Text-matching software to minimise plagiarism

Many universities use text-matching software for plagiarism education and prevention. Such software can assist in identifying parts of a submitted text that are similar to parts of other digital texts. At Monash, Damocles and Turnitin are two software packages that have been successfully used by several groups.

Damocles was developed by Dr David Squire of the Faculty of Information Technology (FIT) at Monash University. Monash staff can use it to determine the extent to which an individual student’s assignment matches with other students’ assignments and/or anything available on the web, as well as to see these matches in detail. Dr Squire is currently offering its use for free on a first-come-first basis with a turn-around time of around one day for a typical corpus of class assignments.

Turnitin is commercial software that is being used by a number of universities across the world. Staff and students can use it to see the extent to which an individual student’s assignment matches with the other texts submitted to Turnitin, published on the Web or stored in certain publication databases. In semester 1, 2007, two Turnitin trials were carried out in the Faculty of Law, supported by Dr Harsh Suri from CALT. In both these trials, Turnitin was used in an educative way where students could submit multiple drafts of their assignment to remove any inadvertent plagiarism. A report on these Turnitin Trials also compared Turnitin with two other text-matching software packages: Damocles and DocCop.

Safe Assign is another text-matching tool that has recently become available for free to all Blackboard clients, which includes Monash staff and students. The NCC group has also published an evaluation report which compares the following plagiarism detection software: DocCop, Docoloc, Ephorus, Essay Verification Engine (EVE2), Glatt Plagiarism Screening Program, MyDropBox Suite / SafeAssign, Plagiarism Checker.com, Scriptum, Turnitin, Urkund and WCopyFind. If you are a Monash staff member and need any further assistance in evaluating a particular plagiarism detection software package, please contact Dr Harsh Suri from CALT.