Pulverizing Plagiarism

Plagiarism is a form of academic dishonesty that involves taking another person's work or ideas and passing them off as one's own. This type of cheating can represent a significant challenge for educators to mitigate. Listed below is a sampling of websites that will (for a fee) search the internet to determine if a person is misrepresenting someone else's work.

Catch It First 

Billed as "The most advanced online plagiarism detection service," Catch It First checks submitted documents against billions of web pages and generates what it calls an "originality report."

EVE2 

The Essay Verification Engine (EVE) Plagiarism Detection System generates reports that include the percentage of the paper that has been plagiarized along with an annotated copy that has all violations highlighted in red.

iThenticate 

iThenticate claims to be the "leading provider of professional plagiarism detection and prevention technology." It compares written documents against a database of over 32 billion web pages and 125 million content items. iThenticate is actually developed by Turn It In.

SafeAssign 

Hosted by Blackboard and offered to its clients is the plagiarism prevention service called SafeAssign. In addition to checking for instances of copying, this service has features designed to educate students about plagiarism and the significance of proper citation of any borrowed content.

Turn It In 

Using a proprietary algorithm, Turn It In compares documents submitted to several databases that consist of over 24 billion web pages, 250 million student papers, and leading library databases and publications. This service is very popular among educators and includes features such as OriginalityCheck, GradeMark, and PeerMark.