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Comparing Three Plagiarism Tools (Ferret, Sherlock, and Turnitin)
MITRA SHAHABI
Pages - 53 - 66     |    Revised - 15-09-2012     |    Published - 25-10-2012
Volume - 3   Issue - 1    |    Publication Date - October 2012  Table of Contents
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KEYWORDS
Plagiarism Detection Tool, Turnitin, Clough-Stevenson’s Corpus, Ferret, Sherlock
ABSTRACT
Abstract An attempt was made to carry out an experiment with three plagiarism detection tools (two free/open source tools, namely, Ferret and Sherlock, and one commercial web-based software called Turnitin) on Clough-Stevenson’s corpus including documents classified in three types of plagiarism and one type of non-plagiarism. The experiment was toward Extrinsic/External detecting plagiarism. The goal was to observe the performance of the tools on the corpus and then to analyze, compare, and discuss the outputs and, finally to see whether the tools’ identification of documents is the same as that identified by Clough and Stevenson. It appeared that Ferret and Sherlock, in most cases, produce the same results in plagiarism detection performance; however, Turnitin reported the results with great difference from the other two tools: It showed a higher percentage of similarities between the documents and the source. After investigating the reason (just checked with Ferret and Turnitin, cause Sherlock does not provide a view of the two documents with the overlapped and distinct parts), it was discovered that Turnitin performs quite acceptable and it is Ferret that does not show the expected percentage; it considers the longer text (for this corpus the longer is always the source) as the base and then looks how much of this text is overlapped by the shorter text and the result is shown as the percentage of similarity between the two documents, and this leads to wrong results. From this it can be also speculated that Sherlock does not manifest the results properly.
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Miss MITRA SHAHABI
University of Aveiro - Portugal
mitra.shahabi@ua.pt


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