Trained in literature departments for the humanistic interpretation of texts, we had a lot to learn. Some of it we learned by direct instruction and some by studying methodological texts. The rest we learn as we go along, through trial and error.

Now we’ve gathered thousands of student texts from 16 U.S. colleges. (Our website says 15, but as soon as we can catch our breath, we need to update it; a 16th college came on board this summer, bringing their own researchers with them!) This summer a whole team of people is finding sources, reading student papers and their sources, and coding the relationships between the students’ citations and the sources they cite. That’s the fieldwork. We have a small grant that allows us to pay a few graduate students this summer, but for most of us this is volunteer work, scholarship to which we feel ineluctably drawn.

Sandra Jamieson and I are tracking, compiling, processing, and analyzing the results of the fieldwork. That’s the lab work. The first three of these–tracking, compiling, and processing–are my job this summer. And it *is* drudgery! I am amazed by how many hours and how much concentration it takes to do this “lab” work.

Yet it is exciting drudgery. As the movement of data among researchers is tracked, marked-up papers are PDFed and stored in accessible online folders, and spreadsheets are assembled with data for the SPSS database, I unavoidably feel excited. We are moving toward a goal, and the goal is one that we all count as very important. We expect to produce the kind of results that can profoundly aid teachers and curriculum-builders. We are too much in the throes of the fieldwork and lab work right now to see that light ahead of us, but we know it’s there. And it keeps me moving through “the drudgery of the lab.” Now I have a better understanding of how scientists are motivated, and why they find their work rewarding.

As the site explains, we have a report of the preliminary research that will be published in Writing and Pedagogy. Yet the website feels even more of a milestone. We’ve come far enough that we’re able to explain the project with enough specificity and brevity that a website is possible, and that’s a huge accomplishment.

As the website also explains, there are a number of people involved in the research. Sandra and I are the principal researchers, the ones responsible for the overall design and momentum. But lots of people are already involved, as contributing coders of text, as site hosts, and as leaders of ancillary inquiry.

More to come! Check out the site, and let us know what you think.

Instead of focusing on students’ citation of sources, educators should attend to the more fundamental question of how well students understand their sources and whether they are able to write about them without appropriating language from the source. Of the eighteen student research texts we studied, none included summary of a source, raising questions about the students’ critical reading practices. Instead of summary, which is highly valued in academic writing and is promoted in composition textbooks, the students paraphrased, copied from, or patchwrote from individual sentences in their sources. Writing from individual sentences places writers in constant jeopardy of working too closely with the language of the source and thus inadvertently plagiarizing; and it also does not compel the writer to understand the source.

Do check out this new journal. With the field of writing studies growing at its current rate, the discipline needs new venues for scholarly publication. Here’s one, and I can testify to its rigorous, thorough peer review system. Very promising.