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Plagiarism

Recent common forms of plagiarism include the use material cut and pasted from the Internet and the sharing of electronic data between students, classes and institutions. There are services and tools available on the Internet for detecting these forms of plagiarism and listed below are the main sites, with a brief explanation of the services offered.

http://plagiarism.org

Provides an online plagiarism detection service and offers a free evaluation trial. Users register with an e-mail address and then documents can be uploaded. Documents submitted for testing are checked against propriety databases held by Plagiarism Org and against major Internet databases. The services offered range from a comparison of manuscripts across classes or universities, to detecting material cut and pasted from the Internet. A report of the findings is returned via the e-mail, with an anticipated turnaround time of up to 24 hours. The report generated comprises three components: Structure Analysis, which rates incidences of matched material on a scale of 1-5. A Content Analysis, which details the number of sources that matched those of the uploaded document and a Similar Links guide for directing users to the appropriate sites. Documents are returned with matched sentences and phrases underlined.

http://canexus.com/eve/index.shtml

Eve2 (Essay Verification Engine) can be downloaded free for evaluation purposes. Eve detects material cut and pasted from the Internet. Files are uploaded and an advanced search is performed. The process takes about twenty minutes and a report is generated, which details the percentage of the document found to match material on the web. Eve underlines the matched material and gives the relevant web-site addresses. Eve2 is quick and seems effective at finding text from sites indexed by the main search engines, but doesn't have an option to search propriety database collections.

http://cs.berkeley.edu/~aiken/moss.html

Moss's (Measure of Software Similarity) is designed to detect software plagiarism. Its main application is in finding instances of plagiarism in programming assignments. It can detect similarities in Java, C, C++ or Scheme programs.