Four free online plagiarism checkers
From the post:
“Detecting duplicate content online has become so easy that spot-the-plagiarist is almost a party game,” former IJNet editor Nicole Martinelli wrote in 2012. “It’s no joke, however, for news organizations who discover they have published copycat content.”
When IJNet first ran Martinelli’s post, “Five free online plagiarism checkers,” two prominent U.S. journalists had recently been caught in the act: Fareed Zakaria and Jonah Lehrer.
Following acknowledgement that he had plagiarized sections of an article about gun control, Time and CNN suspended Zakaria. Lehrer first came under scrutiny for “self-plagiarism” at The New Yorker. Later, a journalist revealed Lehrer also fabricated or changed quotes attributed to Bob Dylan in his book, “Imagine.”
To date, Martinelli’s list of free plagiarism checkers has been one of IJNet’s most popular articles across all languages. It’s clear readers want to avoid the pitfalls of plagiarism, so we’ve updated the post with four of the best free online plagiarism checkers available to anyone, revised for 2015:
…
Great resource for checking your content and that of others for plagiarism.
The one caveat I offer is to not limit the use of text similarity software solely to plagiarism.
Text similarity can be a test for finding content that you would not otherwise discover. Depends on how high you set the test for “similarity.”
And/or it may find content that is so similar, while not plagiarism (say multiple outlets writing from the same wire service) it isn’t worth the effort to read every story that repeats the same story with some minor edits.
Multiple stories but only one wire service source. In that sense, a “plagiarism” checker can enable you to skip duplicative content.
The post I quote above was published by the international journalist’s network (ijnet). Even if you aren’t a journalist, great source to follow for developing news technology.