Checking references and figures before they enter academic work

Integrity is documented at the institutional level as a rule concerning declaration and at the national level as a rule concerning examination conditions. This record documents what integrity consists in where neither rule applies. The practice is a verification step performed by the person who will sign the work.

Two features distinguish it from a general disposition towards caution. The first is that respondents specify what is verified. References and citations are singled out, which corresponds precisely to the failure that the same respondents describe elsewhere, where fabricated sources are identified as the most damaging kind of error. The second is that the practice is stated as invariant. Respondents describe verifying on every occasion rather than verifying when the stakes are high.

The teacher-side counterpart of the same practice is recorded separately, since it concerns material a teacher releases to students rather than work a student submits. Read together, the two records indicate that verification occurs at both ends of the same transaction, and the second report treats fact-checking and critical use as a value shared across groups rather than as a student obligation.

Reported by the third round as a theme raised by a large share of respondents, and corroborated by the second round, which records fact-checking and critical use as commonly reported across all groups.