SafeAssign is a plagiarism detection service offered by Blackboard.  This service helps instructors prevent plagiarism by detecting unoriginal content in student papers.  In addition to acting as a plagiarism deterrent, it also has features designed to educate students about plagiarism and the importance of proper citation of any borrowed content.

Instructors can enable SafeAssign in their Blackboard assignments. As students submit papers, they are checked against SafeAssign’s comprehensive databases of source material.  The papers will then be delivered to instructors through the Blackboard Learning System together with the originality reports, with the results of the matching process, attached to them.

SafeAssign checks submitted papers against several databases, including:

  • Internet – A comprehensive index of documents available for public access on the Internet.
  • ProQuest ABI/Inform database with over 1,100 publication titles and about 2.6 million articles from the ’90s to the present, updated weekly (exclusive access).
  • Institutional document archives containing all papers submitted to SafeAssign by users at the University of Arkansas.
  • Global Reference Database containing papers that were volunteered by students from Blackboard client institutions to help prevent cross-institutional plagiarism.

TIPS Articles on SafeAssignment