When a plagiarism software program has yielded a false positive that has led to a serious (and career threatening) accusation against an innocent person, there is little that can be done to retract the faulty accusation.
Given the wide spread use of such programs in higher education, what level of responsibility should there be to guard against false positive results? How reliable are plagiarism software programs? Are there enough studies being done in this important area? Does the accuracy of such programs vary based on the style manual (AMA, APA,MLA, Chicago, Harvard, etc.) the writer is using?
Indeed, it is very embarrassing to encounter such a situation. There must be some foolproof solution to such problems, especially because plagiarism is taken extremely seriously in almost all academic organizations.
Some programs are not good: e.g. they report plagiarism even if there are similarities in the lists of references of 2 papers even if the authors cite different parts of these papers. Also, some programs search for similarities in terms of e.g. 7 words in a row, and then they may report plagiarism even if you have sentence starting with "This paper aims to find out if" even if what follows may be very different. So, in case plagiarism is detected with such software, still, the texts should be compared additionally (word to word, sentence to sentence) to be certain if something is really plagiarized or not.
The final decision for the man. The program only helps to draw attention to possible violations. Therefore, to say that the program is bad wrong.
I am surprised to read from the above that a certain percentage of plasiarism was detected. Was it actually the case of a certain percentage of overlap?
Whatever the sfotware says, it is up to the human user to interpret the results. A high proportion of overlap is detected on literature review of a paper. This can sually be ignored. Often equations are are another common example of overlap. Again this can be easily determined by the human user whether this is palsiarism or the use of the same basic theory and thus very similar equations.
I think these software packages are useful but it is the huamn user that should make the decision.
These porgrams, such as iThenticate, shows the similarity percentage and not the plagiarism percentage.
I found this article online that shows plagiarism software packages "don't make the grade." Two Texas Tech University researchers did a pretty good study on this topic. The link is below.:
http://today.ttu.edu/2009/03/plagiarism-research/comment-page-1/
Dear Reginald, thanks for your good question. I mainly use the following free online plagiarism softwares and till now, they have met my needs and i am satisfied with them, but As Dear Dr. Kamal Eddin Bani-Hani mentioned most of them indicate the probable replica and similarities of the texts and are not exact; they even cannot distinguish quoted texts from other paraphrased ones and display them as plagiarized texts; the same thing happened to me by one of the best ones some other months ago (Turnitin).
http://www.duplichecker.com/
http://www.plagiarismsoftware.net/
Dear @Reginald, Your answer can not be upvoted! Again RG s/w problems! :(
Anyway, I have an experienced in my country problem of application plagiarism software, iThenticate for example, since it is not good when translation involved! See a story about the plagiarism where iThenticate and two other tools were applied. Graphic is impressive. Here are the links for plagiarism and software used!
http://pescanik.net/2014/07/belgrade-mayor-sinisa-little-mali-is-a-big-time-plagiarist/
ithenticate.com
turnitin.com
grammarly.com
Those programs are good in showing many similar works but not necessary all. They only help in drawing attention to possible violations but not necessary all. On the other hand if a high proportion of overlap has been detected it does not mean that there is a serious violation in the article particulary in scientific papers where equations and proofs are involved. Thus, the final decision should remain for human but we still can say that the programs are useful.
I am not very familiar with the use of these types of software, but my experience with an editor that used them on one of my articles was really very poor and ineffective. The article have been already approved for publication by the same editor and it is in the market, but the software "found" several "similarities" with other papers that were really a "bad joke".
Having been exposed to managing IT teams, i bet, "only those are SMART wins"....This statement is true but undigested to many...in IT the SDC (Software development cycle) requires critical and at the same time inquisitive to explore many options...
The plagiarism software, 'However intelligent may be" has a shorter life cycle, as there is always a chance to get it out-bested shortly...
Open source Plagiarism software shows the similarity percentage with an existing piece of work in an online form. There may be the case that an unpublished version of some scientific work was uploaded and another version published. The similarity percentage can then be misleading, but nonetheless indicate that the work presented before you is not original but copied from another source. Whether or not it fits within the framework of palgiarism, I think it remains unacceptable. Threfore, it seems to me that relaibility can be established once the workings of the plagiarism software have been revealed.
Good point dear @Tobias: "...need to manually investigate these alerts by your own to be sure that it really is plagiarism"! Automatic detection is more than half of a job!
i think
free plagiarism software are not recommended to use because of their association with
data storage capability and further miss use of that data
otherwise turnitin is best i know o far....
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