Plagiarism: The Academic Dishonesty The Significance of Anti-plagiarism Software (Tools) in Plagiarism Detection

Plagiarism is an unethical way of using others ’creative works, words, text, ideas or data in their writings without acknowledging the source or giving credit to the creator of the work. Though this is not a recent phenomenon, it is gaining prominence with the increasing ‘copy and paste ’culture in this electronic and digital era. With the easy availability of scholarly literature online, the plagiarised activities have become the prime concern to all the stakeholders in scholarly communication especially the academic administrators, funding agencies, research organisations and publishers, and thus employing several measures including the application of plagiarism detection tools. The paper describes features of various anti-plagiarism tools-emphasising the plagiarism detection process of popular tools-Turnitin and iThenticate. The use of anti-plagiarism tools among the academic circles is discussed, highlighting their usage in University of Hyderabad in the context of contributing theses to Shodhganga and the plagiarism-free repository of Indian university theses created by the UGC INFLIBNET Centre, Ahmedabad.