Anti-plagiarism Software: Usage, Effectiveness and Issues

In today’s digital age, with never ending advances of information technology, plagiarism of textual documents is becoming one of leading issues that causes wide concern in higher education and science. The ubiquity of Internet has created a plethora of possibilities for unacknowledged copying and paraphrasing of other people’s work. This has grave legal and moral repercussions for the society and seriously undermines its system of values. This paper discusses different types of document plagiarism and examines methods for their detection. It also presents software solutions that implement particular plagiarism detection techniques. Following the overview in the first part, the paper focuses on the analysis of difficulties arising in the plagiarism detection process and points out to open questions that need to be solved. Moreover, it offers some principal suggestions for possible improvements.