Combating Plagiarism: A Hands-On Guide for Librarians, Teachers, and Students

Enlightening if a bit dry, this guide to fighting plagiarism emphasizes that our ability to share information quickly online makes using and crediting sources during research challenging. Darr urges librarians to explicitly teach middle and high school students what plagiarism is, why it matters, and how to avoid it. She stresses that librarians are information literacy experts and encourages them to collaborate with subject-area teachers to help students develop and refine their research and citation skills. Unfortunately, the text alternates between directly addressing librarians, teachers, and students, sometimes even within the same chapter. As a result, it’s a bit unwieldy to use; organizing the book into three sections, one for each targeted audience, would have been more helpful. Chapters focusing on specific skills, such as paraphrasing and micro-paraphrasing, understanding and formatting citations, and using digital images, are most likely to be of use to librarians, and contain specific examples with explanations. Several appendixes, including MLA, APA, and Chicago style guides; practice exercises with answer keys; and lesson plans, may also be beneficial.