Reflective Essay: Plagiarism During World War I

Students spend a great deal of time writing essays. One of the greatest challenges that arises when writing an essay is finding the evidence to support the thesis. As the amount of information available increases it becomes difficult for students to identify reliable sources; thus, leading to plagiarism. The issues of plagiarism, copying, and improper citations can be seen in two research papers I wrote. Due to the large amounts of information available and the lack of education on how to navigate through it it has become easy for students to succumb to the temptation of plagiarism.

Plagiarism is something that teachers constantly lecture students about. Every high school has an honors pledge and every college has a plagiarism policy. I

My paper was about the World War I memorial and the differences between American and European commemoration of World War I. All of the sources I used were scholarly, peer reviewed articles from a database. I chose these sources because they were scholarly, had the least bias, and were written by authors that were knowledgeable on the topic. However, in the process of writing my paper I needed information that was not found in the scholarly articles. For example, I wanted to know the casualty count for the Battle of the Somme. Since that is not something I knew I had to google it, and I ended up using Wikipedia to get some information. However, despite the fact that the information I was discussing is not common knowledge I did not cite any sources. In Howard, Moore, and Rodrigue’s study they found that, 97 percent of papers“contained non-common-knowledge information” (Howard et al, 182) but the information was not attributed to a source. The reason I did not cite the source I got the information from is because I used Wikipedia which is an unreliable source. I thought that if I cited it my argument would weaken. As McClure states that students who use unreliable source “material for their essays refrain from discussing these sources in such ways that would force concessions, force them to wrestle with inconsistent data, [or] inaccuracies or biases” (64). I agree with McClure’s deduction, when I was researching Wikipedia was an easy way to acquire information but it was an unreliable source which made me hesitant to cite it. I knew that if I did not cite the source it would be grounds for plagiarism; however, if I did cite it my argument could be weakened. This is a problem I have when writing many essays, websites, like Wikipedia, allow writers to get general information, that may not be found in a research article, quickly. However, since many