S19-03-Copyscape

Software Profile

Number	S19-03
Product	Copyscape
Company	Address: Email: sales@copyscape.com Phone:
Web-Site	https://www.copyscape.com/
Software-Type	Online, can be integrated with API and WordPress
Costs (04.05.2020.)	Contact sales
Test Date	November 2018 – November 2019

Description

Copyscape declares itself to be a plagiarism checker. The primary aim is to provide a tool for owners of websites to check if their original content was not used by others. They also provide a service of regular checks and email alerts. Copyscape, which started in 2004 (Greenspan, 2019), is operated by a private company, Indigo Stream Technologies Ltd., which is apparently based in Gibraltar. It does not have its own database but uses Google services to crawl the web.

Pros & Cons

Copyscape system found more than half of similarities in manually paraphrased text when one Wikipedia article was used for English, German, Czech and Turkish languages.
Can upload url or paste text for testing, but not a document.
The system did not find any similarities (more than one sentence) in both manually and human translated texts.
This system has very low usability results – test results are displayed online and can’t be saved or downloaded, evidence of similarity is not displayed side-by-side with the source.
After seeing results, if user again presses to test the same text, system again takes money and shows the same results.

Coverage results

Single source

Multi source

Usability results

Workflow process usability

Can upload and test multiple documents together
Auto-fill metadata for documents
The system uses original file names for report
There are no word limit for the testing document
The system display text in the chosen language only
The system can process large documents (for example, a bachelor thesis)

Result presentation usability

Reports are downloadable
Results are saved in the user’s account and can be reviewed afterwards
Matched passages are highlighted in the online report
Matched passages are highlighted in the downloaded report (offline)
Evidence of similarity is demonstrated side-by-side with the source in the online report
Evidence of similarity is demonstrated side-by-side with the source in the downloaded report
Document formatting is not changed in the report
Document page numbers are shown in the report
The report is not spoiled by false positives