A Comprehensive Way to Check for Plagiarism
They say that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, but imitation that goes too far starts to tread on legal gray areas. There’s no problem with being inspired by other writers, but it does become a problem when you “borrow” too much without proper attribution to the original author. That’s plagiarism.
CheckForPlagiarism.net offers a relatively affordable service that will help you combat both intentional and unintentional plagiarism. This review will take a look at the kinds of reports you should expect to receive from Check For Plagiarism and how much they cost.
Why Check for Plagiarism?
The primary focus for this plagiarism checking service is naturally in the area of academia. There are a lot of students out there who have a tough time putting together those essays and term papers, and they may feel inclined to take the easy way out. Furthermore, there are honest students who may unintentionally plagiarize a previously published work. They don’t want to “get caught” for something that they didn’t mean to do in the first place.
Check for Plagiarism claims that its service is superior compared to other plagiarism checking services. By and large, the service is completely automated and run by a machine. You feed in the document — it’ll take everything from MS Word and WordPerfect to PDF and HTML — and it spits out the report a few hours later. It’ll check your document against live and cached Internet sources, offline books and magazines, and academic journals. The patented synonym and sentence structure tool checks “to root out even the most subtle attempts at plagiarism.” It can also work with multiple languages.
What’s Included in the Report?
The plagiarism report is comprised of two main sections. The first section cross-references the provided document with the database of external sources. You can see how similar the document is overall with all other sources, as well as how similar it is against each individual source. These are both shown in the form of a percentage.
Generally speaking, universities and colleges will not tolerate essays that contain more than 5% plagiarism. They will accept up to five percent, because you are able to cite other works and it is inevitable that you may use some phrases that are similar to previously submitted works. In the example above, the person is clearly cheating. More than half of that paper has been plagiarized.
The second half of the plagiarism report goes through the submitted work line by line, word by word. This is actually quite powerful. The plagiarized sections are highlighted and the number next to these sections indicate from which source the original material was taken. These numbers refer to the first section of the report, of course.
Pricing Plans and Payment
There are a total of four pricing plans from CheckForPlagiarism.net. The idea is that they are able to offer everything from super affordable packages right up to support for large institutions.
The Student Package is $20 and allows you to submit up to five documents. Each time you submit a revised document, this counts against your total allotment. From what I can gather, there is no expiry date on these five submissions, so you can use one today and not use another for months.
If you plan on checking for plagiarism on many documents, it may be worth your while to consider the monthly or yearly package. They say that both of these offer unlimited document submissions, but you are limited to a maximum of 10 documents per 24-hour period. In this way, you have an approximate theoretical monthly limit of 300 documents, assuming that you submit them on a consistent basis.
Turnaround time for the Student and Monthly packages are at a maximum of 12 hours, whereas Yearly package subscribers have a document turnaround time of under four hours. Colleges, universities, and other institutions may want to inquire about customized accounts to suit their specific needs.
CLICK HERE TO SIGN UP WITH CHECK FOR PLAGIARISM
- Posted in Reviews, The Net
- 41 comments what's your take?
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Wow,
Looks like I am the first to comment on this one…. Well John I will give you credit this looks like a honestly good post.
Btw. I do offer advertising on my blog… Mr. Money Bags and it all goes to the American Red Cross.
Reply to this commentYou should check the byline on this post. That would explain the improved grammar.
Reply to this commentHaha, never miss a chance to get one up on the boss:)
Reply to this commentWell written Sir Michael. I like the % plagiarised report on posts, so that you know if they took a snippet or the entire post. I think to some extent EVERY post is repeating some strings of words found all over the place… even a room full of monkeys would EVENTUALLY write a novel… there are only so many words.
I’ll stick to copying a couple lines of text, slapping it into some quotation marks, and letting google find the copy cats since its free… but this software has potential.
Does it come with a lawyer?
Reply to this commentMr. Money Bags? Are we seriously in nursery school again?
Reply to this commentInteresting service.
Reply to this commentGreat post! I was looking for a service other than Copyscape for a new project I am working on. It is going require hundreds of articles written for us each month. This sounds like the perfect solution to check to make sure our writers are playing by the rules.
The yearly price is a great deal too, compared to the $65 a month.
It is weird, but I truly believe in fate, and lately things just keep popping up that seems to fit right into place for what I am working on. I hope they are all good signs
Thanks!
Reply to this commentI think if you do have a lot of sites and do a lot of writing or hire writers to do that writing the yearly cost is well worth it.
Reply to this commentI am a teacher from Wisconsin, and checked out the service after the review, and actually asked for a test account for our school. Since we already use TurnItIn, we decided to compare the two first-hand rather than go on anyone’s claims.
Surprisingly, CheckForPlagiarism.net fared better than TurnitIn, on two main fronts, 1) It does not store documents in it’s database (we tested this by submitting multiple documents to be checked against their database, and both did not reference each other), and 2) they have more books in their database compared to TurnitIn (we checked identical documents on CheckForPlagiarism.net and TurnitIn.com and CheckForPlagiarism fared better here).
I say “Suprisingly”, simply because TurnItIn charges thousands of dollars for annual subscription, while this service is economical.
Thank you John for the review, it has given us an opportunity to explore other avenues rather than an expensive solution which TurnitIn claims to provide. We will continue checking and comparing the service in depth, and report if any anomalies arise. For now, the review and the service are both winners!
Reply to this commentNice service, never seen something like this before.
Reply to this commentI am a student myself and think this service can be really helpful, however $20 for 10 submissions is a bit expensive in my opinion.
Unfortunately I think it is only five submissions for the price of $20.
Reply to this commentYea, that makes it even less worth it for the student, and students may need it more than others.
Reply to this commentThis is the first time I’ve ever heard of that interesting service
Reply to this commentGreat review. Great Service. Thanks John!
Reply to this commentI don’t know… 5% of “borowing” seems too little, 10-15% look more real. Tthough it would depend on the type of document.
Reply to this commentHi Michael - This sounds like an interesting service. I’m guessing that a lot of educational institutions will be finding that students are copying and pasting huge chunks of text from the Internet.
Reply to this commentPlagiarism has always been a problem. Nice post John
Reply to this commentTo expensive for me, but it suit with the service
Reply to this commentExpensive and interesting service for me.
Reply to this commentLooks like a nice service. However, I don’t think I’ll be needing it much.
Reply to this commentI would think the yearly service would be the only way to go. 1. I’m not a student and 2. $65 a month is a bit pricey.
I must say I would definitely consider using this service. That way I can make sure people I hire to write articles are not ripping someone else’s work off.
Reply to this commentThis is a concern of mine as my http://ww2db.com website becomes fairly popular in its World War II history niche. For example, I’ve been noticing websites, namely forums, feature entire articles from my site word for word without crediting me. However, I’m not sure if I have the budget for yearly subscriptions at this point. What a dilemma, huh?
Reply to this commentgood post john…this is a good site to detect plagirism
Reply to this commentGood guest-post, Michael, and great idea to bring him in for a guest post, John
[for those of you who didn't realize that it was a guest post]
I used Turn-It-In when I was teaching at UBC, and it did wonders for my students. They became very used to trying really hard not to plagiarise, and some of them who were scared to death that they’d be plagiarizing took extra care with their papers.
We always learn something new. I didn’t know of Check For Plagiarism. Thanks for this!
Reply to this commentVery interesting, but it’s some what expensive for bloggers like me. But it’s making my mind toggle between this and that.
Reply to this commentGood site but on the expensive side.
Reply to this commentI agree with the idea of cursing plagiarism. How about inferencing, paraphrasing or interpreting? Is it kind of plagiarism? As a matter of fact, by doing it the men’s innovation keeps going on. Without a source to refer to, it’s difficult or rare that our or your work is not kind of following others. Plagiarism????
Reply to this commentThis sounds great, especially for those of us who use freelance writers to make sure they are actually producing the original content you pay for! And, this is very affordable to boot.
Reply to this commentI dunno. Something as widespread as plagiarism isn’t hard to remove.
Reply to this commentI really don’t see the link to business and websites. Maybe if you have a large content website, but you should instead hire writers you can trust. I guess it may work if constantly use different freelance writers.
Anyway, the service does work as I’ve seen a few stories where teachers have used this and caught students. I remember seeing a show where a teacher used a similar service, caught students plagiarizing, failed them for it and then got fired when parents complained. This is why schools are failing, they don’t let teachers do their jobs.
Reply to this comment…you should instead hire writers you can trust.
You would think that would be the case, but even established writers you trust can one day go off the deep end or something and start plagiarizing.
This service could be a good insurance policy of sorts that can save you time and hassle later on, as well as to catch a plagiarized piece before you publish it. And that can prevent a lot of difficulties!
Reply to this commentI have a friend that was flunked by a teacher like that, after he posted a portion of a paper he was writing to his own blog….part of a rough draft. The service they were using, picked it up, called it plagerism, and the teacher and school didn’t care if he was “quoting himself” and flunked him. The school had a strict policy where whatever the service said is what they believed, no explanations accepted.
Not only that, but somewhere in the fine print was a little bit about how the service keeps a copy to all papers submitted, and retains the right to do with them as they wish, with no compensation or attribution to the authors. And whatever they do with them, since the submitter agreed with the terms, the company can’t be held liable for copyright infringement themselves, if they use the paper submitted, in any manner, including publication.
In essense, any student using the service, even if forced by a school, is giving up the rights to their own work and giving it away to the anti-plagerism company.
One never knows if some of these services are not secretly selling term papers in addition to “detecting” plagerism.
As a typical blogger, a service like this is somewhat useless for submitting your own material to, if you are looking for people that are copying your work. It will not do that. It can only tell you if you have copied someone else’s work. (you would know this, wouldn’t you?) You would still need something like Copyscape to find the copyright infringers.
Reply to this commentWell, that’s why you add a little (C) to every paper that uses the service, technically then it cannot become one of their corporate assets (unless you agree to some shady terms of agreement) and they can’t check it against new papers. Also, I used to subvert TurnItIn.com completely for school by replacing all the spaces with ALT+255, it reads it as one, big, non-plagiarized word.
Reply to this comment…unless you agree to some shady terms of agreement…
That’s the key bit there. A copyright notice is not required to claim copyright protection, at least in countries adhering to the Berne convention. So, copyright notice or not, the work you submit is going to be used by them as determined by the agreement you agreed to when you signed up to use the service.
Reply to this commentWell, this is cute. Not! Let’s violate copyrights to check plagarism. Hmmmmmm, not smart.
Reply to this commentA little bit expensive?
Reply to this commentWhat a good service. Plagiarism is a serious manner over the internet since everyone can copy-paste article easily. Anyway, for me it’s a kind of good review. Thanks John for writing a good sample for a newbie on paid review business like me.
Reply to this commentGood service but a little expensive for a blogger that writes tons of content. This should be great for teachers though.
Reply to this commentI agree on that one. Maybe John can negotiate a blogger special pricing deal for all of us?
Good service though, from the sounds of it.
Reply to this commentI’m not sure how useful this would be to a blogger, but it looks like it might be a nifty tool for some people. Kind of pricey though.
Reply to this commentInteresting service. Plagiarism is quite annoying. I had someone do that to me once & I confronted them about it. They took down the content immediately.
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