Student plagiarism is not always recognizable by a very high quality of prose writing. (This presupposes that the source stolen from is itself well-written--not always a good bet in academic publishing.) The best student plagiarists carefully revise the prose they steal in order to make it sound *less* polished. I once had a student plagiarize a complex Lacanian discussion of Hitchcock--by removing all references to Lacan or psychoanalysis. Amazingly enough, it still worked as an analysis of the film--which only makes one wonder why the references to psychoanalysis needed to be there in the first place. In that case I knew the source. However I've also had luck by taking distinctive, unusual words and searching for them in a web search engine, rather than an article database. At this point, lots of flap copy taken from books is on-line, and so it's quite possible to find a source even when the whole source isn't online. Sincerely, Edward R. O'Neill Bryn Mawr College ---- Screen-L is sponsored by the Telecommunication & Film Dept., the University of Alabama: http://www.tcf.ua.edu