Fake Science Papers

The Fake Science Paper

The papers linked below were written by sophomores at the end of their I-Search assignment. The job was to follow a model of a "science paper" taken from an academic journal at Bowdoin College, making up all the information except the writer's own name, and slavishly following both the layout and the conceptual structure of the model. The I-Search follows a modified MLA stylesheet, and one of the purposes of this assignment was to provide students with some quick experience in using another stylesheet, quite different from the MLA, whose rules they were required to deduce from the model article.

The papers were graded based on one of two possible criteria: either the paper 1) made a satirical point or 2) it presented a serious point as seriously and "scientifically" as it could. Papers that were silly without an underlying point were acceptable, but could receive a grade no higher than a B.

The papers are posted here, however, not to display the students' achievement or to illustrate the assignment, but to provide research teachers and librarians with an in-house illustration of why you can't believe everything you read on the Web. The sophomores who wrote these papers all learned how to "strip back" a URL (stripping back, for example, from http://www.mta75.org/english/effects/childrensmovies.html to http://www.mta75.org/english/effects/) to find out more about the "bona fides" of the author and publishing institution. Because the students tend to take at face value whatever a web page tells them, making a judgment about the credibility of a web page is one of the most difficult things we now have to teach in the research process.

The papers were mostly exported into html out of ClarisWorks and have been edited only by the writers.