Anti-Plagairism Software, Robocop, and Turnitin

Anti-Plagiarism  

Being the great humanitarian that I am, I am going to begin posting about some things we, as students, can do to avoid those awful punishments and I'll even be discussing some citation tools that will manage all of your resources when writing papers and will even produce a bibliography or reference page in the format that you need! Those posts will be a little later, but this post will discuss anti-plagiarism and some anti-plagiarism software.

First, it should be noted that anti-plagiarism software can be your best friend or your worst enemy as a student. so, what is anti-plagiarism software?  According to PcMag anti-plagiarism software is, "Software that searches the Web for duplicate textual content. It may be a stand-alone program installed in the user's computer or a function of a Web site, such as www.turnitin.com. Universities increasingly use anti-plagiarism software to determine if students have copied someone else's prose, and writers use it to see if others are using their copyrighted work in full or in part."

This is a comprehensive definition of anti-plagiarism and it even introduced the first anti-plagiarism software that we will discuss, Turnitin.

Turnitin is like the Robocop of anti-plagiarism software and can detect plagiarism in most forms. (Get this: The creator of plagiarism.org, the site that provided the plagiarism facts and stats in the last post, is a co-founder of Turnitin. His name is John Barrie) They're so specific that they even have broken down plagiarizers into 10 different categories and sell products to high schools and universities to detect plagiarism, according to information on their website (www.turnitin.com). Their plagiarism department, called originality check, runs papers through a massive database that includes over 24 billion webpages, 250 million student archived papers, and 120 million articles from journals, periodicals and books. Turnitin also provides paper reviewing service through GradeMark and PeerMark. For this information and more, please visit this brilliant article that gives you the skinny on Turnitin and how it works http://www2.bgsu.edu/departments/english/cconline/spring2013_special_issue/Vie/history.html

But all hope is not lost for us students, who may be susceptible to copying someone else's work without even knowing...