A Northeastern University student might spend more time reading student papers than most professors do.
The student, Dustin R. Turin, devotes a couple of hours each morning to look at papers sent in by students from across the country, and even so, he has a 50-paper-high pile waiting for his attention.
Mr. Turin runs an online academic journal of student work, Student Pulse, that publishes students’ work and pays them for it. He got the idea after thinking about all the papers he had written during college that nobody but his professors would ever see. He felt it was a pity to have worked on so many interesting essays that never lived past the day they were due, and he realized that plenty of other students probably felt the same way.
“Not every paper necessarily deserves to be published,” he said. “But some people are really writing great papers.”
Mr. Turin, who is an international-affairs major with a background in Web design, spent about a month developing Student Pulse, which first went online in October. Since then, he has received about 300 submissions from undergraduate and graduate students and has published about half of those. He gets an average of about three submissions per day, which he and two other student editors review.
Though the student editors admit they are not experts in every field, they say they look for high-quality references, proper grammar and style, and fundamentally good writing to decide what to accept.
“Usually by the end of the introduction, I have a pretty good idea of whether we’re going to be able to publish it,” Mr. Turin said.
Mr. Turin also enlisted a Northeastern business student to help with accounting and other administrative matters. Student Pulse sells ads, which allows it to pay its contributors each time their article gets a thousand hits. Mr. Turin would not disclose how much Student Pulse pays, but he said, “I don’t think anybody is under the illusion that they’re going to get rich off of two articles.”
“We do it to be fair,” he added.
Student Pulse has published papers from students at institutions all around the country, though so far many of the institutions are located in Boston. Mr. Turin said there are not a significant number of submissions from his own university.
Contributors send in English papers more than anything else. Most of the papers are undergraduate work, but Mr. Turin said that there have been “a fair amount” of graduate student submissions as well. “When we do get graduate submissions, those oftentimes get featured,” Mr. Turin said. People even send in their master’s theses.
Mr. Turin said that he thinks most people who visit Student Pulse are “incidental visitors” who found the Web site through a search engine. Google News picks up Student Pulse, which brings in many of its visitors, so the articles often appear in search results right next to an article from The New York Times, The Washington Post, or Time magazine.
“Look at the audience that this student is now connecting with,” he said. “Their name is sitting there right next to some famous author or some famous journalist.”
So far, Student Pulse has turned just a small profit. Mr. Turin said he doesn’t think he’ll ever live off the money from the Web site, but he would like to see it grow.
“I think it’s a valuable resource for people,” he said, “and if we can make a little money on the side, that’s a great goal.”
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10 Responses to Northeastern Undergraduate Starts Online Journal of Student Work
charriss - February 2, 2010 at 7:52 am
If he pays them for their essays, does that mean he owns the rights to them? It sounds like a great way to collect student essays for a paper mill.
sltinerella - February 2, 2010 at 10:32 am
What is to keep students across the country from helping themselves to these papers? Do faculty “google” student work?
mhick255 - February 2, 2010 at 10:48 am
I think Student Pulse should be more clear about the ownership, copyright, and potential use of the papers. Assuming, however, that this ISN’T some sort of dastardly plan to undermine the very foundation of American academia, it sounds like a great idea. Lots of good writing and research is being produced by undergrads, and no one but their professors ever sees it.
esselan - February 2, 2010 at 1:13 pm
Oh please. What is to keep students across the country from helping themselves to any content they find online, including that from peer-reviewed journals? That’s a flimsy argument against a wonderful enterprise such as this.
janeway6 - February 2, 2010 at 2:35 pm
For Katie
paievoli - February 3, 2010 at 6:42 am
We have been doing this in my grad classes for years. All of my grad students put their papers online and those that don’t want the work available to everyone outside the class are password protecting their blogs. At the end of the year we are exporting the student blogs via xml so that I can import them into my blog for future student use. If you are not “googling” the student work you find suspicious you are fooling yourself. Students have been copying content since the Book of Kells. Technology just makes it easier today. Let’s try to embrace change and move forward, please.patrickaievoli.wordpress.com
arrive2__net - February 4, 2010 at 3:27 am
I think another good aspect of the Student Pulse may be that they can give some students an example of what a really good paper may look like. Hopefully it won’t establish unrealistic expectations in students. The papers published will temselves be exposed to scutiny … and to the extent that they are available online they could serve indirectly as a sort of counter-plagerism database. Bernard SchusterArrive2.net
andrewbonamici - February 6, 2010 at 8:00 pm
I’m all for identifying high quality student work and making it accessible, but much prefer to see institutions take responsibility for this. Our library publishes both undergraduate and graduate works in an online repository; see for exampleStudent submission of class projects must be sanctioned by an academic department or program.Repositories in .edu domains are trusted resources that get high page rank in google, especially Google Scholar. In regard to ownership, authors in our institutional repository retain full copyright:”…Authors who submit their work to Scholars’ Bank retain the copyright to their work, unless they explicitly give it away to a third party. The University of Oregon Libraries do not seek or claim copyright on any of the works submitted to Scholars’ Bank….”The default terms in the StudentPulse license appear to point in the opposite direction:”…all items/information posted or uploaded to StudentPulse.com are the property of StudentPulse.com (in accordance to applicable copyright agreements).”I’d be concerned about this unless there’s a way to negotiate a more favorable “applicable copyright agreement.”
andrewbonamici - February 6, 2010 at 8:05 pm
Sorry, the links to our repository didn’t show up in my last comment; google “Scholars’ Bank” if you want to see how it works.
studentpulse - December 1, 2010 at 9:50 pm
After seeing these comments, albeit a bit late, I wanted to offer some clarification to some of the concerns that were mentioned:
1.) Copyright: Students retain FULL ownership and copyright of their work. Student Pulse is granted permission to republish it.
2.) Payments: Students are paid based on how frequently their work is read. Therefore, if an article is very popular, a student will be paid more frequently. It should also be noted that payments are offered out of a sense of fairness and respect to the original authors. The primary motivation for most submissions is to have the work read and published. Most students would submit even if no payment was offered.
3.) Plagiarism: @arrive2__net makes an excellent point. Putting this work online does in fact create a counter plagiarism database. Even just searching for a phrase from any one paper will almost certainly return the original. So long as professors take the proper precautions — as they should — this makes their job far easier. Anyone who copies from Student Pulse, just as if they were to copy from any other online source, takes a perilous risk.
As a final note, I’ll mention the highly positive reception Student Pulse has received from students. We get ecstatic emails every week from individuals excited to have stumbled upon a place where they can share their work in a meaningful way. Many articles are read and shared by many thousands of people — and that’s why Student Pulse exists.
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Dustin Turin
Student Pulse