- The University , Research
- 04/03/2021
Plagiarism self-checker for TU/e researchers
As of last week, permanently employed researchers on TU/e’s scientific staff can use plagiarism software iThenticate to check whether their manuscripts partly match previously published texts. The idea is that (the appearance of) plagiarism and subsequent damage to reputation can be avoided.
Lecturers already had access to plagiarism checker Urkund for educational purposes, says Patrick Anderson. The professor in Structure and Rheology of Complex Fluids was head of the steering group that advised the university to purchase iThenticate. “Urkund is suitable for comparing reports from students and for comparing these reports to public sources on the internet, but iThenticate’s major advantage is that it also searches scientific publications behind paywalls.” Another advantage over Urkund, is that iThenticate doesn’t store the scientific manuscripts in its database. This is important because it concerns research outcomes that haven’t been published yet.
iThenticate claims to check over two hundred million sources, of which 69 million are hidden behind a paywall. It also consults the software of seventy billion websites in its search for similarities with the document that was uploaded by the scientist.
Surprises
The main purpose of iThenticate, Anderson says, is to prevent unpleasant surprises. “Researchers closely collaborate on publications with colleagues from both within and outside the university, which sometimes makes it unclear whether the text you receive is original or one that was re-used.”
Even though the re-use of texts is inevitable to a certain degree, such as in descriptions of the experimental setup and method that were used, it could be a reason for publishers of scientific journals to reject submitted manuscripts on the grounds of plagiarism. “These publishers use plagiarism software like iThenticate for that. When a text scores too high on the similarity check, there is a chance that the article is rejected automatically. Often without further explanation. That’s a serious blow to the researchers, and it’s bad for the university’s reputation.”
License to check
The introduction of iThenticate is a trial project that will run for the duration of one year. TU/e has purchased a license for one thousand users during this period, Anderson says. “That’s enough for all assistant professors, associate professors and full professors at our university, some nine hundred in total. The remaining licenses will be distributed among selected PhD candidates at different departments as a test. “In principle, the plan is that all PhD candidates and postdocs will be given access to the software should the pilot turn out to be a success.”
The professor is confident that the pilot will have a successful outcome: “Many Dutch universities already use iThenticate; I know for example that they use it in Delft to check all dissertations. It’s very user-friendly in any case: you upload a pdf and within a few minutes, you get a similarity score for the entire text and a file in which all suspect passages are marked. You only need to click on that to go to the source. We hope that this will be used by as many scientists as possible.”
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