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Features

Source Alert : Student's perspective

Why is it cool?

In academic writing, relying on others’ published findings is essential, and now, with generative AI as an additional powerful tool, you wouldn’t want to miss out on performing at your best. However, properly citing them can be challenging – unless you’re using Mentafy. Our source alerts help you never miss out on a quotation and make your usage of AI transparent, so you cannot be falsely accused of cheating.

Source alerts are notifications you will receive when our writing pattern recognition algorithm recognizes a pattern suggesting copied or copy-typed text in your document. You can review them at different places within the app (e.g. activity stream), to classify them accordingly as one of the following: Citation, My Text, AI-generated, or AI-revised.

  • Usability
    • For every source alert, you see the first part of the text that you were alerted to declare your source. With the ‘+’ sign you can expand the shown text to see all of it and collapse it with the ‘-’ sign.
    • Alternatively, just follow the link below the ‘+’, you can also review the source alert directly within the text ‘in-text revision’.
    • You can always leave a comment, to explain your classification of the text you got the source alert for. You have the following options for classification:
      • Citation
        • The text is from another source (article, book, etc.).
          • Resolution: Cite the source in your main document.
        • Note: If you cite the source in your main document, we detect that automatically to a high degree. In that case, the classification and thereby the resolution of the source alert will happen automatically.
      • My Text
        • The text was actually written by you, outside of your main document and you copied it from that source to your main document.
          • Resolution: Leave a comment to explain the circumstances.
      • AI-generated
        • The text does come from a generative AI tool.
          • Resolution: Indicate, what AI tool you used here and add your chat history (TODO: LINK TO A HOW-TO).
      • AI-revised
        • You have actually written the text yourself, but had AI revise it.
          • Resolution: Indicate, what AI-Tool you used here and add your chat history (TODO: LINK TO A HOW-TO).
    • Memory Aid / Deletion
      • You copied a text, that is not meant to stay in the main document. This is actually not an option, you can choose as a classification. Delete the text again, before submitting your work, and the source alert will automatically disappear.
  • Technical
    • Our writing pattern algorithm analyzes the text, that is entered in the main document. Multiple dimensions of this writing pattern are considered to decide, whether a text was copied or originated directly from the author’s mind, like the speed of the input, the number of recursions, how many corrections have taken place, or the pattern of writing breaks. Based on the interplay of those variables, we will raise a source alert, i.e. mark the text passage that does not look like it was written by the author directly but rather copied from another source.

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