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Plagiarism Checkers Can Save Your Time and Reputation

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Plagiarism Checkers Can Save Your Time and Reputation

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They say that great minds think alike. But when “alike” means “in all the same words,” it’s called plagiarism. With the advent of the Internet and easy access to all kinds of information, the level of plagiarism has gone through the roof. Not only is it unethical, but plagiarism can also discourage students from learning, push people toward academic dishonesty and even ruin reputations or careers. If you’re building your career around copywriting, blogging or digital marketing, you need to be 100% sure that your work is authentic. Be it a blog post or a thesis, you need to check your work for plagiarism before making it public. Plagiarism checkers are the most efficient way to do it.

What is a Plagiarism Checker

For many years, the only way to verify the uniqueness of a written work was a human manual check. It took a lot of time, efforts and would often result in inconsistencies among institutions: one university could find no plagiarism, while another could prove fraud.

When humanity started handing off its most tedious tasks over to computers, plagiarism checkers rose to the challenge of keeping academic integrity. This made verification more effective. However, basic plagiarism checkers can only detect word-for-word plagiarism. If the piece was rewritten or only the idea was stolen, simple plagiarism checkers couldn’t pinpoint the fraud.

The recent years demonstrated a boost in the development of machine learning and neural networks. Now that computers can learn and distinguish patterns, they can spot plagiarism almost flawlessly. In fact, they’re so good that they can even track idea theft and contract cheating.

Why You Should Use Plagiarism Detection Software

If writing is your source of income, you can’t afford to be caught plagiarizing. And it’s not like you do it on purpose. Sometimes, you go through so many sources that you can forget which statement was borrowed and which is your own. Not to mention, it’s so easy to get lost in sources and citations. Adding to the problem, publications may already contain stolen passages, ideas or simply lack proper citation. You shouldn’t forget that many people share the same thoughts. So, even if you think you’re creating original content, chances are pretty good similar thoughts have been published before.

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This is where an originality detector can help you:

Save your time. Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V have become the most popular keyboard combinations for a reason. When you have loads of writing to do under pressing deadlines, you start looking for shortcuts. Take students. When they’re short on time and have a colossal load of tasks, students tend to choose copying over creating. According to the survey conducted by Donald McCabe of Rutgers University, 58% of high school students admitted to plagiarism.

If you’ve never plagiarized in your entire life, kudos to you. But even if you’re certain your words and ideas are unique, it won’t hurt to check if others don’t have “unique” ideas just like yours. Doing this with a high-quality plagiarism checker is extremely fast and almost effortless.

Save your reputation. Few things in this world are as hard to fix as a damaged reputation. Using plagiarism detection tools can save you from the trouble of being accused of plagiarism. An originality checker will prevent you from submitting or publishing someone’s ideas without giving proper credit to the original author. It’s better to be on the safe side and always check your works before publishing.

Unicheck: an Excellent Example of a Plagiarism Checker

There is a vast diversity of plagiarism tools to fit any taste and budget. But which one can you trust? Let’s get it all sorted it out.

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There are two types of originality detectors: free standalone tools and complex plagiarism detection software solutions. Both of them can do the job but with a different level of accuracy and cater to different needs.

Most of the first group tools check the text online: all you have to do is copy your text and paste it in the required field on the website. They check your writing against online sources and show you the results. Some of them also support URL checks to ensure that the content you published has no duplicates on the Internet. Usually, such plagiarizing scanners have a limited amount of checks and their accuracy leaves much to be desired. If you run your text against a couple of free plagiarism checkers, you’ll see that the similarity score differs from tool to tool. However, their main drawback is that only a few checkers guarantee the security of uploaded texts. And some even add your text to their database.

The second group embraces complex solutions that have an extensive toolset and access to scholarly databases. In most cases, they require you to sign up and offer either a freemium or a demo version for you to try out. Such tools are perfectly tailored to the needs of educational institutions as they provide extensive reports, integrate with learning management systems and offer analytics. A great example of such tools, Unicheck, can help you avoid the smallest traces of duplicated content in your work and can even tell if the person who claims to be the author has actually written the piece.

How Unicheck Works

Unicheck uses an algorithm that finds similarities and paraphrases by checking against the Internet web pages, open-source repositories and the user’s internal library. The tool is intuitive and easy-to-use: you just hit the “Create an account” button and, in a couple of steps, you’re ready to start. You can upload your file from a computer, Google Drive, One Drive or Dropbox or simply use the good old copy and paste method.

Unicheck report screen

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Once the tool has checked your text, you receive a report with orange, blue and purple highlights for similarities, citations and references. All matches that have been found will be provided with a percentage scale and a link to the original source. The report can then be downloaded as a PDF file.

Unicheck can also be used by college and university teachers to check their students’ work. It integrates easily with eLearning systems and automatically scans every submitted paper. The tool provides reports, calculates the originality and plagiarism rates and provides aggregated analytics. Emma is an AI-based part of the system that can even identify contract cheating. This self-learning technology studies the examples of people’s writing and uses this information to define authorship.

Final Thoughts

Writing for a living isn’t easy. You have to work fast, research a lot and be creative, even when you feel like you’re fresh out of ideas. But there are things you can’t compromise: your clients’ trust and your integrity. That is why you can never plagiarize and always run your writing against a quality originality detector.

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