Plagiarism Detection

Search Engines

Internet search engines can be used as tools to identify plagiarism.  Identify awkward or unique statements and search for suspect phrases.  Put a piece of the suspected text in quotes and the engines should find any page containing this text.

  2learn.ca allows searches via individual engines such as Google,
     Yahoo, Excite, Lycos, Northern Light, etc.
     http://www.2learn.ca/mapset/SafetyNet/plagiarism/sleuth/StringSearchnew.html

  AllTheWeb
     http://www.alltheweb.com

  Alta Vista claims to index its full context of each page.
     http://www.altavista.com

  Metacrawler searches other engines for keywords.
     http://www.metacrawler.com/info.metac/dog/index.htm

 

Detection Software:

Plagiarism detecting software has become available with the growing problem of plagiarism in higher education.  They check submitted papers against what are available on databases of papers and essays on the Web.

Free Software 

      PlagiServe
    
http://www.plagiserve.com
     Searches a database containing 90,000 student term papers
     papers, essays and Cliff Notes for duplicates of the paper, and provide
     evidence of plagiarism.  It generates a comprehensive report on up-
     loaded manuscript in 24 hours.

     WCopyfind  
     http://plagiarism.phys.virginia.edu
     Examines a collection of document files.  It extracts the
     text of those documents and looks through them for matching words
     in phrases of a specified minimum length.  When it finds two files that
     share enough words in those phrases, copyfind generates html report
     files.  These reports contain the document text with the matching 
     phrases underlined.

  Fee-based Software

     CopyCatch is a program that ensures swift and accurate identification of 
     shared material and can be used for detection, investigation and 
     instruction.

     EduTie scans the database of over 250,000 student-written academic
     works to look for possible sources of unreferenced information.

     Essay Verification Engine (EVE) allows professors to run student papers
     through a computer program that checks for material copied off the 
     internet or for collusion among students.

     Glatt Plagiarism Services, Inc.  This program is typically used in academic
     institutions or in the legal profession for cases of copyright infringement.

     Jplag is typically used to detect the copying of programs in programming
     education.

     LexiBot is capable to search the deep (invisible) web and currently
     searches over 4,300 searchable databases and search engines.

     Moss (A Measure Of Software Similarity) The main application of Moss has
     been in detecting plagiarism in programming classes.

     TurnItIn in addition to detecting plagiarism for nearly 5 million students
     and educators worldwide, it offers definitions for plagiarism, tips to avoid
     plagiarism suggestions for teachers on assignments to discourage
     plagiarism.

     WordChecksytems checks keyword uses and keyword frequencies in 
     electronic documents and presents a "percentage of match" between 
     compared data.  

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