How does the Urkund system work?

1. The teacher informs students of the use of the Urkund system in the respective course and gives them the address of the www –page through which they can accept the use of the system. The students send their work to the Urkund system through the same page.  
2. The teacher gives the students instructions on correct referencing practices before they submit their written work. The students may use any word processing program (accepted file formats). If the document contains many tables, it is recommended to save the file as PDF format. The Urkund system will most likely work with Adobe PDF versions.
3. The students submit their work through the www-page mentioned above. They receive an acknowledgement of receipt from Urkund.
4. The work passes through the Urkund system. It is saved in the Urkund database and then matched with the other documents of the database (e.g. other student work), encyclopaedias, newspaper and scientific articles, books available for the matching process, Internet materials of a similar type, and other comparable materials.
5. A report on the completed analysis is sent to the teacher. Possible similarities between the target text and the source material texts are pointed out in the report. The report contains a link to a general review that the teacher may use for a more detailed study of the similarities detected by the system. The teacher provides an assessment of the significance of the recognized similarities. The student has the right to ask the teacher for an opportunity to see the analysis of his or her work.
6. In the general review mentioned above the student document is located on the left side of the teacher window while the comparable source materials are on the right side. On both sides, the text is clearly marked to point out to which part the teacher should pay attention. By comparing the marked parts of the document with the source texts found by the system the teacher can conclude how to proceed in the matter.
7. After student work has passed through the Urkund system, it is saved in the Urkund database. The document is saved as part of the archive services of the educational organization so that it can be used for the future analyses of other student work. In this way, documents checked and saved by the Urkund system also become protected against plagiarism. The student has the right to forbid the later matching of his or her document with documents from other universities.    

Materials submitted to the Urkund system shall not be used in any other way than those described above.

As the holder of the copyright the student has, however, the right to forbid the use of his or her document as a source material text in the Urkund system. In practice this is accomplished in connection with an e-mailed acknowledgement of receipt. If the student decides to exercise his or her right to forbid the use of the document for comparisons to be made at other universities, the document will still be saved in the local Urkund file and checked for plagiarism. However, the document will not be used as a source material text when students from other universities send their documents to be analysed and it cannot be searched from the Urkund database.