A Chinese academic who has developed a software program to detect and prevent plagiarism in university papers is calling for stricter enforcement of regulations to curb plagiarism, Xinhua News Agency reported.

Shen Yang, an associate professor in the Information Management School of Wuhan University, developed the software that can detect and underline content similar to that in a database of 18.8 billion Web pages and 4.9 million papers.

The software, used in more than 20 universities and 100 magazines, was published in April 2008 to help university authorities and teachers check for plagiarism.

"We need a law to counter plagiarism in academic papers," Shen said.

Shen said his detection program is used only as a reference, and that suspect papers should be further examined to ensure that content similarities are not accidental.

He said he was updating his system to prevent plagiarists from making adjustments to avoid detection, and also to help authorities avoid misjudging accidentally similar papers as plagiarism.

(China Daily 07/06/2009 page9)