2021eResearchReport - Flipbook - Page 29
iThenticate: supporting plagiarism
detection at UCT
Plagiarism has increasingly become a
problem in higher education as students
and researchers find material on the
web they can readily pass off as their
own. While UCT offers the Turnitin
service to lecturers to immediately
pick up plagiarism in student work,
many researchers and journal editors
have requested a similar tool to ensure
the originality of written work prior
to publication. The newly established
Research Systems service offered
by eResearch now offers support for
iThenticate, an online web-based system
for plagiarism detection and prevention.
iThenticate has proven valuable for
UCT researchers to ensure the originality
of their own written work prior to
submission for publication, to prevent
embarrassing refusals.
One researcher who has been making
great use of iThenticate, is Professor
Abimbola Windapo, deputy dean of
postgraduate students within the
Department of Construction Economics
and Management. “I use iThenticate in
multiple ways. I’m the editor of a journal
published by UCT Libraries, and as
such I must check the papers included
in that journal for possible cases of
plagiarism. My research is in the area of
construction and project management
– not only the practical aspects of
construction like workforce and materials,
but also innovations in and around
the construction management space.
iThenticate is also useful in verifying
recognition claimed in that space too.”
Windapo also recently used
iThenticate when she and colleagues from
28 eResearch Report | 2019-2020
a variety of local institutions, hosted the
CBPM (Construction Business and Project
Management Conference) 2021. “We
used iThenticate to check the similarity
of reports of abstracts submitted to the
conference. Papers who didn’t meet the
required index score would be asked to
revise and resubmit before they could
be considered for participation. It’s been
really helpful since it was introduced last
year.”
“iThenticate was implemented at UCT
in July 2020 and presented at the ERP
webinars for researchers. As training is
not required, all UCT staff have automatic
access to the system using their UCT
network credentials,” says Seale. “It is a
simple web-based system that is intuitive
in nature.”
UCT iThenticate
usage
From November
2020 to October
2021
180
181
25%
SUBMISSIONS
DOCUMENTS
AVERAGE MATCH
ORCID: your
passport to the
future of research
Bibliometrics and research outputs are
moving beyond the focus on publications
alone to value all work done through the
intellectual process of research, including
datasets, unique workflows, software and
creative works. A researcher’s ORCID iD
ties all those outputs together to make the
full work visible and discoverable.
“Once your ORCID is set up
in this integrated system,
then everything else falls
into place and nothing falls
through the cracks”
~ Jill Claassen, Section manager of
scholarly communication & research
at UCT Libraries
UCT’s Research Data Management policy
requires that researchers make visible and
reusable not only their research outputs
but also supporting documentation of
the intellectual process, including data
management plans, datasets, unique
workflows and software. As research
infrastructure evolved in support of this
policy implementation, a cumbersome
manual workflow distributed across four
separate systems highlighted the need
to integrate research-data systems. The
system is owned by Libraries and the
Research Office and supported by ICTS
and eResearch, including the electronic
Research Administration system (eRA),
the data management planning platform
(UCT DMP), the ZivaHub data repository
and the OpenUCT repository for
publications.
their unique ID, which connects them
to their contributions across disciplines,
borders and time.
One of the project goals was a
push to also increase uptake in the
use of ORCID, linked to the electronic
Research Administration (eRA) platform,
to automatically identify and harvest
researchers’ online research outputs
and update researcher profiles on eRA
for reporting purposes. As a result of
extensive advocacy programmes, a huge
increase in the use of ORCID by UCT
researchers is evident. Currently, there
are over 800 UCT-affiliated researchers
with their ORCID iDs on the integrated
research system, each of whom has an
up-to-date list of contributions at their
fingertips for the next CV required for
academic progression.
Research Data Integration Project
Making research visible and discoverable
The Research Data Integration Project
(RDIP) was achieved in the technical
implementation of a high-level
interoperability framework, for the
automated exchange of information about
the publications of UCT authors, with
links to the supporting documentation
published on any online repository. Key
to the interoperability framework is the
disambiguous identification of each UCT
author across these multiple systems,
independent of common author names
like John Smith, or successive institutional
affiliations. This is done through ORCID,
which stands for Open Researcher and
Contributor ID, a global, not-for-profit
organisation providing a free, unique,
persistent identifier to all who participate
in research and innovation. Through
ORCID the researcher owns and controls
“One of the things I oversee is openaccess publishing,” says Jill Claassen,
section manager of scholarly
communication & research at UCT
Libraries. “We promote the use of
ORCID as, when a researcher’s ORCID
iD is activated in the eRA, their outputs
will automatically integrate with the
supporting documentation such as
workflows and software or datasets,
resulting in a full and complete record of
contributions.”
This includes outputs in the local
African journals that are published by
UCT Libraries using Open Journal System
(OJS).
“Once your ORCID is set up in this
integrated system, then everything else
falls into place and nothing falls through
the cracks,” says Claassen.
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