Colleges nationwide have introduced anti-plagiarism software to help combat the growing trend of digital plagiarism according to a report by USA Today. As the Internet expands in content, it continues to enable students to access a more diverse collection of websites from which to “borrow” information. The developers of programs such as TurnItIn and MyDropBox.com have contracted with universities to require students check their work against a database of previously submitted work and websites before turning it in.

In 2006, an estimated 10.4 million students were enrolled in either program. Schools accrue licensing fees for their students, ranging from 40 to 80 cents per student.

Both TurnItIn and MyDropBox use a similar process, which takes less than a minute. Once a paper is submitted electronically to the program’s website, the program “memorizes” the information and creates a “digital fingerprint” of its content before checking it against a digital information database which scours the Internet, newspaper and encyclopedia archives, and previously submitted student work for similarities. The program issues a score for the paper based on its resemblance to existing work, highlights matching text passages and identifies the matching text within the database, and gives the professor the opportunity to view the similarities between the passages.