Plagiarism Prevention

Since January 2014 the GWDG offers our Customers the Software turnitin and iThenticate. To gain access, fill in the form on plagiat.gwdg.de. Choose which software you want to use. You may of course decide to use both software solutions.

Turnitin and iThenticate are webbased solutions for plagiarism detection provided by the company iParadigms. They can be used by reviewers and teachers for checking the authenticity of documents to avoid plagiarisim.

Before you use the plagiarisim detection software please note the Legal Regulations regarding data privacy and copyright.

For the use of our plagiarism prevention service an e-mail-address belonging to the University of Göttingen, the University Medical Center Göttingen or the Max Planck Society is required. Furthermore the usage of our plagiarism service is only for official purposes, studential usage is explicitly prohibited.

If you are entitled to use the service because of your affiliation to one of the named organisations, even though you do not possess a correspondent e-mail address, please write an e-mail to support@gwdg.de. We will then provide the access to the software.

Turnitin is designed for student papers. It checks the papers using a data base consisting of other student papers, a proprietary websearch engine and a data pool consisting of scientific puplications.

iThenticate is appropriate for scientific publishers and for research institutions. Writings will be checked against a comprehensive database consisting of websites, scientific journals and other publications, but not student papers.

For both software products you can find online information.

• Information on turnitin
  • http://www.turnitin.com/en_us/training/getting-started
• Information on iThenticate
  • http://www.ithenticate.com/resources/customer-training/

You will receive your plagiarism account from the GWDG. You only have the permission to use this account for operational activities for the GWDG, the University of Goettingen or the Max Planck Society.

For using the plagiarism detection software turnitin or iThenticate it is necessary to save the writings on servers of iParadigms in Europe and the USA. For doing so without infringing copyright or data privacy, you need to make sure that you have the permission of the copyright holder respectively the owner of the personal data.

This means that you are not allowed to check with turnitin and/or iThenticate any papers from students or other writings that are not your own without the permission of the owner. Please verify in your faculty or your institute whether there is a general regulation regarding the copyright and the data privacy issue. Such a regulation may be found either in the exam regulations, the study regulations or other regulations. If no general permission exists, you need to get the owner's permission before you use turnitin or iThenticate.

Writings found in the Internet you are allowed to check, if they are under common license or you have the copyright owner's permission. You may find this information in the license specification for the document or in the website's imprint.

To avoid a permanent storage of the uploaded writings in the Global Student Database in turnitin, iParadigms has configured the accounts created by GWDG in a way that this option is not available. In iThenticate, except if you use Institutional Repositories, also no document is saved durable. Currently, Institutional Repositories are not available to customers of the GWDG. A permanant storage isn't necessary for the originality check of a scientific paper and thus is not allowed.

In case a writing contains personal data, e. g. addresses, acknowledgments, declarations of originality etc., these must removed before uploading the document (recommended also for your own writings). Otherwise you need the permission of the owner to avoid issues regarding data privacy. See also the recommendations of the DFN association (German only). A permission is not needed for cited names in writings already published.

Your own mail address and your name must be saved on iParadigms' servers because they are used for your account. Regarding the transfer and storage of data on servers outside Europe, a contract was concluded between GWDG and iParadigms regarding data processing on order. In this contract it is stated that data privacy and data security must be conform with German law. The data must be used only for the intended purpose, and it is not allowed to provide the data to third parties without the permission of the GWDG.

• http://turnitin.com/
• http://turnitin.com/en_us/features/originalitycheck/content (sources and references for plagiarism detection)

• http://www.ithenticate.com/
• http://www.ithenticate.com/content (sources and references for plagiarism detection)
• http://www.ithenticate.com/search?q= (search in from iThenticate indexed scientific publications)

• Articles on the software test in autum 2013
  • article in the GWDG-Nachrichten 8/2013
  • article in the GWDG-Nachrichten 9/2013
• Articles on the plagiarism service of the GWDG starting in 2014
  • article in the GWDG-Nachrichten 1/2014
  • article in the GWDG-Nachrichten 8/2014
• Article on the legal situation regarding plagiarism software
  • article in the GWDG-Nachrichten 5/2015

• article in the GWDG-Nachrichten 5/2015
• regulations of the DFN association german only

• http://plagiat.htw-berlin.de/start-en/