New Partnership Adds 135 Million Records to Turnitin’s Plagiarism Detection Database
Turnitin, which partners with schools to protect academic integrity, original thinking and authentic learning, already had the best, most robust and largest system for detecting plagiarism. But a newly announced partnership with CORE, the world’s largest aggregator of open access research articles, will add an estimated 135 million more records to Turnitin’s control dataset.
CORE is a service provided by The Knowledge Media Institute, a multidisciplinary research and development lab based at The Open University in the UK and a partner with the digital solutions membership organization Jisc. The Turnitin/CORE agreement will allow Turnitin’s proprietary web crawler to search for text similarities across CORE’s vast global database of open access content and metadata from more than 3,700 data providers.
The partnership is significant because the scholarly publishing industry is changing and more and more academic and research work is moving to open access. As those resources become more available the risks of misuse increase. Those misuses can include both intentional and inadvertent plagiarism. Accordingly, adding the CORE work and data to Turnitin’s universe will help provide the most up-to-date protection for authors and institutions.
As part of the announcement, Dr. Petr Knoth, Senior Research Fellow in Text and Data Mining at The Knowledge Media Institute and Founder and Head of CORE, said, “At CORE, we believe that facilitating machine access to scholarly literature from data providers globally will enable companies like Turnitin to do their work more effectively.” He also added, “As a company deeply invested in research integrity, we appreciate Turnitin’s commitment to safeguarding the originality of scholarly articles and open access content.”
The need to safeguard this and other original academic work from inappropriate use was echoed by Valerie Schreiner, Turnitin SVP Business and Corporate Development, who said, “This partnership with CORE ensures that our database remains at the forefront of publishing trends and can continue to best serve the needs of our customers and partners.”
The CORE/Turnitin agreement comes at the start of the 6th Annual World Conference on Research Integrity, which is perhaps the most significant global meeting on academic originality and authenticity. The conference is June 2–5, 2019 in Hong Kong.
In addition to its tools for detecting the misuse of content through plagiarism, Turnitin also designs and deploys cutting-edge technology tools that can deliver formative and summative feedback for students and teachers, provide actionable reports and investigate other academic misconduct. The company’s dataset now includes more than one billion academic papers and related materials and it now helps more than 15,000 institutions around the world safeguard academic integrity.
