Experiments in Electronic Plagiarism Detection

This report first describes three plagiarism detection systems: the Ferret, developed here at the University of Hertfordshire, (Section 2), Turnitin (Section 3) and CopyCatch (Section 4). The Ferret is a stand-alone system that can be installed on any PC and run on student work by na ve users. Turnitin is a remote system, to which student work is submitted electronically. Turnitin compares each file with Web material and with files held in a database of previously submitted work. CopyCatch, like Ferret, is a local system that can be easily installed on any PC. Our experiments are conducted on the freely distributed basic version.