Tuoi Tre vs TurnItIn

I've been helping students with their research papers lately and one of the biggest issues (both theirs and mine) has been citation. It's a whole new concept for them, but it is further compounded by the fact that while they would like to use good Vietnamese primary sources, those sources themselves are notoriously bad at citation.

To illustrate this, I decided to take an article from local newspaper, Tuoi Tre, from their English publication website and see how it stacked up against Turnitin.com, a plagiarism detection client.

Let's see how they did:

To start, their picture credit is faring better than most of their counterparts whose sole credit for photographers usually looks a little like this:

Oh! Now I know where to find it!

And a quick Google search reveals that indeed, Reuters does own this photo, which originally appeared here, although a credit to the photographer themselves would be a bit better (Benoit Tessier to be specific). Whether Tuoi Tre has a photo agreement with Reuters we will not worry about for now.

Now down to the article. The article itself does fine until we start getting into the final paragraphs where Tuoi Tre starts listing the dangers of shisha addiction. Here we now have 23% of the article, which is pulled directly from Quit Shisha, a website devoted to providing resources for overcoming shisha addiction.

They seem to try to rectify this in the last sentence.

The only problem is, despite the likely scientific backing for Quit Shisha's information, they are not a medical website.

So Tuoi Tre is committing several academic (and dare I say journalistic) errors here:

1. Not citing a source of information

2. Plagiarizing - taking the direct words of others without proper citation

3. Using sources that would fail analysis like CRAAP in which we evaluate primary sources (failing the Purpose category in my opinion)

If Tuoi Tre was in my class, they would get a 0 and a note to see me after class.