Plagiarism-Checking Software
Plagiarism Check Software: How Can I Use Them?
Every person involved in academic writing is well aware of the fact that plagiarism is quite a pressing topic. As far as the issue is on the agenda in our professional activity, we decided to shed some light on the commonly used plagiarism software. First of all, let’s start from what actually the term “plagiarism” means. Most of us consider “plagiarizing” as copying someone’s work or borrowing somebody’s ideas. In fact, “copying” and “borrowing” are only the masking notions for the serious violation.
According to Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary “to plagiarize” means:
- to steal and pass off (the ideas or words of another) as one’s own
- to use (another’s production) without crediting the source
- to commit literary theft
- to present as new and original an idea or product derived from an existing source
All in all, plagiarism is nothing more than fraud and lies
The student can be excluded from the university if the issue of plagiarism has occurred during the learning process.
During the research, you use different sources: articles, on-line books, videos, etc. All these sources finally appear in the Works Cited page. In the body section every paragraph or sentence taken from the other source and is not your own conclusion must be referenced according to demanded academic style.
However, sometimes we neglect the rules of proper referencing or simply forget about in-text citations. Therefore, always better to double-check your paper for plagiarism in order to avoid further issues. For such purpose there are various software programs that will check your paper for plagiarism indicating if there is any matching text accessible in the web.
When choosing the software, it would be better to pay attention to the reputation of the particular company or its product
For example, a well-known company is more likely to sell the software, but not distribute it for free. Please keep in mind that the penalty for plagiarism is always heavier than the amount you are to pay for the program.
N.B. Not all of the plagiarism checking software products are 100% reliable. Some softs, for example, Turnitin, save the papers in their database after checking. What does the latter mean? Imagine the situation when you had written a good dissertation and put a lot of effort in it. Naturally, you will want to check it for instances of plagiarism. If it is Turnitin, the result will be 0% of matching text for the first time. With the happy smile on your face you pass this dissertation to the tutor. He checks the paper with Turnitin and it appears that the paper is 100% plagiarized! How it can be? The reason is the paper has been saved in the database. By the way, a lot of universities and colleges use Turnitin for plagiarism check. In this respect, Turitin not only processes the available data on the Internet, but also it scans its own database of academic papers that have been submitted by different students from all over the world.
In order to avoid such unpleasant situations, do not use Turnitin for plagiarism check. You can always decide in favor of a program which checks only on-line sources while processing your paper and what is more, it won’t add your paper to the base.
