Plagiarism detection tool
SAFE Corporation announced the release of DocMatch, a new tool for comparing all kinds of documents to find plagiarism.
DocMatch compares thousands of document files in multiple directories and subdirectories to determine which files are the most highly correlated. It compares any kinds of documents, comparing text content and text metadata.
The software can be used to significantly speed up the work of finding plagiarism, because it can direct the examiner to look closely at a small amount of text in a handful of files rather than thousands of combinations. DocMatch is also useful for determining common authorship of two different documents.
“Our unique, patented technology has proved really useful for finding copied computer code in court, and I’ve always wanted to apply the technology to general documents like articles, papers, and novels,” said Bob Zeidman, president and founder of SAFE Corporation and developer of the algorithms.
“We had a few cases where we took our matching algorithms and used them to compare written engineering specifications. The results were very useful. In one case, finding copied but modified software specifications gave us the clue to show how one company copied another’s software. So we spent some time to package the algorithms into software products targeted specifically for this use.”
DocMatch can be licensed as the full version or the LT version. The full version is the professional tool. It creates a database containing matching elements between two sets of documents. The full version can automatically search the Internet for all references to commonly used words and filter them from the database.
Also, sophisticated statistics can be extracted from the database. The full version costs $150 for a one-year license. The LT version produces an easy-to-read HTML report showing words, sentences, and paragraphs that are identical or similar in every pair of documents. The LT version costs $30 for a one-year license.