in the Turnitin plagiarism detection software have been documented in scientific literature. In particular, Turnitin has been proven to be vulnerable to ad hoc text encodings, rearranged glyphs in a computer font, text replaced with Bézier curves representing its shape. Automated paraphrasing Another study showed that Turnitin failed to detect text produced by popular free Internet-based paraphrasing tools. Besides, more sophisticated machine learning techniques, such as automated paraphrasing, can produce natural and expressive text, which is virtually impossible for Turnitin to detect. Also, article spinning was not recognized by Turnitin. Asked about the situation, the then vice president of marketing at Turnitin Chris Harrick said that the company was "working on a solution", but it was "not a big concern" because in his opinion "the quality of these tools is pretty poor". Turnitin's response Several years later, Turnitin published an article titled "Can students trick Turnitin? Some students believe that they can 'beat' Turnitin by employing various tactics". The company denied any technical issues and said that "the authors of these 'tricks' are mostly essay mills." The article then listed a few possible "tricks" and how Turnitin intended to take care of them, without mentioning scientific literature, technical treatises or examples of computer code. Further criticism The Italian scholar Michele Cortelazzo, full professor of linguistics, who also studies copyright attribution and similarity between texts, noted that, paradoxically, it is impossible to tell if Turnitin's source code has been plagiarized from other sources, because it is not open source. For the same reason, it is unknown what scientific methodologies, if any, Turnitin uses to assess papers. In 2009, a group of researchers from Texas Tech University reported that many of the instances of "non-originality" that Turnitin finds aren't plagiarism, but are just the use of jargon, course terms or phrases that appeared for legitimate reasons. For example, the researchers found high percentages of flagged material in the topic terms of papers (e.g. "global warming") or "topic phrases", which they defined as the paper topic with a few words added (e.g. "the prevalence of childhood obesity continues to rise"). Turnitin was also criticized for paying panelists at conferences on education and writing. See also iThenticate References External links Software for teachers Plagiarism detectors Companies based in Oakland, California Computer-related introductions in 1997 Advance Publications 2019 mergers and acquisitions