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Anti-Plagiarism Software: Features, Uses and Benefits

Plagiarism is one of the most important issues that the educational community around the world is concerned about. It is unethical for a student to use somebody’s ideas or work, and pass them off as his or her own without citing the original source. The problem of plagiarism is not limited to education; instead, it is often discussed in the blogging world, where one uses others’ blogs to post on the website.

Writing a piece of content is not an easy task as there are a few things that one must be aware of. The most important thing that you must avoid completely is plagiarism. Committing plagiarism can be very easy, but the consequences that come along with it are very serious. This asks for using an anti-plagiarism software to help you check your work.

Types of Plagiarism

As plagiarism is a common thing on the Internet, you may be familiar with the concept, but what most people do not know is that there are different types of plagiarism.

  1. Direct Plagiarism: This is the most general form of plagiarism, and it is the easiest one to identify. The writer copies the content exactly as it is without any changes to the words or the sentence structure and also without quotation marks. Any plagiarism test can identify this type of duplication.  
  2. Patch Writing or Mosaic: Being one of the commonly used methods of plagiarism among students, they are not as obvious as the standard method. Most of the time, the sentences are paraphrased in a way that a normal human cannot find many similarities in the content. Therefore, they are a little difficult to handle.
  3. Auto-Plagiarism: As the term “auto” suggests, this happens when the writer accidentally or intentionally writes the same content that he or she has already published. This mostly happens when the author has written content for a number of blogson the same topic or has written articles under different category pages for the same website.
  4. Inaccurate Citation: If the content does not have any citations or inaccurate ones, it will be flagged for plagiarism. One possibility of this happening is when you use a secondary source. While using a secondary source material, it is important to provide citations to the primary sources as well, but most people forget to do that. Therefore, you need to make sure to cite your sources.

These are the most common types of plagiarism that you will come across, and might accidentally commit when you are writing various blog posts.

Why Use a Plagiarism Checker?

One of the best solutions for plagiarism is using a plagiarism tool. They are readily available all over the Web and are considered quite easy to use. They make it the most effective way to check and identify copied content. Moreover, these tools are updated regularly to cope with the innovative methods that people use to plagiarize content. Considering the fact that even paraphrased content is flagged as plagiarized content, it is important that the plagiarism scanner must be able to identify similarities rather than the exactly same content. This is why most tools today incorporate some amazing technology. Some of them are:

  1. Artificial Intelligence (AI): Artificial Intelligence or just AI for short is a buzz word in today’s world. Almost all sectors have upgraded to Artificial Intelligence and so did plagiarism scanners. This helps the scanner to understand and identify similarities in meaning and segregates word-for-word plagiarism, partial plagiarism and paraphrased content in its report, thus helping the user to have a clear picture about the content.
  2. Cheat Detection:  The use of cheats is a relatively new development in committing plagiarism and are used a lot among students in their academic papers. Cheats are a way to fool the scanner and make it think that there are no plagiarisms in the content. Some of the most common ways are using white characters, foreign symbols and removing words in between sentences. As the newest plagiarism detection tools are powered by AI, they have the ability to identify and prompt the user that there are some cheats used in the content.
  3. URL Scans: Most regular plagiarism tools required text to be copied and pasted into it, but not anymore as the improved tools can scan for duplicate content just with a URL. It does not matter even if you have a 301 redirect or a URL parameter in place because the tools can seamlessly redirect to the correct URL and check for plagiarism.
  4. Clear and Concise Reports: As we have established above, these scanners have the ability to segregate each type of plagiarism with different colors in their plagiarism report. Apart from that, it can give you the exact URL of the original source, and also highlight the exact part of the article. This can save a lot of time as the user can avoid searching for the copied content.
  5. Text Compare: Text compare is a great feature that allows the user to scan duplicate content issues across two or more articles. This is very useful in situations where you need to scan for pages with duplicate content in a specific URL or you already have the text from which the work is likely to be copied from. This saves a lot of time as the user need not sit through the entire time the software takes to search the databases.
  6. Check for Self-Plagiarisms: While writing an article, it is possible to repeat the same ideas from other texts that you have published earlier. A plagiarism checker accounts this and stores the articles that you have already scanned in its database. Therefore, if you scan another document the next time, the tool also checks all the previously scanned documents other than the Web resources. The tool can also scan for plagiarisms in internal links as well.

These are some of the benefits that you can get with premium plagiarism checkers. Though free-to-use plagiarism tools can be used in a pinch, you need a quality anti-plagiarism software to cope with the current standards. Moreover, they are constantly being upgraded across multiple versions.       

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