What Is a Plagiarism Checker and How Does It Detect Cheating?
Plagiarism is nothing new. People have always knowingly or unknowingly taken credit for another person’s work. Unfortunately, whether you intend to plagiarize someone’s work or not, the penalty for intellectual theft remains the same.
Would you want to fail a class, lose your job, or end up in jail for a crime you didn’t premeditate? Plagiarism checkers help you avoid these penalties, and you can also use them to check if the work someone submitted to you is original.
So, how do plagiarism checkers work, why should you use them, and what are their limitations?
What Is Plagiarism?
In a nutshell, plagiarism is intellectual property theft—it means presenting someone’s idea as your own. However, plagiarism goes beyond stealing other people’s work; you can also possibly plagiarize your own work.
These are the types of plagiarism you should know.
Global Plagiarism
This involves presenting an entire body of work as your own. For example, taking one of J.K Rowling’s Harry Potter stories fromany of the websites Harry Potter fans must visitand publishing a book with your name on it is blatant plagiarism.
Verbatim or Direct Plagiarism
This involves copying and pasting bits of someone else’s work into yours, a common form of plagiarism.
Paraphrasing
This is another common form of plagiarism. It involves presenting someone’s idea in your own words without giving them credit. Translating texts from one language to another without proper referencing also counts as paraphrasing.
Several good paraphrasing toolsare out there, but be sure to give credit where credit is due when using them.
Patchwork or Mosaic Plagiarism
As the name suggests, patchwork plagiarism involves taking bits of information from multiple sources and using them to form a new text altogether.
Self Plagiarism
This is reusing work you’ve already made public but altered a bit here and there, so you can receive credit for it as a new creation.
What Is a Plagiarism Checker, and How Does it Detect Cheating?
As the name implies, plagiarism checkers detect instances of plagiarism in your work. The results are usually presented in percentages, allowing you to compare how much of your work is unique and how much of it is copied. It also provides the source or sources with similar texts used in your work.
Plagiarism checkers work with the help of database software. When you run a check on an essay, for instance, these checkers scour the internet and databases they can access to find similarities between your work and other sources.
Different checkers have different ways of conducting this exercise. However, a common way of doing this is through keyword analysis and highlighting similarities between your written work and existing pieces. This is why most plagiarism checkers can find exact matches of copied texts and link to their sources.
Advanced checkers have the framework to go further and check for non-exact matches, i.e., paraphrasing.
4 Advantages of Plagiarism Checkers
Plagiarism checkers are scattered across the internet, from well-known paid software to random free checkers. However, every software you encounter will produce different quality results. That is why we listedthe top free plagiarism checkersin no particular order.
If you consider the authenticity of your work a priority, you should have no issues with using a plagiarism checker. However, for people who are unsure whether they need one or not, here are some other advantages to consider:
1. Intellectual Property Protection
Plagiarism checkers help protect others' intellectual property by revealing if a written work, in part or as a whole, is similar to other works. This ensures that the rightful authors are credited and that their work isn’t used without proper citation and authorization.
This tool helps guarantee that individuals and institutions can continue to be relied upon as credible and trustworthy sources. Simultaneously, it fosters an equitable and respectful environment for creative and intellectual works.
2. Time-Saving
The wonderful thing about plagiarism checkers is that they save you time. With this tool, you don’t have to manually comb through the internet and compare your work with hundreds or thousands of other online literature. Instead, it will do it for you in a matter of seconds.
3. Information Verification
Another great thing about plagiarism checkers is they let you verify sources. If someone claims ownership of a piece of work, a plagiarism checker will let you easily verify this claim.
4. Improved Writing Skill
Plagiarism checkers point out how much of your work is original and how much of it is copied from someone else. Using these markers as a guide, you canlearn great content-writing etiquetteand write more unique articles instead of churning out the same content on the internet.
3 Limitations of Plagiarism Checkers
Plagiarism checkers are one of the most important inventions in the internet age, especially for the academe. However, like every other app, they have their limitations. Here are some of the drawbacks of using a plagiarism checker.
1. Limited Coverage
Plagiarism checkers are designed to detect replicated texts. Despite technological advances, it is still far from identifying when an idea or concept has been plagiarized, not just the text. This means that plagiarism checkers have difficulty tracing other forms of plagiarism besides direct and global types.
2. Issues With Common Phrases
Another limitation of plagiarism checkers is they often have difficulty filtering out common phrases from their results. Though they are designed to overlook these instances, the software can only identify some common terms. This results in getting flagged for plagiarism matches that are mere coincidences.
3. They Can Be Quite Expensive
One more limitation of plagiarism checkers is their cost. High-quality checkers, like Copyscape, can get expensive. While there arefree Copyscape alternatives, these are typically limited to about a thousand words. If you want to check a longer document, you have to pay a fee.
Stay Original With Plagiarism Checkers
Plagiarism checkers are important tools that do more than make sure you aren’t copying someone’s work. They also protect your reputation and keep you out of legal trouble.
If you are a student, a writer, or someone who has to churn out written content regularly, using a plagiarism checker will benefit you. Whether you use a checker or not, it is most important to stay original with your work and give credit where due.
Want to make sure your assignment is plagiarism-free before you submit it? Check out these plagiarism-checking add-ons for Google Docs.
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