Academia and Text Matching Software

Scabies (2007) argued that the electronic text matching software is not the solution to eliminating plagiarism because the soft. Are only focuses on text matching of paper under review with documents (journals, articles, e-books and conference papers) found on the internet or which has been previously submitted and this is a limitation because the only detection are focused on electronic materials without considering some non-electronic paper based documents which could still be plagiarisms.Walker (2010) stated that with the development of text matching software such as the turning plagiarism detection was made easier, however he emphasizes that the turning detection software is not 1 00 per cent efficient, it merely identifies and matches materials present in a document uploaded to turning website to materials available on the internet. Walker (2010) describes the electronic text matching software as a tool only suitable for detecting word for word or direct plagiarism in electronic form and the refined ones from the paper based sources are not easily detected.

Moreover Carroll and Appleton (2001) argued that the turning is just an option for measuring plagiarism and that alone cannot be used as a basis for judging good scholarship practice. In addition Carroll and Appleton (2001) insist that the use of electronic software for detecting plagiarism requires human application and interpretation and that using turning alone as a medium for plagiarism detection is not proficient.According to Barrett and Malcolm (2006) the electronic text matching software (turning) only indicates possible plagiarism without any certainty, it is left to the tutor to determine the extent to which the writer has plagiarisms or included some sources in the paper without acknowledging where they were acquired. In conclusion the concept of plagiarism cannot be overemphasized. It has become a factor that has affected good academic scholarship practice and has created an avenue for educators to develop methods for detecting and dealing with plagiarism.The development of the electronic detection software such as the turning has enhanced the detection of plagiarism however it cannot be relied upon completely because it is not effective. In addition it is important to understand that the best way to detect plagiarism is to use both the manual method which involves educators and he use of electronic text matching software such as turning.