If you are unsure whether or not your written work may too closely resemble your source material, ‘text-matching ‘ software is available to all Flinders University students via Flinders Learning Online (FLO) which may assist you to avoid unintentional plagiarism. Flinders University is providing the opportunity for all enrolled students to use this text-matching software, called SafeAssign.

If you ‘submit’ an assignment to SafeAssign, it will match the text in that assignment to a set of academic papers to identify areas of overlap in which there is either exact or inexact matching between the submitted work and source material. Assignments are compared with source material in several different databases, including the Internet, ProQuest ABI/Inform database, archives of all papers submitted by Flinders University users, and a database of papers that are voluntarily submitted to Blackboard by students from other institutions.

SafeAssign generates a report that details the percentage of submitted text that has been matched with existing sources. The report also shows the suspected sources of each section of matched text.

Reports cannot be seen by other students but may be viewed by your lecturers and tutors if you have submitted the report as part of topic requirements. Those assignments submitted by students under the Student Learning Centre 2008 assignment will not be viewed by either other students or faculty staff but may be viewed by the Student Learning Centre staff administering the software.

SafeAssign Announcement

Please note: As of 1 August, 2008, SafeAssign will no longer be available to Flinders University students directly via mydropbox.com. Please ensure that you use SafeAssign via SLC or Faculty-based topics on FLO.

Accessing SafeAssign

To access SafeAssign you need to register into STLL0001 Student Learning Centre.

Registration may take up to 7 days. Once complete, the topic STLL0001 will be listed among your other FLO topics.

For more information on how to submit an assignment using the SafeAssign tool please view our animated tutorial or download the pdf version.

Interpreting SafeAssign reports

It is important to keep in mind that SafeAssign is a text-matching software program, not a plagiarism detection device. Flinders University is offering it to students as part of its Academic Integrity Management Strategy (AIMS), for educative purposes, so that students may improve their ability to paraphrase and to understand and follow academic conventions in acknowledging sources.

SafeAssign reports provide the following:

an overall matching percentage which indicates what percentage of the total submitted paper matches existing sources in the databases. This percentage may include quotes and common phrases or blocks of text that match other documents. Reports should then be studied further to see whether the sources of matched text have been acknowledged correctly, or whether matching has occurred simply because of the use of common phrases etc.
a sentence matching percentage which is generated by clicking on a sentence that has been identified as matching an archival source. A Source Comparison window opens up, showing the URL of the matching document, the percentage of similarity for that particular sentence, and a direct comparison of each sentence with its suspected source.

All reports must be analysed, as matched text may or may not constitute plagiarism.

For example:

Single quotes will be highlighted as matched text but are a legitimate use of source material, provided they have been enclosed in quotation marks, their source has been acknowledged correctly, and you have not relied heavily on a number of quotes that another author has used.
Matching may occur if you have not paraphrased adequately, and your work too closely resembles another person’s work, even if you have not copied text verbatim.
Sentences of a generic nature may be matched but it is unlikely that these will constitute plagiarism. Example: Several authors may inadvertently write of Australia, ‘Australia is a vast country with a relatively small population’. This may be included as matching text although no plagiarism has actually occurred.

For further explanation of the analysis of SafeAssign reports, drop in to the Student Learning Centre and speak to an academic advisor.