Plagiarism: Detection Tools
Computer technology has made it technically easier to capture text and copy it to another document. On one hand, this ease can encourage revision and effective collaboration; on the other, it can make it easier for a student to plagiarize. Computer technology can also help instructors locate original source materials that may have been plagiarized, even though it is not an easy fix for teaching students to write effectively using sources.
Much press has focused on plagiarism detection tools as the technology of choice, and we list three here that you might want to investigate; however, don't forget that using a search engine may serve your needs just as well.
Using a search engine
If you read student writing and notice material that does not seem to be in the student's typical sentence patterns, vocabulary, or diction, select a sentence from that material and place it in a search engine. Often this technique will find an original source if it is freely available on the web. Links to several search engines are listed below.
Google: Google's key word search offers access to over 2 billion websites.
Metacrawler: Metacrawler is a meta-search engine, searching other search engines for phrases and key words.
Yahoo: Yahoo places information into categories and subcategories. The search engine searches these categories as well as other web sites for words or phrases.
Plagiarism detection tools
The following three detection tools are easy to use and located much of the plagiarized materials we used in our testing. Note, however, that you must critically evaluate the results of these tools. They sometimes make matches with original sources that, from a human perspective, are clearly not matches, and often they report many more original sources than may have been used.
www.turnitin.com
Searches: Local database, published work over the Internet and previously submitted papers.
Ease of Use: This tool is fairly simple to use. After an initial login verification, users (faculty or students) can submit papers which can be peer reviewed and grademarked also. The instructor or the student is then notified if the paper has been plagiarized. Although the analysis is done within seconds, the instructors can choose either "FastTrack" or "24-hour turnaround" for Originality Report generation. With FastTrack, reports appear in the instructor's Turnitin inbox within minutes.The 24-hour turnaround option allows students to resubmit a paper as many times as they wish within a 24-hour window, giving students the ability to correct any errors or omissions that they may have made.
Cost: The cost varies from 1000$ to 10,000$, depending on the type of the institution and the total student enrollment.Turnitin also provides a cost effective solution, wherein the Turinitin technology is hosted and maintained at their office instead of the client.For further information, kindly visit the website link given below.
To Use : Goto http://www.turnitin.com. It will require the user to first create an account at turnitin and after obtaining the id provided by the institution, the user can then check papers for plagiarism.
www.mydropbox.com
Searches: Local database of previously submitted papers and the Internet
Ease of Use: This tool is really easy to use and the average document turn-around time is 11 hours. An instructor will receive an email reporting that an online originality report is ready within 24 hours of submitting a document. This report displays the exact paper text and color codes passages based on how closely they match a source found in their database or on the Internet. In addition, the copied or paraphrased passages are linked to these possible sources. While the originality report is easy to read, it does take 24 hours to prepare, and instructors can only upload one document at a time.It also lets you maintain a digital library of papers submitted to the system.
Cost: $750 for a department or $100 per instructor. Contact mydropbox.com to get a quote for a single campus license. The individual instructor plan includes 6 active classes and 100 originality reports. The department plan includes 50 active classes and an unlimited number of submissions. The campus license includes an unlimited number of active classes and allows instructors to submit an infinite number of documents for detection. Price is based on enrollment.
To use: Go to http://www.mydropbox.com/
Eve 2
Searches: Internet
Ease of Use: This program uses a step-by-step wizard to guide users through the process of adding files for plagiarism detection. After Eve scans the files, it generates a report that lists the websites that contain material that might be plagiarized and displays the entire paper with the similar content underlined. However, Eve 2 does not indicate which website appears to match each passage and does not allow users to click on the text to go directly to the corresponding website. Eve does not take as long as Turnitin or Plagiserve, but the search time is proportional to the number of documents that the user adds at once. In addition, Eve only accepts essays that are in text-only format.
Cost: $19.99 per instructor for unlimited use
To Use: A 15 day demo version of Eve 2 is available at http://www.canexus.com/eve/download.shtml. From this website, click the link under the Download Now heading, choose Open from the dialog box, and complete the installation wizard. Once downloading has completed, open Eve and you will be prompted to add files in plain text format. Eve will pre-scan the files and allow the user to choose from a quick, medium, or full strength search. Choose the search type and click Go.
