If you supervise theses, you hear the question more and more: what can a tool like Acurio do that Elicit, Perplexity or SciSpace can’t already? And why bother at all, when the university already recommends Turnitin?
Both are fair questions. The short answer: these tools answer different questions, and only one of them is the one you ask when you grade. Does the cited source support the claim the thesis makes?
Four tools, four questions
| Question | Tool | Who uses it |
|---|---|---|
| Is text copied? | Turnitin Similarity | Lecturers after submission, sometimes students too |
| What literature exists on my question? | Elicit, Perplexity, Consensus | Students, while writing |
| Do the citations in my draft hold up? | SciSpace Citation Verifier | Authors, before they submit |
| Do the sources support the claims of the submitted thesis? | Acurio | Lecturers at hand-in, students beforehand |
The difference is clearest in a single sentence. Say a bachelor’s thesis contains:
Digital teaching improves learning outcomes across the board by 40% (Meyer, 2023, p. 24).
But page 24 of Meyer reads: “In the tutor-supported subgroup, learning outcomes rose by 40%. The full group showed no significant difference.” The source exists, the page number is right, the 40% is there. Only the claim is wrong. Meyer (2023) is a fictional example, the same one as on our page for institutions.
What do the four tools make of this sentence?
Turnitin Similarity finds copied text
Turnitin Similarity compares a thesis’s wording with text from the internet, licensed academic literature and earlier submissions. At the University of Zurich, for example, it has been the official plagiarism check since October 2022, and the university advises against other plagiarism tools. For that job it is the right tool. The University of Zurich itself calls the similarity report “merely an indication” that nobody should accept unchecked.
Our sentence is the student’s own wording. Turnitin finds no match, and the sentence passes unnoticed. The same goes for a fabricated source: an invented citation is original text, and a plagiarism check has no objection to original text. Why that is the costlier error is the subject of Plagiarism vs. miscitation.
Since 2025, Turnitin Clarity has also offered students a citation check. It reports formatting errors, mismatches between citations and the reference list, and missing citations, currently in English only. Whether Meyer says on page 24 what the thesis attributes to him is not something it checks either.
Elicit, Perplexity and Consensus help you write
Elicit searches academic databases for a research question and pulls details from the papers it finds into a table. Perplexity answers questions with citations, drawing on academic databases in its Academic mode. Consensus shows how studies split on a yes-or-no question. All three sit on the writer’s side of the desk: they help people find and understand literature. How they differ from each other is covered in AI research tools compared.
That is also where the rankings of the “best AI research assistants” doing the rounds come from. The vendor Atlas Workspace, for instance, ran its own test in 2026: seven tools, its own among them, the same 50 questions against 200 papers, counting how often an answer cites a source that doesn’t exist or doesn’t contain what was said. That helps you pick a research tool. It says nothing about a submitted thesis. What it measures is whether the tool cites correctly in its own answers, not whether students do.
On their own, these tools never see our sentence. You could enter it and ask whether Meyer (2023) supports it. With 40 cited works, that would be 40 queries whose answers you would then have to check. And a library textbook they only read if you upload the pages yourself.
SciSpace is the closest relative
SciSpace is best known as a chat with papers: upload a PDF, ask questions. Since autumn 2026 it has offered Citation Verifier, which comes closest to Acurio. It checks whether a manuscript’s references exist and their details are correct. In full mode it compares the claims with the source material SciSpace can retrieve and read, and reports whether a source supports the claim, supports only a narrower version of it, doesn’t contain it, or contradicts it. Without a readable source, the claim is left open as “could not be checked”.
That is the same question Acurio asks. For grading, two differences matter.
Who checks which version. Citation Verifier is built for authors checking their own draft before they submit. If a student runs it on their draft, you don’t know which version was checked against which sources. What counts is the version handed in. You can also run Citation Verifier yourself on each submission. For a whole course, that means uploading every thesis one by one and finding the sources SciSpace can’t read yourself. Whether you may upload students’ theses to a service is also up to your university.
Which sources get read. A bachelor’s thesis often cites textbooks, edited volumes, reports and paywalled articles. If those stay unchecked, a good part of the check is missing. In an Acurio submission, nobody can hand in until every cited work has a source: whatever Acurio can’t find open access, students add as a file, as phone photos of the cited pages, or with a reason. A work with only a reason stays “not checked”, and you see the reason.
What Acurio does differently when you grade
Acurio starts from the submitted thesis, as a PDF, Word file or LaTeX, and works in three steps:
- Capture every citation. Acurio recognises parenthetical citations, numbers and footnotes, and the claim each citation is meant to support.
- Find the original passage. Acurio searches the whole source, even when the page reference is off.
- Judge with reasons. Supported, partly supported or unsupported, each with the original passage and a reason. If a source is missing, the passage reads “not checked”, never “unsupported”.
For our sentence that means: Partly supported. The source reports 40% only for the tutor-supported subgroup; the thesis generalises it to everyone. The passage from page 24 sits right next to it.
You see a course’s submissions in one folder, each thesis with its count of supported, partly supported and unsupported passages. You get an email as soon as Acurio has checked a thesis. The report shows the flagged passages first, and you only read up there. What students check beforehand with their own account stays invisible to you; you only see what comes in through a submission.
For universities, where theses end up matters too. The University of Zurich turned Turnitin down in 2017 because Turnitin did not meet the university’s data protection rules, and only introduced it in 2022, once Turnitin had accepted them. Acurio is hosted in the EU (Germany), GDPR-compliant, and uploaded theses and sources don’t train any model.
Who it is worth it for
If you only check for plagiarism today, Acurio doesn’t give you a faster version of that. It gives you a check that rarely happens at all. Checking citations today usually means picking three or four sources and hoping the sample hits the right ones. With 40 cited works, a full check by hand takes hours.
A source check pays off most where a grade has consequences:
- for theses and dissertations whose grade counts,
- when a grade can be appealed: you can put a finding with its original passage on the table, while an AI-detector score hardly counts as evidence there,
- when several supervisors are meant to grade by the same standard.
What Acurio doesn’t do
- Acurio doesn’t find copied text. You still need the plagiarism check.
- Acurio doesn’t guess whether a language model wrote the text. It checks citations, as described in Proving AI cheating at university.
- Whether a source suits the research question and whether the argument holds is still your call. Acurio tells you whether the source contains the claim.
Bottom line
Turnitin, Elicit, Perplexity and SciSpace are good tools for their job. Turnitin finds copied text, Elicit and Perplexity help with research, and SciSpace helps authors check their draft. What is missing when you grade is a check of whether the submitted thesis reports its sources correctly. Acurio fills that gap, alongside the plagiarism check rather than in place of it.
What this looks like for a whole course is on the page Acurio for institutions. In a pilot we check a real batch of submissions from your department, with no contract: request a pilot.
Sources
- University of Zurich, Teaching Tools: Plagiarism checks for teaching staff (German).
- University of Zurich, central IT blog, 6 Sept 2022: Turnitin löst Plagscan ab (German).
- Turnitin: Product updates (citation check in Turnitin Clarity).
- SciSpace: Introducing SciSpace Citation Verifier.
- Elicit: Changelog.
- Atlas Workspace: 7 Best AI Research Assistants (2026).