Test of Plagiarism Detection Software

It's finished, it's published. We worked feverishly right up to the wire. On Sept. 26 we sent copies of the preliminary reports (they were still in line for some language polishing) to the companies tested, so that they could prepare a statement, if they so chose.

We held a press conference this afternoon, cutting over to the new version of the plagiarism portal and the E-Learning unit on plagiarism detection ("Fremde Federn Finden", in German) at the start of the conference. We had 5 reporters in attendance and many who requested virtual press materials. The online magazine "Spiegel Online" had requested that we write a summary article for them, so we just cut out sleep for a few days in order to get it done.

We have had a lot of interest from reports and of course the companies tested. If we learn of other systems, we will be glad to test them as we have time (which will be spare time, as the financing for this project runs out tomorrow), although the results might not be comparable, as the Internet is constantly changing.

Here is a copy of the ranking page:

Ranking

Excellent Systems

No system was ranked as excellent - but there have been many people who attended plagiarism detection seminars who scored 100% on the same tests!

Good Systems

Nr. 1 : Ephorus

Acceptable Systems

Nr. 2 : Docoloc
Nr. 3 : Urkund, Copyscape (premium), PlagAware
Nr. 6 : Copyscape (free)
Nr. 7 : TextGuard
Nr. 8 : turnitin, ArticleChecker
Nr. 10 : picapica

Unacceptable Systems

Nr. 11 : DocCop
Nr. 12 : iPlagiarismCheck, StrikePlagiarism
Nr. 14 : CatchItFirst

We hope that our work can help these companies to produce better results. But our summary for 2007 is the same as for 2004: It is better to use a search machine yourself, the software just costs money and is not necessarily very good at finding all plagiarisms.

Test of Plagiarism Detection Software

I am currently redoing my E-Learning-Unit on plagiarism, "Fremde Federn Finden" (in German). As part of the work I am repeating the test that I conducted on plagiarism detection software in 2004. Then I used 10 papers that I wrote myself with a known amount of plagiarism / originality to see how well the software measured up. It was not a pretty sight - often flipping a coin was just as effective.

For the repeat of the experiment I have 10 more papers and will be conducting tests over the summer of the following products from various countries:

• CopyCatch Investigator - UK - http://www.copycatchgold.com/index.html
• Doc Cop - Australian - http://www.doccop.com/
• Docoloc - German - http://www.docoloc.de/
• Ephorus - Dutch - http://www.ephorus.nl/
  
• Eve2 - Unknown, no address given - http://www.canexus.com/
• MyDropBox/ SafeAssignment - English - http://www.mydropbox.com/
• Plagiarism Finder - German - http://www.plagiarism-finder.de
• StrikePlagiarism - Polish - http://strikeplagiarism.com/
• TextGuard - German - http://www.TextGuard.de
• turnitin - USA - http://turnitin.com/static/index.html (iThenticate seems to be the same software but targeted to businesses and not schools - http://www.ithenticate.com/static/home.html)
• Urkund - Swedish - http://www.urkund.com/

If any of my readers know of any other software, please let me know! If you are a software producer of plagiarism detection software, please contact me so that I can include you in the test.

The results will be published online in September 2007.