| Unfortunately when you use a search engine to search
for these sites, they pop up as advertisers on your results page!
Google (recommend Advanced Search)
Metacrawler or Ixquick (be very careful not to use the companies
that are advertising their term papers ("sponsored links" or "sponsored
results")
- term papers (phrase) or termpapers
- plagiarism, also follow link at top of page to Free Term Papers
- research papers (phrase)
Yahoo searches the terms below and takes you right to Shopping!
Even gives you a direct link to a topic. In fact many of these sites
are Yahoo sponsors.
- term paper or termpaper
- research paper
- lecture notes
Other search engines result in a much higher retrieval rate, but
many of those tend to be academic institutions' catalogs and handbooks.
Google in advanced search mode allows you to search only by domain,
so you might "exclude" .edu domains.
Recently lecture notes have hit the Internet, and many are written
in essay form. Using Google or Ask, search for lecture
notes as a phrase. Even lecture notes that are written in outline
form could be quickly converted to text form, such as Professor
Campbell's notes on Poe at Gonzaga University. Study24-7.com, Versity,
and StudentU, formerly the three big ones, seem to be gone. For a slightly
dated article on the topic, see "Notetakers turn profit." by Ben
Romano. (Oregon Daily Emerald, 23 Nov. 1999; last viewed 5 Aug.
2003)
For an article on the topic of lecture notes, see Prof. Mathieu
Deflem's paper at Purdue University.
There are also a number of articles on the topic in the Chronicle
of Higher Education, some listed in the bibliography.
Most of the paper and essay mills link to others. Some are collections of essay mills.
The Paper Store offers a number of sites that are discipline-specific,
as do the Paper Experts, Inc. and Termpaper Experts, which seem
to be the same Canadian company. Both of these companies charge
for papers. And both sites list other companies. Makes you wonder
if they might all be owned by the same parent company?
There are, by conservative guess, at least tens of thousands of
sites available from which students can download papers and assignments,
so no comprehensive list is possible. Peggy Bates and Margaret Fain
at Coastal Carolina University have compiled a lengthy list of sites,
and can be found at http://www.coastal.edu/library/presentations/papermil.html .
Since nearly all the sites explicitly state that the papers are
not to be turned in as the student's work, they make no guarantees
for quality. Many sites are supported by advertising, in some cases
by other sites which may be owned by the same people.
Term paper sites that accept donations often require the writer
to sign over the copyright to the term paper site, and also to agree
never to take legal action against the site.
One might not think of some sites
as being a termpaper "mill," e.g. scribd.com, which is a site for creative original work, but also includes copyrighted materials illegally. None of the works posted on this site will show up in a browser search. Sometimes faculty or departments will post their student or faculty papers on a web site, like at the University of Oregon, to be easily copied. Blogs can also be a source of creative works. Associations often post presentations from meetings. As more and more institutions, associations, and individuals choose open access, more and more sources will be available to be plagiarized.
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