Plagiarism detection tools work by comparing text submitted by a user to a database of other published text, to determine if any similarities exist, and to help prevent plagiarism. Plagiarism is the practice of presenting ideas or creations of another as your own. As a matter of policy, educational institutions work hard to instill in their students the understanding that plagiarism is not only unethical but also unwelcome in professional and academic settings.
Plagiarism detection tools can be used by teachers and students to assure academic honesty but they also have many other applications. Authors, journalists, bloggers, copywriters, or content writers can also use this type of tool to ensure the writings they are creating are original, to improve their writing, and so on.
1. Stop Plagiarism and Promote Authenticity
Avoiding plagiarizing is the biggest and most obvious reason for using plagiarism detection software. If a student knows their professor uses such tools, they will refrain from even attempting to plagiarize, or they could use a plagiarism tool themselves to check their own work. But avoiding plagiarism is important in every form of writing and in every setting. Not only is it unethical to steal someone else’s work, and not only can it discredit your work, but it can even be considered illegal in many situations.
2. Improve Your Writing Skills
Plagiarism checks keep you honest by finding how much of your work is original and how much is a copy, and allowing you to eliminate any copied content. However, using a good and reliable plagiarism checker can also help writers improve their writing skills, in various ways.
For instance, if your work implies a lot of paraphrasing, it can help you improve those parts of your texts. Most importantly, by pointing out similarities of your text to texts written by others, this tool can help you identify flaws in your style. You can use this to work on improving your skills and finding a more authentic voice for your writing.
3. Prevent People from Stealing Your Creations
It’s true that there isn’t a plagiarism detection tool that is 100% reliable, because not every work is digitized which means that no database is truly complete. Nevertheless, thanks to good plagiarism detection software, writers can rest assured that the chances of other people taking credit for their work are significantly smaller.
4. Provide Links to the Source Text
When you use a tool for detecting plagiarism, once it compares your text to other texts, if it detects any similarities, it will provide you with links to the original text. This feature can be very useful whether you want to make sure that the writing, or parts of it, aren’t plagiarized, or you want to give credit to the original writer. It can also be a great way to assess whether or not the claimed findings are supported by sufficient evidence.
5. Find Similarities and Provide Percentage
Whether you are checking content you are writing, or someone else’s work, once you run the text through a plagiarism tool, it will tell you what percentage of the content is plagiarized. This way you can learn how authentic the particular text is, and whether you should rewrite it. Regardless of the field you are in, this can help you determine whether the level of similarity is acceptable, or the work can be considered plagiarism.
6. Create Your Own Digital Database
When you run a text through plagiarism detection software it will analyze a massive online database. However, it may also use any documents that have been processed by the software before, and compare them to the text you are checking. This can help you prevent self-plagiarism. The fact is that there simply isn’t enough time in the day to review every source that might have been used for a business paper. And anyone who would plagiarize will most likely count on this when presenting the document.
Conclusion
Lots of people have been found guilty of plagiarism and given severe punishments for it. Due in large part to widespread practices of copying and pasting online, plagiarism has emerged as a serious problem. However, thanks to advancements in technology, it’s now possible to prevent accidents like this. To avoid and identify plagiarism in texts, you can now use the appropriate tool. Invest in software that checks your writing against the billions of documents already on the internet and reports any instances of possible plagiarism.