Plagiarism Checker Test Results to be Announced Friday

Dr. Debora Weber-Wulff, who is a professor at the University of Applied Sciences in Berlin, is preparing to announce the “winners” of her latest round of plagiarism checker testing.

In her last round, which was in late 2008, Dr. Weber-Wulff surprised the world by announcing that Copyscape had outperformed the competition. This time, however, she has tested more services, 26 out of 47 possible, and has put them all through a rigorous test to see how well they do detecting a known amount of plagiarism.

Her tests are unique in that they are the among the few truly scientific tests that compare plagiarism checker applications in an apples-to-apples environment. Though her conclusions are usually controversial, they are something of a gold standard that plagiarism checkers, legitimate ones at least, usually try to meet.

That being said, this time Dr. Weber-Wulff is doing more than simply posting the results on her site. Instead, she’s announcing the results over a livestreamed event. Specifically, there will be two announcements on this Friday January 7. The first will be in German at 900 UTC, which will be at 4 AM ET, the second will be in English and at 1500 UTC or 10 AM ET.

Everyone is invited to attend and the only requirement will be a computer capable of viewing Flash video and listening to audio.

For those who can’t attend, there will be a site for the results afterward and, of course, Plagiarism Today will have a thorough write-up on the outcome as well.

For more information, see this press release. Hope to see some of you there!