The Citation project

The (North American) Citation project "is a multi-institution research project responding to educators’ concerns about plagiarism and the teaching of writing.... Our team systematically studies student papers that were produced in college writing courses and that draw on sources. Our purpose is to describe how student writers use their sources." They analyse student papers to see how students have used sources: "quotation, summary, paraphrase, or patchwriting". They give a detailed account of their methods. In analysing the student papers they went to the original sources to see how they had been used. The first phase concentrated on first year undergraduate writing classes, but the second phase will include a wider range of papers. The results of the initial pilot study are reported in:
Howard, R., Rodrigue, T. and Serviss, T.(2010) “Writing from sources, writing from sentences.” Writing and pedagogy, 2(2), 177-192. http://writing.byu.edu/static/documents/org/1176.pdf
and show e.g. that patchwriting (taking some text and changing bits here and there) and paraphrasing were very common, but summarising (which would require more effort and understanding) was not. The website is at http://site.citationproject.net/
Photo by Sheila Webber: Interior of a house in the Kulturen Open Air Museum, Lund, Sweden, May 2013