Portal connects UK faculty to advanced plagiarism checking software

Today the University of Kentucky Office of the Vice President for Research and the Office of Research Integrity launched iThenticate at UK, a portal open to full-time faculty that can check written content for similarities against 217 million articles, books, conference proceedings and 90 billion current/archived webpages to ensure the integrity of their work prior to publication.

“Now more than ever, universities are taking proactive steps to eliminate research misconduct, in all of its forms,” said Vice President for Research Lisa Cassis. “By providing iThenticate to the UK research community, our investigators now have a quick tool to rule out plagiarism.” 

Developed in partnership with iThenticate and Crossref, a leading plagiarism checking service, the portal will assist in identifying unoriginal content through a vast repository of previously uploaded documents, published materials and internet sources.

The software will generate a downloadable report and check for potential similarities to ensure the originality of scholarly work. An intuitive, color-coded user panel for viewing source content makes reviewing each potential match easier, and a variety of exclusion options help researchers determine the level of focus for critical text match review. The portal is suitable for reviewing large-scale research projects or publications, grant proposals and articles.

“UK’s commitment to responsible conduct of research is enhanced by the provision of the iThenticate software. It is a good resource to compare draft applications of grants and publications to ensure there is no copying of verbiage without appropriate credit to the original author,” said Helene Lake-Bullock, assistant vice president and executive director, Office of Research Integrity.

The iThenticate at UK license will consist of 15,000 credits for 3,000 full-time faculty, for a total of five credits per faculty member. Each faculty member required to complete Responsible Conduct of Research (RCR) training and in compliance can use these credits to submit manuscripts or other research documents. Units (colleges, centers and/or institutes) will be responsible for purchasing credits beyond the individual faculty allotment and will be able to monitor usage by faculty through a Tableau report currently in development.

An iThenticate Zoom demonstration on Sept. 29 at 2 p.m. is open to any UK faculty member. It will provide an overview of the system and show how to upload content. A recording of this demonstration will be offered on the iThenticate website after the session.

Questions may be directed to: iThenticate@uky.edu.

UK iThenticate website: view FAQs, request access, join Zoom demonstration.