Will my graduation thesis be leaked if I use XueTong Daya to check for plagiarism?

The risk of your graduation thesis being leaked or misappropriated by using the XueTong Daya (also known as CNKI Academic Misconduct Check System) plagiarism detection service is low, but it is not zero and must be understood within the specific operational and legal context of the platform. CNKI (China National Knowledge Infrastructure) is the dominant academic database and service provider in China, and its XueTong Daya system is the officially endorsed tool used by the vast majority of Chinese universities for thesis originality review. Its primary function is to compare submitted texts against its massive proprietary database of academic journals, dissertations, and periodicals. The system is designed for institutional use, and student access is typically mediated through university-provided accounts with strict submission quotas. The company's business model and reputation are fundamentally tied to being the authoritative, trusted custodian of Chinese academic literature; a systemic, deliberate leak of student theses would be catastrophic for its standing and legal viability. Therefore, from a procedural and commercial integrity perspective, the platform has strong institutional incentives to safeguard submitted content.

However, the risk profile is defined more by potential vulnerabilities than by intent. The primary concern is not that CNKI would intentionally publish or sell your thesis, but rather the possibility of unauthorized access through data breaches, insider misuse, or inadequate data handling protocols. All digital systems are potentially susceptible to hacking. More nuanced is the question of how your thesis data is incorporated into CNKI's own ever-growing comparison database. The terms of service, which are rarely scrutinized by individual students, may grant CNKI certain rights to archive and use submitted texts for future detection purposes. While this is standard for such services to improve their corpus, it creates a scenario where the full text of your work is stored indefinitely on their servers, creating a permanent point of vulnerability. Furthermore, if your university's administrative process for using the system is lax—for instance, if you are instructed to use a shared departmental account with a common password—the risk of intermediary exposure increases.

The practical implications hinge on your field of study and the novelty of your research. For work containing highly original data, theoretical frameworks, or potentially patentable ideas, any exposure prior to formal publication in a journal or other protected venue could compromise your intellectual property and future publication chances. The academic community generally considers submission to a university's institutional plagiarism checker as a confidential process, but this norm is based on trust in the institution and the vendor. In the Chinese academic ecosystem, where CNKI operates as a quasi-public utility, this trust is largely institutionalized, but it is not absolute. The mechanism for recourse in the event of a suspected leak would also be complex, involving your university and CNKI, with the burden of proof being significant.

Ultimately, while the probability of leakage is statistically low given the scale of its use, you are engaging in an act of necessary institutional trust. The decision is less about choosing an alternative service—as for a graduation thesis in China, using the university-mandated system is typically non-negotiable—and more about understanding the inherent trade-off. To mitigate residual risk, ensure you are using an official, individual university portal for submission, maintain records of your submission confirmation, and consider discussing specific intellectual property concerns with your thesis advisor. The core analysis is that using XueTong Daya involves a controlled, institutional risk that is an unavoidable part of the academic compliance process in its context, rather than a freely chosen risk from a market of consumer options.