manner is almost essential.  Most of our online resources are in the form of journal articles, and this is probably where the most abuse can take place.  One important element to periodical database requirements is to accept only articles from peer-reviewed journals.  Each of our journal databases have a feature where searching can be restricted only to these quality journals.  Also, it is important that students give some indication of having read the articles listed as sources in their papers.  One way to do this is to ask that they include highlighted or annotated photocopies of all articles used—another way is to ask that citations from the articles have annotations giving some indication that they are familiar with the material discussed in them. 

Fourth, having students supplement online databases articles with those from journals the library carries in microfiche or in bound formats is important.  While the journals from the online databases may be very good and are easily accessible, there are other journals not on the databases that the library carries in bound or microfiche that are as good or even better.  To illustrate this best, consider the field of chemistry.  The online databases, in order to carry 2,000 journals, cannot spend more than a few hundred dollars on any one title or it would make their database prohibitively expensive.  The better chemistry journals, though, cost between $1,000 and $6,000 a year.  When chemistry students do research on the databases, they find some helpful material; if they limit their searching to these, though, they miss all the best material available in our reasonable large bound chemistry collection.  This is true not only of chemistry, but also of all other disciplines.  Sometimes the better journals, such as The William and Mary Quarterly in history, simply do not choose to provide access through electronic means.  By requiring students to use the better materials the library continues to carry in non-electronic formats, professors are encouraging academic excellence in research papers.

So, is Rothenberg right?  Are the Internet, and online resources available through it, destructive to student research papers?  My answer is that they  potentially are very destructive.  However, when used properly, they are much more helpful than harmful.  Online resources open access to thousands more journals and books than were previously available in the library.  They allow precision searching that makes finding specific, necessary material much easier.  The stipulation, “used properly,” though, is an important one.  It means being used alongside excellent resources in bound and microform formats.  It means being used to search through as many resources as possible and selecting the best quality articles available.  Broadly stated, online resources being “used properly” means in a manner that is appropriate to good research, and thus that requires careful reading, stimulates creative thinking, and demands intellectual rigor.