S19-01-Urkund

Software Profile

Number	S19-01
Product	Urkund
Company	Address: Gustavslundsvägen 135 SE-167 51 Bromma Sweden Postal address: Urkund \| Prio Infocenter AB Box 15120 SE-167 15 Bromma Sweden Email: support@urkund.com Phone: +46 8 738 52 10
Web-Site	https://www.urkund.com/
Software-Type	Online, can be integrated with Blackboard, Canvas, Moodle, and other learning management systems
Costs (04.05.2020.)	The cost depends on the number of students.
Test Date	November 2018 – November 2019

Description

Urkund presents itself as a fully-automated text-recognition system for dealing with detection, handling, and prevention of plagiarism (Urkund, 2019). The system was founded in 1999. It is currently owned by a private equity fund, Procuritas Capital Investors VI, located in Stockholm. They claim to be a leader in the Nordic countries, and to have clients in 70 countries worldwide—mainly academic institutions and high schools, including over 800 of Sweden’s high schools. They crawl the web “with the aid of an ordinary search engine” (Urkund, 2019) and they also compare the documents with student submissions to the system.

Pros & Cons

Urkund system has very high results both in coverage and usability scores.
In texts from Wikipedia articles the system found most similarities with copy & paste plagiarism and using manual synonym replacement for all languages.
The system had difficulties finding similar texts from online articles especially when 1-2 words were replaced with synonyms or each sentence was manually paraphrased.
Test document formatting was changed in downloaded PDF result report so that whole text was in the same font size and tables were converted to text paragraphs (see in screenshots).

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