In this paper an on-going research effort aimed at detecting and localizing damage in plate-like structures by using a mode shape curvature based damage detection method is described. The proposed damage index uses exclusively mode shape curvature data of a damaged structure. The damage index is defined as the absolute difference between the measured curvature of the damaged structure and the smoothed polynomial representing the curvature of the healthy structure. The maximum value indicates the location and size of the damage. To examine limitations of the method, several sets of simulated data are applied and the obtained numerical damage detection results are validated by comparing them to results of an experimental test case. Simulated test cases include damage of various levels of severity. In order to ascertain the sensitivity of the proposed method to noisy experimental data, numerical mode shapes are corrupted with different levels of random noise. The modal frequencies and the corresponding mode shapes of an aluminium plate containing mill-cut damage are obtained via finite element models for numerical simulations and by using a scanning laser vibrometer (SLV) for the experimental study.