Keeping 3,000 academic texts a year clean — with less noise, not more flags
Studi-Lektor edits thousands of theses, dissertations and manuscripts across every discipline. Here's why they moved their plagiarism checks to Mentafy — and what changed in daily practice.
A check that has to be reliable — and discreet
With 130 editors, Studi-Lektor reviews around 3,000 academic texts a year: theses, term papers, dissertations and scholarly manuscripts across every field. These are documents that carry real weight and are strictly confidential.
So a plagiarism check has to do two things at once: deliver a review the team can trust, and handle every document cleanly. Over recent years, Studi-Lektor tested five of the strongest scanners on the market before making a decision.
Reliability in daily work, not the longest feature list
What tipped the decision wasn't feature count. It was what holds up under daily load: reports you can trace, results that stay consistent, and a contact person who actually answers.
At Studi-Lektor's volume, consistency isn't a nice-to-have. A medical dissertation and a business bachelor's thesis both have to be checked sensibly — without the team recalibrating its judgment from scratch every time.
First impression
Mentafy works deliberately to cut false positives, so the scan seems to find less. On paper, that can read like a weaker result.
After a few weeks
Far less to sort out by hand — and the findings genuinely worth pursuing are still right there in the report.
"For a team that goes through hundreds of reports by hand, that's the difference between a useful tool and a time sink." Kai Stapelfeldt, Studi-Lektor
It finds the source even when the words have changed
Mentafy's semantic source search surfaces passages that draw on a published source even when nothing matches word for word — including translated passages and reworded paragraphs. These are exactly the cases a match-based scanner can't reach, by the nature of its technology.
And they're the cases that matter most in editing: someone worked from a source and simply forgot to cite it.
A finding is a signal, not a verdict
It matters to Studi-Lektor that the system never claims more than it knows. Mentafy doesn't replace the expert eye — it prepares it. The editors decide; the tool points them to where they should look. That's exactly where the team feels well supported.
The documents belong to the client — full stop
Students' and researchers' documents belong to them, not to an editor and not to a vendor. Mentafy is a small German company with servers in Germany, where documents are reliably deleted on a schedule Studi-Lektor sets.
Nothing is fed into third-party comparison databases or used to train AI. At a time when every AI provider is scouring the web for training data, that's a decisive point.
Catching honest slips before they become problems
Most of the time, the check protects students from careless mistakes — a source used and simply left uncited, quickly fixed once it's flagged. When it looks like sources are being hidden to overstate someone's own contribution, Studi-Lektor raises it openly.
After decades of this work, the team has become good at supporting and motivating students to invest the time and thought that good, original work takes.
"With several thousand papers a year, what counts isn't who finds the most, but who produces the least noise. Mentafy returns fewer false positives and still finds what actually matters — including translated and reworded passages that other scanners, by the nature of their technology, simply don't see." Kai Stapelfeldt · Managing Director · Studi-Lektor