After establishing a clear understanding of university policy on plagiarism, instructors should review the Internet to investigate the scope of material on the topics they will assign students to research. Instructors who take time to review this material will be more inclined to identify information that has been plagiarized. In addition, we need to teach our students how to evaluate web sites more critically. All too often, the material we believe students have misquoted is actually presented on the web page as the original source. Furthermore, most web pages do not contain citation information we use in traditional sources.
Web documents have no page numbers, and in many cases list no author or publication date.
Often the content of a web page may be entirely transcribed from another source without proper citation. One quick review of the Internet demonstrates evidence of several examples of this practice. As a result, students may innocently misquote information because they did not know the content on the web page was plagiarized. Most students who are beginning researchers simply do not possess the background or knowledge of primary references to make critical assessments of information. Hence, it is our duty to determine the level of our students' research skills before expecting them to assess the validity of other references.