Avoiding plagiarism
There are two easy ways to avoid plagiarism:
- Ensure you reference your work properly, and
- Check your work with a plagiarism checker like Viper before you submit it.
There are a good number of free and paid plagiarism scanners available on the web to help you avoid plagiarism. So how do you know which to choose? Here's a guide to the features:
Plagiarism checkers vs. citation checkers
Not all scanners are plagiarism checkers. TurnItIn's WriteCheckTM, for example, is a paid scanner that detects citation errors. If a match is found to the web, there's no indication of where that match came from. Viper produces a comprehensive plagiarism report which highlights possible matches and indicates the location of any suspect sources.
Resubmission
If your plagiarism scanner detects you haven't referenced something properly, you'll want to make changes and resubmit. Many plagiarism scanners don't allow this, or charge you additional fees for resubmission. Viper allows you unlimited resubmissions.
Scan against local databases
Many students review their past essays when writing a new essay and you'll want to be sure you haven't accidentally plagiarised something you submitted previously. Because of the way many plagiarism checkers are written, they won't allow you to scan your essay against your local files. Viper allows you to scan against as many documents and folders on your computer/network as you like, if you want to.
Scan against the web
Surprisingly, some plagiarism checkers don't offer the ability to scan against the Internet but instead allow you to scan against a bank of other documents. This is one of the most impotant features of a plagiarism scanner. Viper allows accurate scanning against all types of files on the Internet, including PDFs - and you can also turn this feature off if you want to.
Check for rewording
Paraphrasing is probably one of your biggest concerns when it comes to avoiding plagiarism. Many scanners check for exact matches to sentences, paragraphs and so on. But for those that are entirely web based, there is a fundamental flaw. For an investigation by the BBC, James Heather, senior lecturer in computing at the University of Surrey, confirmed that plagiarism detection systems such as Turnitin that are routinely used by universities are open to simple cheats allowing students to evade detection when submitting copied material. As the makers of Turnitin admitted themselves, the company is still working to detect when such tricks have been used.
As we explained to the BBC back in January, Viper is written in a different language to those web based scanners and makes use of superior word stemming technology that deals with synonym and sentence restructuring well. If a web based scanner claims to do this, be aware that the web based class (technology) for dealing with this type of problem is likely to be substantially inferior to what we use.
Check multiple languages
This is a feature that may be important to you - Viper offers multiple language support.
Check different file types
Again this may be important to you - Viper accepts most standard file types such as .doc, docx, rtf etc.
Free or paid options
Be careful using free plagiarism scanners - you may find your essay shows up on the net or in an essay bank the very next day! For guidance on how we use your essay, see: 'How does Viper use my essay?'.
Database checking
Good scanners will store a copy of your essay for other people to scan against. This actually improves the accuracy of future scans - so scanners that say they don't do this simply won't work as well for you. Of course, you don't want other people to actually SEE your essay if there is a match - so be really careful that you choose a scanner which doesn't display your essay to anyone else. Viper stores your essay but only displays a percentage match for future scans.
Publications checking
Some scanners claim to help you avoid plagiarism by checking against journal databases which are paid subscription databases. We have contacted all major journal databases and, bar one which works with Turnitin, they do not work with plagiarism scanners - their technology doesn't allow it. So, in short, the only journals that will be scanned are those that are publically available on the Internet - the claims are misleading. NB: Don't instantly sign up for WriteCheck thinking you'll get this feature - as noted above, they check for citation errors, not plagiarism, and their scanner doesn't deal well with paraphrasing!
Nonsense features
When choosing a scanner for avoiding plagiarism, keep an eye out for features on the feature list that simply don't make sense. For example "Offline checking against books, articles, magazines, journals etc." and "Manual as well as automatic plagiarism checking". Do you really believe that when you submit a scan, the makers of this scanner will manually check your documents against books, articles and magazines? According to Google, there are around 130,000,000 books alone - you might be waiting a while for your results! Realistically, scanners (like Viper) can only check electronic copies of books - and decent scanners like ours will search these.
Finally...
Through proper referencing and use of a comprehensive plagiarism scanner, Viper gives you the ultimate tools for avoiding plagiarism. If you decide not to use Viper, do check the features of the plagiarism checker that you choose - and read the small print!