Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Software Finds Plagiarism In Research

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the grant-revoked dept.

shmG writes "Researchers from the Virginia Bioinformatics Institute have created a seek-and-destroy program — for plagiarism. Called ET Blast, it's designed to find plagiarism in scientific papers. It does a full-text analysis, and then looks for similar publications in several databases. 'We have better literature,' Garner said. 'There are abstracts and full papers, and a database called Crisp, where you compare stuff to every grant the NIH gets. It's compared to any research that's been funded.'"

2 of 111 comments (clear)

  1. How is this different from Turnitin? by mlts · · Score: 4, Informative

    This sounds almost exactly like turnitin.com where when one uploads a paper to it, it searches almost anything it can get ahold of and will list any text in any academic journal that is copied verbatim.

  2. Re:You can't plagiarize yourself [Re:What about .. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

    I actually ran into this in grad school. When writing a tech related paper, I referenced one of my past papers on the same subject as a source. My professor made it clear I had to cite myself to avoid "self-plagiarism". I thought it quite possibly the stupidest thing I had ever heard in my life, and it was coming from a celebrated PhD at a major New England university.