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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.