How Plagiarism Software Finds a New Shakespeare Play

Intriguing magazine article title, isn't it? It's an intriguing magazine article in Time Magazine.

From the piece...

Sir Brian Vickers, a literature professor at the University of London, came to his conclusion after using plagiarism-detection software — as well as his own expertise — to compare writing patterns between Edward III and Shakespeare's body of work. Plagiarism software isn't new; college professors have been using it to catch cheats for more than a decade. It is, however, growing increasingly sophisticated, enabling a scholar like Vickers to investigate the provenance of unattributed works of literature. With a program called Pl@giarism, Vickers detected 200 strings of three or more words in Edward III that matched phrases in Shakespeare's other works. Usually, works by two different authors will only have about 20 matching strings. "With this method we see the way authors use and reuse the same phrases and metaphors, like chunks of fabric in a weave," says Vickers. "If you have enough of them, you can identify one fabric as Scottish tweed and another as plain gray cloth." (No insult intended to Kyd.)