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Daily News

May 28, 2016

Method of Research

The Citation Project

The researchers collected 174 students do when they write and

to provide this information for
papers from 16 universities
administrators and professors.
that were different in
geography, academic standing,
To do this, the researchers
communities, and religious
coded
the papers to identify the
affiliation.
citations and then figured out
what types of citations they
These papers were carefully
were.
chosen so that they would have
a diverse range of students to
study. The researchers only
took papers that were 7+ so
that they would have a good
amount of citations to work
with. In addition to that, only
papers with verified sources
were used.
Their project was called The
Citation Project and the goal of
this project is to see what

Do you really understand

what youre reading? Or
are you just copying?

This study, the Citation Project, is an

expansion of a previous smaller scale
citation study that was only based on one
institution. The previous study only studied
18 papers from the same institution
whereas the Citation Project collected
papers from multiple institutions with 100+
papers that had identifiable sources.
The researchers saw a need in further
study because none of the citations in the
18 papers studied had citations that were
summarized. This raised the question of
whether students are just citing sentences
or if they actually digest what they read.
The goal of the Citation Project is to see
whether writing teachers and librarians
teaching students how to use sources
really have an effect on them. Teachers
and librarians are always emphasizing how
important citation is to prevent plagiarism,
but do students understand? Also, this
study can provide an overall idea of what
students are doing when theyre writing.

Ways to Cite
Direct Quoting

Paraphrasing

Quoting a piece of writing

word-for-word by using
quotations to cite it.

Rewording the
sentence/phrase that you
are citing.

Patch-Writing
Rephrasing a phrase using
similar syntax/style as the
source.

Summarizing
Reducing a passage by half
its length by only including
the main points in your own
words.

Findings from the Study

The study showed that students are usually quoting text directly,
which the researchers believe shows that they do not fully
understand the text to be able to summarize it. Also, the study found
out that most citations are found within the first few pages of the
source, which means they probably have not read the whole article
to fully understand the article. This also suggests that students are
just citing because its a requirement as opposed to citing to support
their argument.

What does it mean to digest the

text?
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Only 6% of citations found in these 174 papers were summarized

instead of just direct quoting, paraphrasing, or patch writing. From
1000+ citations, 67% was taken from the first 2 pages of the
sources. This shows that either these students cant fully
comprehend the articles they are using or they choose not to.

Source: Sentence-Mining: Uncovering the Amount of Reading and Reading Comprehension in College Writers Researched Writing