Emily Gover

Here at EasyBib, we research, discuss, and write a lot about how students conduct research in high school and college. We are constantly analyzing data from our 42 million users to see how they approach research, and using that data to improve our services.

Research shows that the overwhelming majority (96%) of students use Google in course-related contexts. Unfortunately, this is probably an unsurprising statistic for many of you. School and college librarians play an integral role in student academic success, yet students (and, from what we’ve heard, even some fellow faculty members!) don’t take fundamental research skills very seriously.

Here are just a few (out of many!) reasons why students should rely on their awesome teacher-librarians instead of the ubiquitous search engine, and consider basic information literacy skills and academic integrity as a natural part of their research, writing, and education.
Plagiarism goes beyond the classroom.

Through analyzing our user data, many of our student users are not even aware that they should cite paraphrased sources. Yikes! Students may not care about citing their sources now, because they believe that once they graduate, no one will care about whether or not they included a citation in their research papers, anyway. Explaining to students that plagiarism is a serious issue that has negatively impacted many professional lives can put the harsh consequences of plagiarism into a clear perspective.

We recently created a list on the EasyBib blog about celebrity plagiarism accusations. It’s likely that students have more interest in stories about rock stars and actors than, say, a politician dropping out of a Senate race. Placing plagiarism into a context that students can relate to can help them not only understand the consequences of committing plagiarism, but also see that acknowledging other people’s work is a lifelong practice.