Using data to improvestudent research

EasyBib is an automatic bibliography composer.

Students use it to cite sources for their

research.

We teach information literacy.

18%of all student papers include

plagiarism1

Source: (1) TurnItIn; (2) Both Sides Now: Librarians Looking at Information Literacy from High School and College.

50%likelihood of using a credible vs.

non-credible source1

4%increase in the use of paper

mills and cheating sites1

~16%of students are adequately

prepared for college.2

That’s how we felt too..

The problem is becoming bigger.

Unprepared students make for unprepared

adults.It’s not just students who plagiarize:

•Pal Schmitt, former president of Hungary•German education minister•Jayson Blair (former New York Times writer)•Jonah Lehrer, journalist and author•Fareed Zakaria (reporter, author, host)

We are in the right place to figure it out.

Over half of all students in the US (40M)

Over half a billion

citations

We asked ourselves the following questions:

•What are students using in their research?

•How good are their sources?•How can we help them?

We started with the basics.

_gaq.push([ 'citations._trackEvent', citationTitle, citationPublisher, citationId]);

Here’s what we found.Top sources 2010

•Wikipedia•Google1.The New York Times2.CIA World Factbook3.Oracle Thinkquest4.Buzzle5.US BLS6.Dictionary.com7.CDC8.PBS9.eHow

Source: EasyBib Google Analytics Oct 2010-Nov 2010 data.

What could we do?•Warn them when their source’s

credibility is in question•Analyze the quality of their full

bibliography•Make it easier to not plagiarize•Suggest better sources

Define credibility.

Improve citation quality

Gave students access to their own analytics

To combat plagiarism, we built an audit trail for

notes

So after all this...Does it blend (tm) ?

1. Wikipedia2. Bio.com3. History.com4. PBS5. Mayo Clinic6. CDC7. The New York Times8. BBC9. CNN10.WebMD11.US BLS

•Wikipedia still on top, but ...

•No content farms, no Google..

•WebMD is questionable, but its credibility can be argued for.

Source: Apr-May 2013 Google Analytics data

We have to admit, it’s getting better...

We have to admit, it’s getting better...

Help students find better sources

How does the Research engine currently work?

Cloudant (CouchDB)MySQLLucene/Solr

Slow, asynchronous, lots of moving parts.

Starting to do a bit more

StatsD::increment($metrics);

$response = $rediska->publish( array('realtime'), $citation );

There’s a lot more we can do, and data will help us.

Cloudant Search•Full-text search integrated into Cloudant

•Lucene syntax

•Indexing is easy

function(doc){ index("title", doc.title, {"store": "yes"});}•Grouping of sources via chained map-reduce

map: function(doc){ if (doc.title){ emit({"title": doc.title}, 1); }}reduce: _sumdbcopy: citationGroup------map: function(doc){ if (doc.title && doc.key.title){ emit(doc.value, doc.key.title); }}

Live data analysis. Crowdsourcing.

•Use Cloudant Search to power feedback on sources (# of times cited in real time, quality of bibliographies derived from)

•Allow users to submit their own credibility evaluations and aggregate results

SourceRank!

Credibility weighting + crowdsourcing

Synchronous & realtime via Cloudant Search

Value nodes based on nearest neighbors

And other things...

Driving growth

We have the largest UGC

citation set. Making this

searchable creates a “moat.”

The more people that use

EasyBib, the better the tool

becomes.

What about other data analytics tools?

Too stretched to learn more complex tools (looking for easy answers)

Costs (GA is free!)

EMR, Hadoop, Redshift, Cloudant Search: This is what’s next.

Questions?

Darshan Somashekar@darshan

darshan@imagineeasy.com