what is the best plagiarism checker

what is the best plagiarism checker

The Importance of Using a Reliable Plagiarism Checker

1. Introduction

A student who makes the decision to plagiarize is also making the decision to take a risk of severe consequences considering the easy detection of plagiarism in today’s modern age. In doing so, a student is putting at stake his or her academic integrity and possibly the career or field of study to which they aspire.

A test conducted by Jamie Forest and Donald McCabe that was documented in the Journal of Education for Business revealed that there was a five-fold increase from 1993 to 2000 in the percentage of students who admitted to copying internet documents for use in handing in as class assignments. This information demonstrates that the problem is not diminishing, but rather escalating. This being said, it is important for students to understand the significance of the issue and be aware of methods and means to avoid committing plagiarism.

A writer must be concerned with more than just the act of plagiarizing; one must be concerned with the possibility that their work will be checked by their peers, TA’s, professors, or a national database of some sort. This concern led to the need for a program or system by which an instructor can run a student’s paper and determine if it is in fact the student’s own work. In order to combat this issue, many companies have developed computer programs designed to detect plagiarism.

The act of taking someone else’s work and passing it off as your own is defined as plagiarism. This is a prevalent problem in academic writing. If a student fails to provide attribution for quotes and relies too heavily on one source, he or she has committed a serious academic offense. With the increase in technological advances, writers are no longer confined to using only books, magazines, and journals as sources of information. Web-based resources provide an overwhelming amount of information which can be difficult to discern, leading many students to simply copy and paste information into a paper with the misconception that if it is on the Internet it is public domain.

2. Criteria for Evaluating Plagiarism Checkers

The most effective way to improve such content is to check it by using a sophisticated exclusion/inclusion filter. This allows the user to specify what parts of an original document or previously submitted work should be excluded from the check against a vast database of internet sources. Then, any content for which the user can provide an online source of origin can be entered into the checker’s exclusion/inclusion filter so that it is effectively checked for originality against everything else, but not against itself or the content specified for exclusion. This is a very powerful, systematic, and efficient way to improve any matched unoriginal content.

For any written material to be useful, it should effectively get the message across. But simply matching a string of words to an internet source and returning any matches does not actually discern where unoriginal content has been used. Ignoring proper citations, referenced material will still be matched as unoriginal, leading to false positives.

Individual products vary in the extent to which they meet the basics of this criterion, but they should all offer at least some level of this checking capability. This is, of course, a key criterion. One of the original reasons behind the automation of plagiarism detection was to speed up the process, allowing for quicker feedback to locate and help students who may have inadvertently plagiarized simply because of improperly cited references. Add students and researchers into the mix, and it becomes evident that this feedback on originality is just as important when checking the work of others as it is one’s own.

3. Top 5 Plagiarism Checkers

2. Dustball: A free plagiarism checker that can be used by anyone. Simply paste your work into the box, and it will be checked against several databases. It is a great tool for students, but the results are not as specific as paid software like Turnitin. However, it is better than search engine checking, and the turnover time for a result is quick.

1. Turnitin: Perhaps the most widely used plagiarism software and internet-based checker. Instructors have the ability to set up their assignments to allow students to submit their work directly to Turnitin. The originality of the work can be checked by comparing it with over 45 billion web pages and 337 million student-submitted papers and articles to detect any overlap with existing documents. Results are color-coded for the instructor to see. Teachers can also use this to check if a student’s work is original or plagiarized. A downside is that it is not free, and students cannot check their own work as a third party without access to an assignment.

Search engine is not the only place where you can check whether your work is plagiarized. There are several software and internet-based plagiarism checkers available. The features of these plagiarism checkers vary; some are free and provide basic checking and results, while some are paid. Some provide detailed results regarding which part of your work is copied and from where. They compare your work with documents available on the internet and with previous submissions by other students on a particular assignment, and can tell you how much of your work is original. Here are the top 5 plagiarism checkers:

4. Comparison of Features and Pricing

Turnitin vs. The rest Given the possible consequences of using Turnitin (personally, we will be royally pissed off if we ever discovered that academic material we’ve submitted is now the property of Turnitin), it doesn’t have some fancy features to justify the price: mothball a document for seven years and you’ve only got to “submit it once through Turnitin” as long as it doesn’t leave safe storage. But with no grading tool or revision assistant, this is just paying for writing mistakes. And if Turnitin grades by the quality of grammar, you’ve gotten a haha F. But with no grading tool or revision assistant, this is just paying for writing mistakes. And if Turnitin grades by the quality of grammar, you’ve gotten a haha F.

Grammarly has the most basic features that help in correcting any proofreading mistakes in a document. It will focus on more general mistakes such as grammar, punctuation, and spelling errors.

Turnitin has a feature where it would teach the students the concept of citing and referencing. This teaching is much helpful to students who have problems in making a correct citation or reference in their writing. The method is easy whereby students can use it as an example and it would automatically create the citation/reference in the document. This is an advantage because other software would not teach how to refer or cite the correct way. For example, from. There are also additional features such as grading tools, e-rater, and revision assistant. These tools can grade the students’ writing and give feedback on it. Revision assistant will be able to revise the document by using back the same copy of the document before any revisions. These additional features have exceeded the tools for checking plagiarism. However, Turnitin still maintains the price that is equivalent to each institution that uses it. This could be a problem because Turnitin may seem expensive for only a personal user.

This is the section that you are waiting for! It takes much of our mind to compare the features and pricing to determine the better choice of plagiarism checker. From the comparison, we can acknowledge the advantages and disadvantages of both checkers that would make it easier to decide. In the comparison of features and pricing, we compare Turnitin against Grammarly.

5. Conclusion

The problem of plagiarism affects everyone in one way or another, whether or not we realize it. Everyone, from a school student all the way through to top professors or research professionals, feels the pressure and fear of unintentionally plagiarizing someone else’s work. In this technology-driven day and age, the chances of committing accidental plagiarism are higher than ever. The array of information sources available is staggering – from library-based information to online published works, all the way through to our good friend Google, the internet search engine. You never know where you might find the piece of information you are looking for. By using a reliable plagiarism checker, you are investing in the future of your work and the preservation of your own name and reputation. The need for a good plagiarism checker is now greater than ever, and with individuals or establishments using various operating systems and browsers, it has to be universal. A good plagiarism checker will run across various platforms and check through an array of published works. This comprehensive search is something that would take a large amount of time and effort to replicate, or indeed remember to do. One thing to keep in mind is that plagiarism does not always consist of copying someone’s work word for word and passing it off as your own. Paraphrasing, or changing a published piece of work into your own words, is still plagiarism if the original idea is not cited. An efficient plagiarism checker will pick this up and allow you to make the right citations or changes to your work. With the amount of work being put into published papers at any level – from school through to professional work – the original authors deserve to have their ideas protected and have credit where credit is due. Using a reliable plagiarism checker will give you peace of mind that you are not going to be faced with any surprises on the originality of your work, and evidence against claims of plagiarism will hold up to scrutiny.