Guide for Thesis Writing: Ouriginal (Formerly Urkund)

What is Ouriginal?

Ouriginal is a completely automated system against plagiarism and is being successfully used at universities and university colleges throughout the whole of Europe. Ouriginal’s system checks all documents against three central source areas: The Internet, published material and previously submitted student material (e.g. Memoranda, case studies and examination works). 

Ouriginal never determines what is a plagiarism. The reports they provide to your teachers consist, in the event of them finding similarities, of a text comparison. They note the parts of your document that are similar to other sources, in Ouriginal’s archives, on the Internet and in published material, and give the teacher access to the original material where they have found the similarity. Ouriginal compares textual similarity and subject similarity. It is thus possible that there will be hits in your document even if you have reworded a text and have used synonyms.

The teacher is provided with percentage indications for each hit in the document, but it is only when a marking, its original and discovered sources have been carefully checked that the examiner can conclude whether or not a justified suspicion of an attempt at deception is present. It is, therefore, of the utmost importance that you, as a student, make yourself aware of what is regarded as constituting a plagiarism, familiarize yourself with reference and quotation technique, but also listen to – and follow – the instructions you have received from your teachers.

Teacher's instructions

• Log in to Ouriginal at https://www.ouriginal.com/
• Select the "Log in" button, then on the page that opens, select the "Login to Ouriginal" button. The login page opens, where you select "Kajaani AMK" from the Institutions drop-down menu. Then click the button "Sign in via institution".
• On the next HAKA login page, enter your KamIT ID (username and password).
• At the first login, an analysis address is created for the user (first name.surname.KAJAK@analysi.ouriginal.fi). This analysis address you created will be linked to your KamIT ID.
• After activating your analysis address according to the process above, you should see your own Ouriginal analysis address (firstname.surname.KAJAK@analışı.ouriginal.fi) either on the top right of the page or behind the profile icon on your account page.

Use of Ouriginal by e-mail

• When you start using Ouriginal in your course, give your analysis address to the students.
• When a student sends their document to be checked via your analysis address to Original, it takes a few hours from the moment of sending, when the checking process is complete (promise within 24 hours).
• When the review process is complete, you will receive a notification to your email address. The e-mail message contains a summary of the correspondence percentage of the student's document with reference databases. In the same message there is a www link to the review report, where you can check the originality of the text in more detail.

1. Your teacher will inform you of the email address where you will send your work. The e-mail address has the format firstname.lastname.KAJAK@analysis.urkund.fi or firstname.lastname.KAJAK@analysis.ouriginal.fi.

Teacher, check your address when you log in for the first time. The previously acquired address has not changed.

2. You write your work with a word processing program. You can send files to Ouriginal, e.g. in the following file formats: .doc, .docx, .sxw, .ppt, .pptx, .pdf (without protection), .txt, .rtf, .html, .htm, .wps and .odt. Pdf format is the most recommended of these. Also note that the file name does not contain special characters.

3. You return your work by sending it as an e-mail attachment to the e-mail address provided by your teacher. You will receive a confirmation message shortly after receiving your document. In the same message, you will receive a link where you can deny the use of your work as a reference source in the Ouriginal system.

4. The document is stored in the database, after which it is compared with other documents in the database, encyclopedias, newspaper and scientific articles and books that are available for comparison, and material found on the Internet.

5. Ouriginal performs the analysis no later than one day after it has received the document. The teacher receives an analysis report, which explains the possible similarities of the document to other sources.

6. Your teacher will inform you of the result of the analysis. You can ask your teacher for a link to the report.