I would like to receive a comprehensive list of provider of software
for detection of plagiarism. My focus is on detecting plagiarized
material from the World Wide Web.
Important factors for weeding out potential candidates are:
* ability to search for material in non English material
* ability to define which search engines or sites the product queries
during the process
* ability to run in-house (server or personal pc) not as a hosted solution.

Regards / Mikael

---

Request for Question Clarification by czh-ga on 08 May 2006 15:46 PDT

Hello mikael-ga,

I?ve watched several researchers lock and then abandon this question.
It seems the information you seek should be available. My preliminary
research shows that this is not true.

I can provide you with a list of providers of plagiarism detection
software. These products tend to be focused on the academic market and
require that you submit the material you want checked to be compared
to their database of collected information.

1) I have not found any products that are specifically aimed at
checking non-English material although some claim to be able to
recognize non-English characters. It is not clear from your question
whether you simply want the software to recognize occasional
non-English quotes or whether you want to check whole documents
produced in other languages. If you?re looking for non-English
plagiarism detection, which languages are you looking for?

2) I have not found anything to indicate that the plagiarism detection
software products market their capability to search with specific
search engines or have built their database from searches with
specific search engines. Please explain why you believe this
capability is available. What research have you done to locate these
products? Please share your findings to help us with the search.

3) None of the review sites that give overviews of the various
plagiarism detection software products highlights whether the service
is hosted or can be run in-house. This capability will have to be
identified after you?ve developed an initial prospect list.

As you can see, this is a much tougher search than you would expect.
I?d love to help with the research but I?m stymied at this point.
Please provide additional information or explain the context of your
question so we can get you the information you need.

I look forward to your clarification.

~ czh ~

---

Clarification of Question by mikael-ga on 08 May 2006 22:46 PDT

Hi again,

Here are my attempts at some clarifications:

1) We receive papers from many different authors in most of the major
languages (English, German, French, Russian and in the future we also
see Arabic coming). This means that 90% (minus the initial abstract)
is written in that original language.

2) My understanding of these software tools is that they run local on
a PC (or hosted somewhere) and you supply an orginal text to be
cross-checked against the programs reference database. This database
can be either propriety or based on a series of defined web searches
against web sites. My problem is that I need to be sure that the
system checks against web sites that we know our authors use when
doing there research or fact gathering. Otherwise, I'm not really sure
how confident we could be that the systems actually will detect any
"copy and pasting" from such sites.
But - I can be wrong were in my understaning of how these systems
work. Please than include some links on the technical foundations of
the systems.

3)A system that I have tried is called "EVE - Essay Verification
Engine". This systems runs locally on my PC, but seems a little bit to
light weight for us.
It might also be that an other market for these systems are the
traditional search engine vendors like Autonomy, FAST, Google,
dTSearch etc etc can supply specially tailored versions of their
software that provides this kind of functionality.

regards / Mikael