So what are the usage scenarios a plagiarism checker will have to face? There are three overriding themes and any specific case will likely either be classified as one of the three or may have a combination of two or even all three scenarios in them.

These situations highlight why it is important to be aware of the different plagiarism and copy detection tools out there and not just relying on one or two. Just as using a screwdriver is wrong when trying to hammer in a nail, it is important to use the right tool when checking for plagiarism and, to do that, you need to understand the different jobs there are.

1. Verifying Originality

In this scenario, you are given a piece of content from an unknown origin, whether an essay, a new article, poem, etc. and you need to check and see if the work is original.

This is the situation faced by countless professors, teachers and other educators every day. It’s also the one faced by editors in newsrooms and for sites across the Web The goal is to either verify that the work is original or determine if it might be plagiarized.

What it Needs

Generally, for plagiarism checkers in this area, accuracy and breadth of database content is the most crucial thing. Such plagiarism checkers don’t have to find every result, just the one correct result. However, it must be able to return that to serve any purpose at all.

Speed, however, is slightly less important though simplicity is crucial as many of the people reading the reports as those reading them often know little about the original material or the suspected source content.

Leaders

Currently, iParadigms is the undisputed leader in this field with its two main products, Turnitin, for schools, and iThenticate for businesses.

SafeAssign, which is owned by Blackboard, is a common alternative.

2. Tracking Content Misuse

This is the more common situation we talk about on Plagiarism Today. A content creator has written a piece of material they know to be authentic and want to track how it is being used on the Web. This involves not merely returning one accurate result, but rather, all the results available.

What it Needs

Breadth and accuracy are still important, but are less so. The reason is because there’s a higher tolerance for false positives as it is easier to make human judgements when starting with a known authentic source and, generally, there is only an interest in looking on the Web, not databases of academic content.

What is more important is the ability of the checker to return a large number of accurate results and to do so quickly. It’s not enough for the plagiarism checker to spot misuse and stop, instead, it has to find and report every incident it can.

Leaders

For casual users, Copyscape and Plagium are likely the best tools. For businesses, services such as Attributor and iCopyright Discovery are more robust solutions.

3. In-Depth Plagiarism Analysis

The final situation is one where one already suspects the work of being a plagiarism and has reduced the field of candidates down to a a one or a few documents. The checker needs to either confirm those suspicions or get a more accurate picture on just how extensive the plagiarism is.

What it Needs

If you already know where the work was likely plagiarized from, you don’t need any kind of Internet searching capability. Instead, you can focus on comparing the two documents in depth and that requires a flexible plagiarism checker that can easily sift through the works involved for similarities and produce detailed results.

Leaders

WCopyFind is one of the best-known and most loved apps in this area though there are also a slew of document comparison tools that can also work.

Bottom Line

Most people reading this are going to wonder what this means for them. The answer is simple: If you ever find yourself in need of a plagiarism or copy detection tool, it’s important to stop before making a decision and ask the important question of ‘What do I need to do with it?”

What you need the tool for is going to determine how you’re doing to use it and, that in turn, will determine which tool is likely the best.

There are still other differences between the tools, some seem to work better for certain types of content or plagiarism than others, but when deciding which tool to use, the first thing to consider is the job it will be doing.

Once you know that, the rest of the decision gets much easier.

When Dr. Debora Weber-Wulff, a professor at the University of Applied Sciences in Berlin, set out to test and compare the top plagiarism detection tools available, she never expected to catch one of the programs in a lie.

However, it appears that is exactly what she did.

As she received her results, she noticed that the originality reports from iPlagiarismCheck closely mirrored those from iParadigms’ Turnitin Product. When Weber-Wulff approached iTheticate with the similarities, they researched the matter and released a statement (PDF) accusing iPlagiarismCheck of using the Turnitin service illegally.

It is the turning point in a very strange story that has been going on behind the scenes for some time here and it finally appears to be at a point where I can share what happened.

The Story

A few weeks after my first post about iPlagiarismCheck, Weber-Wulff approached me to ask me what I knew about the company. By this point I had already noticed the plagiarized image on the iPlagiarismCheck Web site (See notes in original article), and had some concerns about the company. However, nothing was definite on my end and I certainly didn’t have enough evidence to say anything publicly.

The two of us swapped notes and she told me about her work. She was comparing the various plagiarism checking services by submitting a wide variety of papers known to contain plagiarized content to see how well they detected the copying. At this point, she had just completed her second round of testing and was working on her actual report. However, she had noticed that iPlagiarismCheck and Turnitin produced almost identical results when used on the same papers. Unnerved by this, she had approached me for more information.

To further test the similarities, we took a lengthy paper that I had submitted through iPlagiarismCheck and pushed it through Turnitin. The results were almost identical despite the complicated work. However, there were some differences in the order of the sources and the percentages listed, it could have either been caused by two similar algorithms pulling from the same source or one algorithm interpreting the same results slightly differently.

Though the results were worrisome, they weren’t definitive enough to draw conclusions, at least by themselves, and I was repeatedly reassured by iPlagiarismCheck that their system was separate and that the similarities were the result of the use of the same sources.

With little hard evidence and nothing to go on, I simply stopped actively promoting iPlagiarismCheck and decided to wait and see what happened.

(Note: You can find much of this story documented in her “Strange History” update about iPlagiarismCheck (Note: The Link points to a translated copy, the original is in German))

iParadigms Responds

Before releasing her results to the public, Weber-Wulff gave all of the companies involved a chance to respond to the findings. Yesterday, iThenticate submitted their response (English PDF) in a four page document mostly focused on issues they had with the actual results.

However, in the last page of the report, iParadigms addressed the similarities between it and iPlagiarsmCheck by saying the following:

“In making a check of suspicious Turnitin activity, it was uncovered that two individuals by the names of Angela Nevarez and Susan Keisler have been using the Turnitin system in an unauthorized manner. These individuals seem to have found a Turnitin account id and join password that had been published on a university website for use by instructors at the university most likely through the use of a search engine.

The individuals used this information to create classes and assignments to which they submitted papers in order to generate Originality Reports. The individuals deleted their submissions shortly after each Originality Report was generated. Deletion of a paper from an assignment does not remove the paper from Turnitin’s student paper database and does leave a method of tracking the submission. The account administrator at the university has been contacted and has confirmed that the individuals in question were not authorized users of the account. The individuals’ false user accounts have been blocked from the Turnitin system and the institution’s account information has been changed to prevent further misuse.�

If this information is to be believed, then the reason for the similarities is because iPlagiarismCheck was using a Turnitin account without permission to produce their results. That, if true, would be a violation of several laws and could, in theory, subject iPlagiarismCheck to both civil and criminal penalties.

It also indicates that, if their changes were successful, that iPlagiarismCheck is no longer functional and is unable to process works. I have not tested the service since this announcement was made. I have contacted iPlagiaismCheck at the account I had available but had not heard back from them as of this writing.

I will update this article should I hear anything.

Other Results

Though the revelations regarding iPlagairismCheck are the most explosive element of the report, the other results bear some great fruit as well.

The big surprise in the results is that Turnitin did not fare as well as many of the other tools. Though the largest name and the most popular service tested, it fell behind other services, including Copyscape, which confirmed that it can detect academic plagiarism very accurately, and several foreign companies.

All in all, it was the European services that ruled the day. Ephorus and Docoloc (Free demo) took the one and two slots with Ephorus being the only service to get above an “acceptable” rating.

However, several popular services were not tested including Mydropbox and SafeAssign, which are sister services, due to either problems with the service or issues in establishing contact.

In the end, it is a very interesting study and one that is a worthy read. Google Translate seems to do a decent job with most of the pages, making them at least intelligible to an English speaker.

A Personal Note

The truth is that I am very upset about this incident. iPlagiarismCheck came highly recommended to me by good friends of mine. If these allegation turn out to be true, then myself and many people I work with have been tricked and outright lied to by this company.

I have spoken on many occasions with the people at iPlagiarismCheck and have asked them point blank about this issue. They have repeatedly denied it. Though I’ve had suspicious about them since I noticed the plagiarized image, they were just that, suspicions. Up until yesterday, I never had any hard evidence to back those gut feelings and, since they provided a useful and necessary service, I didn’t feel it appropriate to completely stop promoting them.

The response from iParadigms is the first solid evidence that something is truly amiss at the company.

In that regard, my only regret in this situation is that I promoted a company that was, according to iParadigms, engaging in illegal behavior. I sincerely apologize to anyone who reads this site and may have used iPlagiarismCheck in part due to my reviews and recommendations. Those reviews were, apparently, misguided.

I am sorry.

However, my reviews of iPlagiarismCheck were based upon their ability to provide great results at an unbeatable price. That is certainly true, it just appears that they were able to provide all of that due to unlicensed access to Turnitin’s service. I am going back and updating my previous reviews of the service to make light of this controversy.

On that note, anyone who is interested in another recommendation might want to take a look at getting an individual subscription at MyDropBox. Though it is double the price of iPlagiarismCheck’s unlimited service, providing only six months instead of a year for roughly the same price, they have a very good reputation among academics. Though they were not tested in Weber-Wulff ‘s report, I have seen the results myself from other professors I know and they have proved to be at least comparable to other services.

Also, Copyscape performed very well in the study and is working to improve its detection of mass plagiarism. Its premium service, at five cents per search, may be the best bang for the buck for those needing to do quick checks and don’t have a large volume of works to inspect.

All in all, there are options and it looks like it is probably time to start seeking them out.

Conclusions

Personal feelings aside, this is still a very dark day for plagiarism detection. iPlagiarismCheck was filling an obvious need by providing a low-cost, easy to use academic-style plagiarism detection service. By making available one-off submissions and having reasonable rates for unlimited subscriptions, iPlagiarismCheck was expanding the reach of such services beyond schools, universities and major corporations and into the hands of bloggers and small Website owners.

As legally dubious as the service might have been, iPlagiarismCheck was filling a need and it would be nice to see another company step forward and fill it again. The question is though whether or not it is possible to provide access to these services, including Internet cache and article databases, at the costs needed to make them accessible to everyday Internet users.

Let’s hope that iPlagiarismCheck is just a speed bump on a way to a better tomorrow. With so many companies vying to enter this field, it looks very likely to be the case.

Update:

A few hours after this article was posted, I received a reply from Susan Keisler. I am going to post her entire response below, verbatim. without any commentary.

“Thank you for brining this to our attention, and I apologize for reverting a bit late. Needless to say after reading through TurnItIn’s accusation of us “Stealingâ€? their service we have contacted them on a stern note to resolve the matter. I will let you know more on this as soon as I hear back from them.

As far as ‘HOW’ this came about, we think it’s as follows:

Last two months we had a string of fraudulent orders on our site, which were discovered, suffice it to say we dealt with the submitters’ sternly, instead of just letting it go (as fraud is unfortunately a part & parcel it seems of e-Commerce), simply because running our system, for plagiarism checking without even the compensation of the mediocre amount we charge translates into wasted resources and ultimately jacking up of the prices to cover costs, which we simply do not want to do. We want to remain people-oriented and within the average customers’ budget range.

The two names mentioned by TurnItIn, Susan Keisler and Angela Nevarez are both publicly published. For example, as you may be aware, my name, Susan Keisler, is the name used in all outgoing correspondence, while that of Angela, who registered our domain name, is listed in the WhoIs database, hence both names are easily accessible and subject to abuse. Which is the case here.

Dr. Debora, if you read the report, did her research rather arbitrarily, relying on sources which may or may not be credible, as even the TurnItIn admins point out. She did not give us a chance to relay our side of the story and directly approached TurnItIn, needless to see a one-sided, mis-conception was formed.

As soon as I hear back from TurnItIn and resolve the matter with them, I will update you promptly.

Sincerely,
-Susan keisler”

I will, of course, post any updates as they come.