Weaving a Web of . . . Research

First came toll-free telephone numbers. Then came the fax. Now there’s the Internet, with online ordering and e-mail delivery. Through all those changes, though, one element has remained the same: On the other end of the line is a desperate student looking for help on a term paper.

“We’ve become even more international,” says Barton Lowe, owner of West L.A.’s Research Assistance, which this year celebrates 30 years of funneling research reports to students and businesses. “The Internet has made the world a much smaller place. We’re getting contacted from all over the world.”

Scores of Web sites offer free access to student-run archives of term papers--the kind of collective action the Students for a Democratic Society never envisioned--and custom research, for a fee.

Some offer no illusions about their intent. Chuckiii’s Home Page (https://www.gate.net/~chuckiii/cheats.htm) links to Web sites that offer research, archived papers and “paper swaps,” where students file work they’ve done for others to consult. Other sites--such as https://www.elee.calpoly.edu/~ercarlso/papers.htm and https://www.essay.org--offer free archived essays.

Students using such services, though, walk an ethical tightrope. Submitting a bought or downloaded report for class credit constitutes plagiarism at most schools and can lead to dismissal. And many of the Web sites carry warnings that the material should be used as a basis for further research.

“There’s only one way to do a research paper: introduction, body and conclusion,” Lowe says. “Our license by the state of California says [if a customer is] a student, we have to inform them they have to incorporate the material in their own work, and sign a waiver saying he will incorporate the material into his own work.”

How often students cross that ethical line is impossible to measure. Lowe said he and several other report-sellers recently beat back a legal challenge by an East Coast university when some 80 students to whom he had sold reports did not turn them in for credit.

Lowe said the incident buttresses his contention that he simply offers a guidance service through his collection of reports, at https://www.research -assistance.com/cgi-bin/hazel-cgi/hazel.cgi.

“We provide condensed, concise information on thousands of topics,” said Lowe, who estimated that 75% of his customers are students. “We’re a library, for those who wish to come in and just peruse through our reports on different subjects for free.”