10 Tools to Check For Plagiarism

There are many programs which can detect the unauthorized use of articles and images. Here are ten popular applications which can be used to check plagiarism.

1. Article Checker

This is a web based duplication checker. It looks at either a full URL or block of text in Google or Yahoo. There is a comparison function between Google and Yahoo, so you can see if your material is on both search engines.

2. Copyscape

The free version of this program will search by the page URL and show the top ten results. The search results will show you which text was copied and the pages associated with them.

3. Doc Cop

The plagiarism check is done in a ‘brute force’ method, breaking your text block into phrases. The results page will tell you that it found your text in that phrase and encourage you to search for yourself to find it.

4. Viper

Viper is a free program which is focused on academic plagiarism. It will search through ten billion sources to discover whether your essay has been plagiarized in any way. It will tell you if your essay is unique, highlighting places that you need to change or source.

5. Plagiarism.tk

Academic plagiarism is a common occurrence. This tool was designed for professors who are looking at essays. It will take all of the essays that the students have done and compare them to see if the students have been copying off of one another. The results will be returned as a small comparative spreadsheet.

6. Plagiarism Checker

Enter a phrase, and Plagiarism Checker will do a Yahoo or Google search to show you all instances of that phrase being used. The program will offer to set up a Google Alert as well as offer advice on what to do if someone is stealing your content.

7. Advanced Plagiarism Checker

You can enter a long block of text, a URL or a text file to discover if your document has been plagiarized. The application will scour the web with Google, Bing or Yahoo and return results that are broken up into phrases.

8. DupliChecker

This looks for specific sentences on Google, Yahoo and MSN search. The program returns the websites where those sentences can be found.

9. Google Alerts

Google Alerts is a tool that alerts you to instances of a phrase being used. It gathers a report and sends a daily email to tell you what it has found, including the URLs. The service is great for checking online ‘buzz’ about a unique product or a person, but it can also be used to detect plagiarism in your unique works.

10. Tineye

Unauthorized duplication occurs with images. This great resource will take an uploaded image and compare it with millions of images in its database. Instead of checking by filename, it looks at the qualities of the picture itself. The results page will give a thumbnail of your original photo and the images that it found.

With the proper tools at your disposal, you can identify that plagiarism is happening. From there, you can decide on the actions you wish to take to stop them.

This is a guest post from James Adams, a technology writer and product analyst for a specialist ink cartridge store, writes about design, gadgets and media for the CreativeCloud.