Plagiarism is such a big issue in the digital world, whether you are a student, blogger, or professional writer. Copying someone’s work without reference to them can decrease your credibility and result in legal problems.
To address this issue, there are so many plagiarism checker tools and techniques available to help you check and remove plagiarism well. Therefore, this article will provide you with the best methods for identifying plagiarism and making sure the content produced is original.
What is Plagiarism?
It would be important to understand what plagiarism means before learning how to check and remove plagiarism. Plagiarism is the act of presenting other people’s ideas or words written by another as if one has. This means totally copying some paragraphs, using other people’s ideas, and passing them off as yours, or even more.
Some people commit unintentional plagiarism by forgetting to cite their references well. This is why checking for plagiarism becomes important, especially for students or content creators.
Why Avoid Plagiarism?
Plagiarism must be avoided in any given situation due to the following reasons:
- Ethical Accountability: It is completely unethical to pass off somebody else’s work as your own.
- Academic and Legal Repercussions: Students and professionals may suffer the worst kind of repercussions if they plagiarize, including academic penalties, fines, or lawsuits.
- SEO Penalties: Search engines, including Google, will penalize sites with plagiarized content, thus affecting your visibilities and ranks.
- Tarnished Reputation: If your plagiarism is discovered, then the credibility and trustworthiness you have established could be irreparably harmed.
But now the question is how to check for plagiarism. Let’s see that below.
How to Check for Plagiarism?
There are numerous tools for the detection of plagiarism. Below, we have listed some of them with their free as well as paid features:
1. Grammarly Plagiarism Checker
Grammarly
Starting Price
₹ 11808.00 excl. GST
Grammarly plagiarism checker is best known for its grammar and spell-checking capabilities, but it has a plagiarism checker, too. Uploading or copy-pasting your text into Grammarly allows it to scan it for all sorts of matches on the web.
How to Use: Open Grammarly, then paste the text, and you’re ready to proceed to click plagiarism check. It will show the percentage of your content plagiarized and even point out which sections need citations.
Best For: Freelancers, students who are in a hurry checking the plagiarism of work, and professionals looking for a quick plagiarism check.
2. Copyscape
Copyscape
Starting Price
Price on Request
Copyscape is one of the earliest tools web content developers turn to if they plan to check for duplicate content. It cross-checks your content with billions of pages within the web and then you have a report on similar content found. Other advanced features of the paid version include batch search and API access.
How to Use: Paste your URL or text in the search box on Copyscape and press on Search button to detect any duplicate content.
Best For: Bloggers, webmasters, and businesses that are curious about whether their content is copied or not.
3. Quetext
Quetext
Starting Price
$ 7.20
Quetext is a simple plagiarism checker that searches for text similarities. The paid subscription also comes with plagiarism reports and word count per search. It is indeed a very effective service in terms of plagiarism detection, along with an easy user interface. The DeepSearch technology delivers an in-depth search and scans through the vast range of content from sources to help you pinpoint any instances of copied work.
How to Use: Create a free or paid account and paste your content. Quetext will show you all the similarities it can find.
Best For: Teachers, students, and content writers.
4. Turnitin
Turnitin is one of the most robust plagiarism checkers. This tool is very common in most of the academic institutions. It does an excellent job of finding copied material from published books, academic journals, or any other resource online.
How to Use: Normally, students can only enter through their school’s submission platform. Once some results come up, it gives detailed reports on the above sources.
Best For: Typically, for your academic paper, dissertation, and other research documents. The site will prove helpful.
5. Small SEO Tools
SmallSEOTools
Starting Price
$ 9.80
Small SEO Tools plagiarism checker is designed to detect plagiarism. It checks your content against many sources and gives you full information about your content that is copied elsewhere. This helps maintain good content integrity. This free plagiarism checker works pretty well and may even be compared to the paid tools in the features as well. What makes it the best is for scanning very small articles and blog posts.
How to Use: Upload your file or paste the text, and it will scan for duplicates across the internet.
Best For: Small-scale content creators who just quickly want to scan for plagiarism.
How to Remove Plagiarism?
Once you have detected plagiarism, the toughest part is to remove the plagiarism. Here’s how you can ensure that your content has no plagiarism:
1. Paraphrasing and rewriting
One of the greatest ways of ensuring no plagiarism exists is by paraphrasing the content. This means you write the paper in your own words yet convey the same meaning and idea. Be careful, this is because a simple re-arrangement of just a few words in a row will not be enough. It should be markedly different in structure and phrasing.
2. Citing Properly
When you use ideas or direct quotes from other people, ensure that you cite them. There are APA, MLA, and Chicago, among other styles depending on your needs. A citation will not only remove the likelihood of plagiarism but also improve the credibility of your work.
3. Use Quotation Marks
Use quotation marks for the text if direct quotes are being used. Proceeding from there, the proper source citation should be provided. It is essential in any academic writing and even articles that publish direct quotes.
4. Plagiarism Checkers in Post-Editing
Even after manually removing or correcting plagiarism, it would still be useful to pass your text through a plagiarism checker once more. This will ensure that your text stays original and non-plagiarized from now on with no accidental copy-pasting.
5. Use AI Detection Tools on Generated Text
Hence, one should also be checking for AI plagiarism. Tools, including Copyleaks and Originality.ai, are also good at detecting AI-generated text. This is useful for businesses and content writers seeking to ensure all their content is human-written and original.
Conclusion
Plagiarism not only affects your academic and professional reputation but also your personal reputation. However, software or tools like Grammarly, Turnitin, and Copyscape, along with the best practices of writing and citation, help create original pieces of writing in the first place. Apart from that, give credit where credit is due and use plagiarism checkers only as the final layer of protection before publishing your work.
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Written by
Namrata Samal 
Namrata is a skilled content writer with an expertise in writing marketing, tech, business-related topics, and more. She has been writing since 2021 and has written several write-ups. With her journey with Techjockey, she has worked on different genres of content like product descriptions, tech articles, alternate pages,... Read more
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