Ouriginal fails more often than not to detect plagiarism

Thu, 23 May 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Ouriginal , the plagiarism detection service formerly known as Urkund, has been in use at the University of Helsinki for a very long time. Because of Ouriginal’s inability to process some of our students’ Master’s thesis, I spent a little bit of time investigating Ouriginal and its problems. Here’s what I found out. From Swedisch to European to US-AmericanIt is unclear to me which software we are really using since Ouriginal is a merger of the Swedish Urkund and the German PlagScan, and in 2021 Ouriginal was acquired by the American Turnitin . I don’t need any of such software, but our university mandates that theses must be scanned by the software. Since I read and evaluate an increasing number of theses every year, I also increasingly use Ouriginal. Ouriginal supports many document formats, but support is buggy Looking at the history of submissions, I realized that until about mid-May 2024, all submitted PDFs had been dutifully analyzed. But last week, something changed since about half of the submitted documents were not processed. The usual tricks (submitting in another format such as .docx, .odt, .ps, .rtf) did work for some, but not all of the theses. One thesis was especially stubborn, and neither our “experts” nor the Original helpdesk staff had any clue why their software could not process it (which makes me again wonder what software their backend is actually using). Ouriginal is investigating already for a month without getting back to me with answers… Our university receives funding from the Ministry of Education based on graduating students, and we lose thousands of Euros for each student who fails to graduate on time. Fee-liable students also have a strong incentive to graduate on time in order to avoid additional costs. Therefore, every delay in the graduation schedule is unacceptable. Ouriginal’s performance disappoints with a shocking detection rate Since there are dozens of ways how to turn a Word document into a PDF, I tried to isolate the problem by submitting test documents to the Ouriginal service. I used manuscripts that we had published over the last few years. I was shocked when I realized that Ouriginal failed to detect plagiarism in more than half of all cases. Paywalls are not to blame since almost all our publications are freely available. Neither the novelty of the publication nor the quality of the journal made a perceivable difference. However, it seems evident that Ouriginal has more problems with non-English documents. It is very difficult to explain why so many freely available scientific texts from reputable journals ( Scientific Reports , Angiogenesis , Annals of Anatomy ) are not indexed by Ouriginal. Failure to detect plagiarism from Helsinki University’s own thesis repository Original does not even index our own university’s freely available PhD theses ( https://ethesis.helsinki.fi ). None of the PhD thesis written in my own lab was recognized. I also checked my own PhD thesis , and it was the only one that was recognized (Ouriginal found it on docslib.org , not our own university’s official thesis repository). Does it make any sense to pay for such an imperfect service? I don’t think so. The omission of freely available texts from important journals seems inexcusable since a simple Google search does a better job. I did Google searches for sentences from the unrecognized texts, and in most cases, Google identified the original source without problems. A Python script to split texts into sentences for individual Google searches and to aggregate the results can be written by any programmer in an afternoon. Why would you maintain your own database if Google does a better job than you can? Plagiarism to the following published manuscripts/theses/proceedings was NOT detected:*

Detecton on Michael’s Domain

Ouriginal fails more often than not to detect plagiarism