WriteCheck (beta):
WriteCheck (beta) is a product offered the American company iParadigms, LLC, which also produces Turnitin and iThenticate. In comparison to Turnitin, WriteCheck also offers to check grammar and offers professional tutoring for a fee that students can afford. It also states it does not store the uploaded texts in it’s own database (which Turnitin does). Additionally, WriteCheck only flags potentially plagiarized text passages, while Turnitin also shows the corresponding sources. There has been much criticism of iParaidgms earning money from both sides of the plagiarism problem, from the educational institutions and the students. Inside Highered published a critique by Elizabeth Murphy, Kent Anderson, a medical journal publisher, has a long blog entry on the topic as well.
Since WriteCheck uses the same algorithm as Turnitin and thus different results can not be expected, WriteCheck was not tested separately. In addition, we decided not to test systems that offer editing help in parallel with their products.
iThenticate:
iThenticate is another program offered by iParadigms, LLCs and uses the same software and database as Turnitin. In comparison to Turnitin its target group mostly consists of authors, researchers, companies, and publishing houses. As with WriteCheck, they are offering individual checks that give authors the chance to „harden“ their texts before submitting them to scholarly journals, as many of the scholarly journals use CrossCheck on all manuscripts submitted, another iParadigms product. iThenticate was not tested for the same reasons as WriteCheck.
PlagSpotter:
PlagSpotter is a software system developed by a company by the same name from Kiev, Ukraine. This software searches for copies of webpages on the internet and can not be used to analyze texts. For this reason PlagSpotter was not tested.
PaperRater:
In addition to plagiarism search, PaperRater also offers proofreading and spell checking. Currently, the service is free of charge, a premium version is planned. During a short check of PaperRater, a complete Wikipedia article was tested and the system rated it as an original. For this reason and because proofreading is offered on the same site, PaperRater was not evaluated.
Effective Papers:
Effective Papers is offered by the British company One Freelance Limited. It offers to search texts for plagiarism and states it does not store uploaded texts in it’s database. However, as this company mainly offers ghostwriting services and there was no way to contact a human being by telephone or email, this software was not evaluated.
ThePenster$:
ThePenster$.com makes it clear that they are a ghostwriting company that also offers plagiarism detection, presumably to check the quality of the papers they sell. Its layout shows a high similarity to that of Effective Papers. As no contact information was given, and the major focus of the service is on ghostwriting, ThePenster$ was not tested.
Custom Writings:
Custom Writings is another company that offers so-called „professional writing services“. It mostly targets students. Custom Writings also offers plagiarism detection, but since its focus is on writing services, this system was not tested.
AntiPlag:
AntiPlag is a plagiarism detection system that was mainly programmed to find instances of collusion. It was developed by the Slovakian company SVOP with support from the Slovak Centre of Scientific and Technical Information. In 2011 it took first place in a plagiarism detection competition, „Pan CLEF 2011“, for both precision and recall for external plagiarism detection, that is, finding plagiarized passages in the closed set of suspicious documents and their corresponding source passages in the closed set of source documents.. Because the company does not sell the software and could not make it available for this test, the software could not be tested.
AcademicPlagiarism:
AcademicPlagiarism is a software offered by a one-person US company of the same name. It also offers plagiarism detection, but mainly focuses on so-called professional writing services. A contact person was named on its website and contacted by email, but did not reply, although the request for contact was repeated. Because of this and because of the focus on ghostwriting, AcademicPlagiarism was not tested.
Small SEO Tools Plagiarism Checker:
Small SEO Tools states that it detects plagiarism by using search engines. There was no information on the company on the web site, and the company is pitched to search engine optimization managers and not to universities, it was not tested.
Plagium:
Plagium was tested in 2010 and deemed unsuitable for usage at educational institutions, something the owner was not happy about. The email exchange is documented – with permission by the owner – on the 2010 test web page. The software was at that time announced as a beta version and is still, three years later, described as such on their web page. Because of this, we refrained from testing Plagium.
Plagiarism Checker:
There is one tool called Plagiarism-Checker and one called Plagiarism Checker. The former asks for your email and promises to send you a download link, but it never comes. The latter just looks up a phrase in a search machine and returns the results. It would be easier to work directly with the search machine in this case.
KOPI:
KOPI is a Hungarian site that states that is able to find translation plagiarism from the English-language Wikipedia. It is supposed to work for texts in Hungarian, English or German. They store papers that are uploaded to the site and educators can chose to check against that database („monolingual search“) or against the Wikipedia („Multilingual search“). The system is still noted as being in Beta. It was extremely difficult to use the system, not in the least because it kept reverting to Hungarian. Since the system only checks with the Wikipedia and it was not able to work with our Wikipedia-based test cases, the test of KOPI was discontinued.
