What is CopyCatch?
CopyCatch is a suite of software products developed by CFL Software Development, all designed to find similarities between documents using whole documents rather than keyword or phrase queries. There are versions which cover individual through to corporation-wide use.
All the programs use much the same search methodology, comparing sets of documents with each other or with larger stores of related material.
They can all find similarity below the sentence level and are all designed to be able to identify such similarity even with changes in word order, insertions or deletions.
Copycatch Gold has been used by individual university teachers for a number of years to monitor student work for plagiarism or collusion.
Copycatch Investigator is actually a set of algorithms designed for large-scale users, and is normally tailored for specific purposes, from visual interfaces to automated monitoring systems running on very powerful multi-threading computers.
The other tools listed are used by Forensic Linguists to gather and assess evidence in cases of malicious emails, threatening letters and other suspect written material. CFL uses them in consultancy work, but they are also used by university researchers and investigators.
- Powerful plagiarism and collusion detection
- Sophisticated searching
- Fast, scaleable, multi-platform software written in Java
News and Events
With effect from September 2007 the Universities and Colleges Admissions Service is using CopyCatch Investigator to monitor personal statements submitted by applicants to United Kingdom universities.
| Press Reports | |
| The BBC | "Degree applicants copy from web ..." |
| thisislondon.co.uk | "Student web cheats caught out by pyjama inspiration ..." |
| The Observer | "Universities use computers to catch plagiarists ..." |
| UCAS | "UCAS research shows few students pay to plagiarise ..." |
| The Telegraph | "Pupils copy university application off the internet ..." |
| Related Links | |
| Specimen page | Taken from the UCAS similarity database |
| Tailored for UCAS | How it was done |
| Other CFL case studies | In Education, Commercial and Legal Sectors |
Find out how CopyCatch has been used by UCAS since September 2007 to help them verify the personal statements of applicants.