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　　"Man came by to hook up my cable TV

　　We settled in for the night my baby and me

　　We switched 'round and 'round 'til half-past dawn

　　There was fifty-seven channels and nothin' on."

　　In this humorous song, Bruce Springsteen is mocking a situation that present-day media users know all too well: Just because there is a lot of information out there, there is no guarantee that anything you find will be true or useful.

　　This glut of information, especially in cyberspace, poses serious problems for serious researchers. How is one to determine the validity of resources on the Internet? Take Wikipedia, for example, which describes itself as "an open source web-based online encyclopedia." The site continues: "Today Wikipedia includes 15 million freely usable articles in over two hundred languages worldwide, and content from a million registered user accounts and countless anonymous contributors." Ay, there's the rub. Who are these "anonymous contributors"? Why won't they tell us their names? Is it because they are simply too modest to boast about their talents? Or is it because they are making up most of what they write?

　　The ease with which professional writers can access information from the Internet also leads us-on too many occasions-to suspect the veracity of their output. More and more often, we hear horror stories of journalists who have had to resign their posts because they were caught plagiarizing from another news reporter's work. In recent years, for example, a journalist at the Seattle Times newspaper was accused of inserting paragraphs that he himself did not write into an article under his own byline. When confronted, the journalist replied in his defense, "It was obviously a cut-and-paste job; I probably used a number of wire stories and other sources and carelessly squished them all together when I wrote the story."

　　Teachers know all too well the hazards of allowing their students to do research on the Web. Too many students seem to think that "cutting and pasting" a section of someone else's work into your own paper is just "paraphrasing" the original source. In 2003, Donald L. McCabe, the founder of the Center for Academic Integrity (C.A.I.) at Duke University, estimated that 40% of college students admitted to plagiarizing their assignments. No doubt that number is even higher now.

　　So what can be done about this unchecked flood of useless (and sometimes outright false) information? The answer is clear, "Researcher beware." We need to become more discerning readers and consumers of information, open to all aspects of a particular topic, unwilling to accept statements as fact until we can verify them for ourselves, and suspicious of anything that is too popular, too accepted, too good to be true.