Originality

This article has been updated to reflect the enhancements that will be available after Friday 6 December as part of the December Release 2024.

Originality is new software developed by UNIwise, offering similarity reports at the point of marking for assessors, reviewers and managers. The Originality service is available on FLOWassign (main PDF file only, not appendices) and FLOWlock. Reports are generated by comparing a participant's submission to documents, from either your own WISEflow licence or from another institution's WISEflow licence, and to web content. Institutions will be able to determine if they are willing to share content from their licence with fellow institutions using WISEflow. 

Participant submissions are sent to Originality two hours after the participation period ends, unless a participant has an individual deadline, then that will be used as the reference point. The turn around time for an Originality report being produced is within 24 hours.

Please note there is a file size limit of 100MB per submission.

Key Terms

Indexing: Documents which are indexed are added to the database and can be searched against. Any documents which shouldn't be indexed are marked as confidential material (see key functionality below).

Matches: A match is a sentence that has been found to be semantically similar to a sentence from another source.

Document Score: The proportion of the document that has been found to be similar to other sources, where the higher the score the more matches we have found.

Annotations: These are the on page highlights of matches, each of which correlates to a card in the Originality panel and has a unique reference (see example below).

Excluded content: This is content that has been excluded from the Originality report, such as bibliography, references, tables and titles.

Source Document ID: The Originality ID of the document that a match has been found to, this does not relate to any WISEflow IDs (submission, paper ID, etc.)

Matches

Matches are categorised into three types in the report:

• Document: A document from either the same license, or from a license which has shared their documents with you through a sharing group. Dependent on the sharing group settings, either:
  • The full document can be accessed
  • Only the actual sentence matches is shown
• Private: A document from a different licence, not sharing content with you and where the information that can be seen is minimal. Only a document reference is shown.
• Web: Content from a website, where the link to the website is provided.

Key Functionality

Once the Originality module is enabled on your licence, it will be enabled on all flows (FLOWassign and FLOWlock) as the default. 

Managers can enable and disable Originality on a flow. They can also add the Confidential Material element to the cover sheets. This enables participants to declare if the work contains confidential material. If it does and the check box is ticked, Originality will not index the file.

Assessors and Reviewers can see the status of the reports and see the reports. The manager must grant the relevant assessor the appropriate licence defined assessor type privilege to be able to access the Originality reports.

Semantic Similarity is used by Originality to calculate the similarity of two sentences. This involves using a language model and vector database to identify sentences which have similar meanings to each other. This is more efficient than string matching, and allows us to better identify matches where small changes have been made to the text (as well as identifying exact matches), or the sentence has been paraphrased.

Legacy Marking Tool

For flows using the legacy marking tool, users are redirected to a standalone web viewer to see the Originality report. The Originality standalone viewer is a read only report and can only be accessed through a link provided within WISEflow. The standalone viewer is only available in English.

Access the report from the header navigation where a button displays the similarity score; it will open in a new tab.

New Marking Tool

For flows using the new marker journey, users can view the Originality report in the marking tool and toggle the report on and off alongside their usual marking activity.

Both the standalone viewer and the new marking tool viewer will show the same information, and have the same Originality features.

Originality Reports

However you view the reports, the main features are described below.

1. Toggle the switch to see the Originality report overlaid on the participant's submission or to switch the report view off (new marking tool only).
2. Similarity score: Identifies the total similarity score, made up of three types of matches.
3. Document score: Displays the score breakdown from the three types of matches (see Matches section above).
4. Sentences with a match: Displays the total number of matched sentences.
5. Match Categories: Displays the match categories used against any highlighted match (see below).
6. All matches: A full list of all matches is displayed from all of the types of matches: document, private document or web. Click on one of the matches in the list to see it highlighted in the main document.
7. Sentence Comparison: View the match details showing the sentence in the document being viewed, and the sentence in the source document to which it has been matched. It is also possible to download the source document if available.
8. Summary: Displays a summary list of the top sources matched in the document.
9. Excluded content: In this case it is the title that has been excluded from the report.

For the individual matches, categories are used to define how well matched the text is to the source.