DrillBit plagiarism check: how it works for your thesis

What is DrillBit, and why did universities switch from Ouriginal?

DrillBit is a commercial plagiarism detection product. It is sold to institutions and publishers outside the national scheme also. Under the national licence, the version your university gets is called DrillBit-Extreme.

That national licence comes through ShodhShuddhi, a Ministry of Education programme which the INFLIBNET Centre runs. As per INFLIBNET, ShodhShuddhi has been giving universities and institutions plagiarism detection software since 1 September 2019. For the first four years the software was Ouriginal, the product earlier known as Urkund. The contract with Ouriginal by Turnitin ended on 30 September 2023, and from 1 October 2023 INFLIBNET shifted the programme to DrillBit-Extreme. There was one trial month first. Full service started on 1 November 2023.

Your department did not pick DrillBit on its own. If your university is on the national licence, any thesis checked there after late 2023 has most likely gone through DrillBit. INFLIBNET has extended the DrillBit service several times after that, and the latest extension was in June 2026. In case you are reading this a long time later, see the ShodhShuddhi site for the present position.

Some universities keep their own Turnitin licence too. And if the notices of your university still say “URKUND” or “Ouriginal”, they were probably written before October 2023.

How do you get your thesis checked on DrillBit?

Each university has its own small differences, but mostly the route goes in these steps.

1. 1

   Find out who runs the check

   Ask your research cell, library or department which office does the plagiarism check for theses. In most universities it is the library, or a coordinator named for plagiarism checks. The notice board or the university website usually gives these informations.

2. 2

   Ask whether you need your own login

   Under ShodhShuddhi, the university coordinator can give PhD scholars and faculty their own DrillBit accounts. Some universities like to run all thesis checks from one central office instead. Ask which way your university is following.

3. 3

   Prepare the final file

   Send the version you are going to deposit, as a single file. Chapter order and the reference list both should match the final thesis exactly. If anything moves around after the check, the report also will change.

4. 4

   Confirm the settings

   Ask if references, quotations and small matches are excluded. INFLIBNET gives these as the standard settings for theses, but the university decides what is actually applied.

5. 5

   Read the report and the AI report

   Two reports come back to you, one for similarity and a separate one for AI writing. Go through both of them before you accept the result or start changing anything.

6. 6

   Collect the certificate

   When the result comes within the limit of your university, the office gives the certificate that your thesis submission form asks for. In DrillBit this certificate comes from the Digital Receipt on the analysis page.

Know two limits before you upload. INFLIBNET’s FAQ gives each scholar five documents to begin with. The university coordinator can give more if you request, and the university’s allocation is counted per year. As per the same FAQ, a long document gets counted as more than one submission. Every 20 pages counts as one, so a thesis of 200 pages takes up ten. One file can go up to 800 pages and 100 MB. For this reason many universities ask you to check the chapters with your supervisor first, and send only the final thesis to the library.

If you will deposit the thesis on Shodhganga after this, the certificate from this check is usually one of the documents needed there. That step is in our Shodhganga submission guide.

How to read a DrillBit similarity report

A DrillBit report has basically the same parts as other similarity reports. Go through them in this order.

• The similarity percentage is your matched text as a share of the whole, counted after the exclusions your library picked. Start reading from this number, but it decides nothing by itself.
• The source list puts the matched sources in order of how much of your text each one covers. If one source has a big share, look at that first. Many sources with one or two words each are much less serious.
• The highlighted passages are where you see the matched sentences and in which part of the thesis they come. Here you decide about each match. Some are cited quotations or standard phrases, and a few you must rewrite.
• The exclusion settings is where you find out if the library kept out references, quotes and small matches. A percentage given without these settings is hard to judge, so look at them along with the number.
• The AI report is separate from the similarity figure, and it measures some other thing. Take it as a reason to look at that text again. It is not proof of anything.

The settings INFLIBNET lists for theses

Three standard exclusions for theses are listed in INFLIBNET’s DrillBit FAQ. These are exclude references and bibliography, exclude quotes and exclude small sources set to 14 words. When these settings are on, the reference list is not counted in the percentage. Quotations marked properly are also left out, and so are short matches of up to 14 words. Your university can set them in a different way. So ask which settings were used, and see that the report shows them.

Short matches of three or four words

Many times scholars get worried about small highlights of three or four words scattered all over. INFLIBNET’s FAQ puts these down to paraphrasing spread over many pages. As per the FAQ they add very little to the score, and you can ignore them. Worry only about one long continuous passage matching a single source.

What the library can and can’t exclude

The office doing the check can apply the standard exclusions. If the university allows, it can also keep aside matches which are clearly not a problem of your writing. Your own published paper is one example, if your university permits you to include it. But the office can’t reduce the figure only because you request it, and it should not. When a match is really wrong, show the exact source and passage and then ask. To see how the same parts of the report look in Turnitin, check our guide to reading a Turnitin report.

DrillBit vs Turnitin vs Ouriginal

All three tools take your text, compare it with other text and report the overlap. Where they differ is in who supplies them to Indian universities, who is allowed to use them and what they search.

Why the percentages differ

Check the same chapter on DrillBit and on Turnitin, and you will get two different numbers. Each searches its own set of web pages, publications and submitted papers. Each tool have its own matching rules and default exclusions also. DrillBit says it compares against millions of scholarly publications and billions of web pages. Turnitin describes its databases in much the same broad way. So you can’t call any one of them the “true” figure. For your thesis, the figure that counts comes from the tool and settings your university uses at submission.

Rechecking is one more practical difference. DrillBit does not save your upload automatically, as per INFLIBNET’s FAQ. When you revise the thesis and upload it again, it is not matched with your earlier upload. Turnitin works differently here. There a draft may or may not go into a repository, depending on how the assignment or account was set up. That is a common reason why a final version matches with the student’s own earlier draft.

Theses in Hindi and other Indian languages, and AI-text flags

Indian-language theses

As per INFLIBNET’s FAQ, DrillBit supports 15 regional languages and more than 3,000 fonts. The languages are Hindi, Kannada, Urdu, Malayalam, Telugu, Tamil, Marathi, Sanskrit, Sindhi, Santhali, Gujarati, Bengali, Assamese, Odia and Punjabi. DrillBit’s own website gives a longer list. That is one reason DrillBit suits Indian universities, since a thesis in Tamil or Hindi can be checked with the same tool as an English thesis.

For a thesis in a regional language, the percentage will mostly come lower. INFLIBNET’s FAQ says this openly, and the reason is that much less text in those languages is available to compare with. So a low figure for a Hindi thesis is weaker proof of original work than the same figure on an English thesis. Your examiners are aware of this.

The AI-writing report

According to INFLIBNET, DrillBit gives a separate AI-detection report for every submission, and there is no setting you need to switch on. DrillBit calls this detection of AI-generated text. Like any AI detector, it can only estimate. It may flag text written by a person and miss text written by a tool. About AI, the UGC 2018 regulations are silent. So how your university acts on this report will depend on its own circulars.

Say your thesis gets flagged. Please don’t sit and rewrite chapters in a panic that same night. Your old drafts, notes and version history show how the text grew, so keep them. Then go through our guide to using AI tools in your PhD to see what is generally accepted and what you should disclose.

What to do if your DrillBit percentage is too high

First find out what “too high” means in your university. The UGC 2018 regulations give levels, and universities are free to make them stricter. You can see the levels in detail in our plagiarism limits guide. Don’t go by a figure your friend got at another university.

Then sit with the report itself. From the number you won’t know which pages need work.

1. First see which settings were used. If the report was run without the standard exclusions, it can be several points higher than the same thesis checked with them.
2. Start with the biggest single sources. Usually the real problem is one long match to a paper or thesis you used a lot.
3. Write the passage again in your own words and cite the source. Otherwise keep it as a proper quotation in quotation marks with the citation. Our guide on paraphrasing and quoting shows how to do it.
4. Go through the literature review and methods chapters carefully, since definitions, standard descriptions of methods and summaries of other studies are where most matches collect.
5. Send the revised file for a fresh check, but remember a long thesis eats up your allocation.

Some scholars swap letters with look-alike characters, paste text as images or put passages through a paraphrasing tool. All these count as academic misconduct. DrillBit may not catch it every time. Your examiner reading the chapter will catch it. If you want help to revise a chapter, our similarity report review goes through the report with you and fixes the citations, while you do the rewriting themselves.