An Albanian Academic Database and a Qualitative Anti-Plagiarism System created by Akademia

Being a tech company, with the primary focus on education, Akademia embarked the venture of encouraging students to put their ideas and thoughts in their own voice through presenting the platform of an anti-plagiarism checker in Albanian. Together with the University of Prishtina, Akademia aims to spur creative and meaningful thinking, academic, social and professional effective communication, reflection of the level of understanding and demonstration of diligence predominantly through critical thinking by providing the opportunity to create and contribute new meaning. Having tested over 30 different anti-plagiarism platforms, Akademia has managed to create the most qualitative anti-plagiarism mechanism in the Albanian language so far. 

Being focused solely to further development of educational practices in Kosovo, Akademia intends to equip all the educational institutions with this particular feature. Considering that in various institutions, the number of students is immensely large as with the case of University of Prishtina, high level of transparency is one of the essential characteristics an educational institution must be acknowledged for. Correspondingly, as many universities do not have any anti-plagiarism mechanisms integrated in their systems, such mechanism will not only incite creative thinking and expression but it will also contribute to a higher level of transparency in between student-instructor relationship. There as, one can easily describe such feature as a web-based writing assessment toolkit that allows instructors to provide feedback to their students through distinctive markup tools and originality reports in order to detect plagiarism. Viewed from the student’s mindset, this type of system is not supposed to limit writing or learning abilities, quite the contrary it is supposed to enhance them.

Equally important is the academic database that this platform provides. With regards to the lack of online documents provided in Albanian such as research and scientific papers, articles, books, theses, abstracts, journals and various other documents as well as inadequacy of a convenient search engine platform, Akademia has also created an academic database where you can login freely and search any type of data from a variety of available sources. In other words, Akademia database, just like Google Scholar, allows you to broadly search for scholarly Albanian literature across various disciplines and sources created by academic publishers, professional societies, online repositories, universities and other websites. It helps you find relevant work through the world of scholarly research.

There are three fundamental features of the Akademia database:

1. Akademia database is comprehensive: it finds scholarly work of many types and it indexes material from credible journal publications, conference proceedings, books, preprint servers etc. where it puts them all in one place, and as such you can access them by just searching the keywords of your interest. Being as inclusive as it is, Akademia database is, therefore, a highly necessary tool when it comes to research, writing and other purposes.
2. Reliability: all profiles present in Akademia are done by scholars and their contributions are presented correctly and comprehensively through appropriate named authors, titles or journals. As such, they are credible sources that contain solid information.
3. Citation Analysis is automated: keeping track of the influence of scholarly work is essential, therefore along with the scholarly documents provided, there are also citations offered in various versions such as MLA, APA etc. Keeping in mind the ethos of our work, we need to be able to give credit to researchers who have provided the information through acknowledging their ideas by citing their work.

Throughout Akademia’s journey, ICK has played a critical role from the ground up by being the key adherent behind their work. As such it is worth mentioning the significant support they provided through facilitating numerous activities while opening their doors to many new opportunities. Being directly incorporated into ICK’s incubation through the fast track model, Akademia became part of the ICK’s mission into developing a culture of innovation in Kosovo through a professional development plan. As a hub, ICK in cooperation with Recura Consulting successfully provided mentoring opportunities for Akademia especially through a 10 day intensive business consultancy with regards to fundamental principles of valuation methods, training activities on how to operate as well as penetrate in the market, thinking about strategic approaches in a more systematic way and so on and so forth.

Additionally, ICK offered various training courses/workshops with the focus being to achieve knowledge on how to identify and engage with customers, how to market their product as well as strengthen their business model. Despite the training opportunities, ICK also endowed Akademia with financial support by providing grants in order to develop their idea into an end-product namely the academic package. Furthermore, ICK facilitated and sponsored engagement of Akademia into numerous conferences, business fairs, and events by clearing away all expenses. It also promoted their idea of the academic package through various meetings such as the one with the Ministry of Education, Science and Technology. There as, ICK, as a business incubator continuously contributed to the systematic and strategic development of Akademia.

In essence, the ubiquity of internet and its rapid development has created a plethora of possibilities for unacknowledged copying and paraphrasing of other people’s work and as such it has contributed to the proliferation of plagiarism cases, thus emphasizing the intensified need for an anti-plagiarism mechanism in Albanian accompanied by an Albanian academic ‘google scholar.’ All things considered, the academic package provided by Akademia represents a crucial component for an individual’s academic development. Being able to provide a website furnished with a vast spectrum of Albanian literature as well as a mechanism that qualitatively checks for similarities among various individuals’ work, not only represents an accomplishment for Akademia as well as all educational institutions in Kosovo, but also for ICK as an advocate of Akademia throughout their journey by constantly providing moral, financial and educational support.

By: Xheneta Sopjani (ICK)