Text Analysis Tools

This page provides information on various tools that can be used for detecting plagiarism in plain text (such as essays).

Commercial tools

Turnitin is an online plagiarism detection service that electronically compares students’ work against electronic sources including other students’ work. It is the official JISC Plagiarism Detection Service, and although not a free service, subscriptions are paid by institutions.

MyDropBox is a suite of online tools that includes a plagiarism detection system, a tool for online marking and commentating, and a peer-review platform.

CopyCatch Gold has been in use for many years in educational institutions. It is aimed at collusion detection. CopyChecker, which comes free with CopyCatch Gold, is designed to be used by students to learn how to use sources appropriately. A full report on how the two programs have been used together since 2003 at Aston University in the UK is available.

Essay Verification Engine (EVE ) is an online plagiarism detection tool from CaNexus that compares students’ work against webpages and returns weblinks from which the students may have plagiarised. Eve is not a free service.

Glatt Plagiarism Screening Program is plagiarism detection software available for purchase on CD-ROM only. It stores information on each student’s writing style and uses this information to determine plagiarists from non-plagiarists. This software may be useful in situations where the original source material cannot be located, e.g. papers purchased from research paper writing mills, fraternity files, papers written by friends, etc.

Free tools

PRAISE (Plotted Ring of Analysed Information for Similarity Exploration) is a free software tool for detecting similarity between documents. PRAISE works with VAST and pairs of similar documents detected by PRAISE can be selected for further investigation in VAST.

VAST is free software that produces interactive visualisation for viewing similarity between two documents. It is intended to be used with other detection tools to aid the investigation into the extent and significance of similarity detected by tools such as PRAISE.

Free open-source tools

Sherlock is available as part of the BOSS Online Submission System or as stand-alone software. Offers powerful plagiarism detection capabilities for detecting plagiarism among student submissions, whether the assignment be natural language or software source-code. BOSS and Sherlock are free.