Electronic Plagiarism Seminar

DETECTION  SITES  AND  SOFTWARE

Most of these services charge a fee, either for a subscription or per paper, and sometimes both.  For more information, such as how the site works, please click on the link.  The author welcomes any additional sites.

Comparisons and information

Satterwhite and Gerein (see bibliography on this site) offer a chart comparing some of these services and search engines.  Some  of the services offer a free trial. You can also find other comparisons and evaluations, but like the chart above, they become quickly outdated, and in some cases the information is incorrect.

A more up-to-date source of information about a greater number of services can be found at the UMUC VAIL site, which divides them into useful categories and provides detailed information. DMOZ Open Directory Project at http://dmoz.org/Reference/Education/Educators/Academic_Dishonesty/Plagiarism/Detection/Software/ also offers some evaluations. In every case however, one should go directly to the web site to find out if some of the shortcomings pointed out in the evaluations have been remedied with more recent updates.

Software

The following list of software includes all the software the author has been able to find. If there is no annotation with the software, it means that the author has not (yet) evaluated it. The author would appreciate being apprised of any additional software not on this list. Being listed here should not be construed as an endorsement, nor are they listed in any particular order!

TurnItIn.com, formerly Plagiarism.org, http://www.plagiarism.org/   Pricing based on type of school and number of students. Also available for individual and departmental subscription.  According to Satterwhite and Gerein, TurnItIn.com has the highest rate of detection among subscription software, since it searches not only a large portion of the WWW, but also a number of full-text proprietary databases.  Free trial available.  Their web site was completely revised July 2003 and again in 2005, and now includes handouts to be used by teachers, and guides for students as well.
See also Andy Denhart's article, "The Web's Plagiarism Police" for a cautionary tale, at http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/1999/06/14/plagiarism/print.html (while whiney, the point is made that one needs to read the report carefully and not rely solely on the software)

iThenticate.com is a new service offered by iParadigms.com, and intended for "publishers, corporations, law firms, and others" to check sources, prevent plagiarism, and protect their own intellectual property. Unlike Turnitin.com, it does not search previously submitted content, but rather searches only the Internet.

MOSS (Measure of Software Similarity) http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~aiken/moss.html:  in use since 1994, and used primarily to detect plagiarism in computer programming. 
Robert Sanders wrote an online article that explains MOSS. This article was not available as of 3/7/03, but can be found as a cache file in Google. Another article by Sanders on MOSS can be found at http://www.berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/97legacy/11_19_97b.html.

Glatt Plagiarism Screening http://plagiarism.com/    An interactive program that uses the student's own writing style, and is based on the cloze procedure.  This software is especially useful for detecting plagiarism when the source is another student, a purchased paper, or a book. Offers computer software to teach students to avoid plagiarism.  Also provides students with the opportunity to self-test for plagiarism. 

WordCHECK KeyWORD Software  http://www.wordchecksystems.com/ Requires the user to create archives of sources to be checked against?  Software purchased ($195) and mounted on your own computer. 

Essay Verification Engine (EVE2) http://www.canexus.com/eve/index.shtml  .  Purchased software which compares the essay to "anything" on the WWW.  $19.99 one-time fee, per person, with free updates of EVE2, and discounts for new upgrades.  Free 15-day trial.

CopyCatch Gold http://www.copycatchgold.com/ (and its multilingual version Multiconcord). Based in the United Kingdom, it costs 10p per student per year to use. Demonstration available. Programs also available for newspapers and translators.

Plagiarism Resource Center at the University of Virginia. Free software developed by Dr. Lou Bloomfield (as a result of uncovering the ongoing plagiarism in his class).

MyDropBox http://www.mydropbox.com/ formerly EduTie and PlagiServe. WARNING: PLEASE READ: the author of this web site has evidence that PlagiServe and EduTie, now known as MyDropBox, are owned by the same company and individuals who also ran a number of paper mills (EssayMill, MightyStudents, EssaysOnFile). They have also been accused of plagiarizing on their Web site from another company's Web site documents. I find their claims unrealistic. I would be happy to share what information I have on this company, and will continue to investigate it.  FTE-based fee.

Other software found but not evaluated:

CourseMarker http://www.cs.nott.ac.uk/CourseMarker/

Damocles http://viper.csse.monash.edu.au/~damocles/about/

Jplag http://www.ipd.uka.de:2222/

OrCheck, VAST http://cise.sbu.ac.uk/

Plague http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/projects/plague/

Safe Assignment http://www.safeassignment.com/ Developed by MyDropBox, please see note above about that company.

Sherlock http://www.cs.usyd.edu.au/~scilect/sherlock/

SIM http://www.cs.vu.nl/~dick/sim.html

SPlaT the self-plagiarism detection tool http://splat.cs.arizona.edu/

Urkund http://www.urkund.com

YAP http://www.bio.cam.ac.uk/~mw263/YAP.html

Software no longer available:

FindSame.com from Digital Integrity no longer appears to be available for free.

PaperBin.com from IntegriGuard

Gotcha!, from 4PointGroup.net

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To cite this page (MLA style):
Pearson, Gretchen. "Part title." Electronic Plagiarism Seminar. Syracuse, NY: Noreen Reale Falcone Library, Le Moyne College, 2002. Available: http://web.lemoyne.edu/~pearson/plagiarism/. Created 19991202. Access date.

This Web page is protected by the US Copyright Act of 1976 as amended, Title 17 of the US Code, and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998. The author freely grants permission to anyone wishing to link to this site. However, permission must be obtained before extracting any of the content of the site, to be republished elsewhere.

This page was created on 2 December 1999 and last updated on 27 June 2005.