Wired on Friday: Electronic resources have become the main tool for students gathering information, according to an online survey conducted by the Electronic Publishing Initiative at Columbia University in New York (EPIC).

An online survey of college students was conducted in the spring and autumn 2003 semesters. Email invitations were sent to students at four-year colleges and universities across the United States. Some 1,233 individuals responded.

About 99 per cent said that they used electronic resources for their schoolwork and were far more dependent on electronic resources than print resources.

Respondents said they were most dependent on the World Wide Web, followed by email and library-sponsored electronic databases at their schools.

The results show that undergraduate students, in particular, are heavily dependent on the Web.

Graduate students are more likely to use library-sponsored electronic resources. While the physical library is still an important destination for students to retrieve articles and books, undergraduates are more likely to use the library as a study space, for the computing facilities or for internet access.

Students said that they learnt about school-related electronic resources primarily through their library website (31.5 per cent) and through their professors (27.1 per cent). internet search engines (13.7 per cent) do not play a large role in informing students about academic electronic databases. When going online to do work for a course, students are more likely to use an internet search engine (46.5 per cent) than to go to a library-sponsored electronic resource (21.9 per cent). However, almost one-third of the students reported that they use both methods equally.

Kate Wittenberg, director of the Electronic Publishing Initiative at Columbia said: "Libraries are generally doing an excellent job of providing digital collections for research and education. In fact, research libraries have provided tremendous leadership in this field."

However, she believes, "students' research habits, and their preference for using Google and other search engines as their first stop rather than the library, is part of a more general cultural and social change and I am not sure that there is much that libraries, or anyone else, can do to change this pattern".

This dependency on electronic resources can be either a positive or negative development, she said, depending on whether scholarly and educational publishers respond by developing high-quality digital materials that serve the students' needs for content that is accessible through the internet.

"If they are able to develop research and searching techniques that lead them to high-quality and appropriate content (and if that content is available through publishers' efforts), their education and work can benefit enormously," Ms Wittenberg said. "If not, they can end up using material that provides them with incomplete or inaccurate information."

There is no doubt that the issue of plagiarism is causing a headache for many educational institutions worldwide. Consider, for example, the case of the student at the University at Canterbury who admitted downloading material from the internet for his degree and is suing his university for negligence.

Michael Gunn, a 21-year-old English student, claims his university should have warned him his actions were against the regulations. He was told just before his final exams that he would get no marks for his course work. The university discovered he was plagiarizing when it began to run a pilot program of plagiarism-detection software to analyse students' work.

Turnitin.com, a California-based company that was formed in 1996 when a group of researchers at University of California at Berkeley created a series of computer programs to monitor the recycling of research papers in their large undergraduate classes, offers a plagiarism prevention service.

Over 3,500 institutions license its plagiarism prevention system, including hundreds of high schools, and Turnitin.com can deter plagiarism for nearly six million students and educators in 50 countries. During peak usage, 20,000 papers are submitted daily.

The software compares a student's essay to all text publicly available on the internet, to books and academic journals and to the millions of essays already turned in to the service. Within five minutes, it can issue a report that highlights each passage that matches another source.

Plagiarism is not only a university problem but is also occurring in high school. A 2001 national survey of 4,500 high-school students conducted by Rutgers' Management Education Centre in New Jersey found that 75 per cent of them engage in serious cheating and more than half have plagiarised work they found on the internet.

A 2002 survey of 12,000 high-school students conducted by the Josephson Institute of Ethics showed that students who admitted they cheated on an exam at least once in the past year jumped from 61 per cent in 1992 to 74 per cent in 2002.

"I have heard from faculty and teachers that plagiarism is an increasing problem because many students do not understand the appropriate use of cutting and pasting that is so easy to do in the digital environment," Ms. Wittenberg said.

"They are trying to spend some time in class teaching students about the appropriate uses of quotes, the importance of full citation, the potential dangers of cutting and pasting material into their papers."