Page numbers

[Reid Gilbert]

Although I second Ric's concern that a student seeking page numbers for an
article might be padding a bibliography, I also want to raise one other
possibility which those of us who teach need to consider.

More and more students are finding articles in online databases and
downloading these as full-text. I'm thinking of data bases like CBCA
(Canadian Business and Current Affairs which has absorbed indeces like CPI,
Canadian Periodical Index)and the quite marvelous new FullText Elite of
EbscoHost which indexes some 3200 periodicals, including scholarly journals,
and presents some 70% of these in full-text.  __CTR__ is indexed in
EbscoHost.   These are, of course, a wonderful resource, but a major problem
is that the downloaded full text does not indicate the original page numbers.
 Students only learn the number of pages and the page on which the article
began in the particular Vol/Issue of the journal/magazine.

This means that students can't make proper internal citations (MLA) or
footnotes.  It also means that citations in a List of Works Cited or
Bibliography  must be awkward online citations.  MLA and APA are both in
process of creating new entry models for such online sources but they are, at
the moment, rather awkward and incomplete.

I don't understand why those who input the articles can't indicate page
numbers, but at present they do not.

As the www and electronic journals become more and more the resource of
choice of students doing undergraduate research, problems with these sources
will begin to affect all of us who teach.  I encourage my students to use
online sources for scholarly journals (and I include __CTR__) but I
discourage them from using general web sites which do not have some
accreditation. An online journal is simply a reproduction of an article which
has already undergone jury or editorial scrutiny, but a miscellaneous web
site can often give poor or downright incorrect information.  I've had some
funny "quotations" from such unofficial web sites, but I'm also worried about
the possibility of racist or sexist, or otherwise biased web sites being
incorporated into essays by naive students who believe anything in print or
online must be of value and of equal value to all other sources.  I think it
is even more important than it used to be to teach students to evaluate
sources, and especially those found on
the internet.

Just some "teacherly" thoughts.


- Reid