Detecting Plagiarism in Academic Writings

In the modern society, the problem of plagiarism occurs really often. People who use online or other sources do not always cite them properly. Plagiarism is considered to be an academic dishonesty that is why instructors do everything possible to detect and determine the plagiarism in the academic writings. This will not only find dishonest students, but will prevent them from plagiarizing again. Nowadays there are a lot of techniques which will help to detect and to determine plagiarism in the academic papers. These techniques are very helpful for the instructors in schools, colleges and universities. First of all, you can determine plagiarism by analyzing the format of the paper. Main errors that can signal about plagiarism in the paper are: the format of the paper is not according to the assignment that was given, line or page breaks are at odd places, URL or article number at the and of the writing, odd phrases like click here. All of the following signs may indicate that the paper was copied directly from the internet. Citations can also help to determine plagiarism in the paper. Usually plagiarized papers contain very old citations. Also try to match references listed at the end of the writing with the in-text-citations. If they do not match this is a sign that the paper may be plagiarized. Check the content of the paper. There are few basic signs of plagiarism that can be found: the paper doesnt exactly match the assignment, the paper is not unified and seems to be cut out from different places. Another way to check the research paper for plagiarism is to check its style. The style of the paper may differ from the students previous works; level of writing is much higher than others; the style of the paper doesnt match to the required. One more very efficient way to check whether the paper is plagiarized is to ask the student questions about the material in the paper or about this specific subject. Also you can ask the student to make a brief verbal summery of his/her paper. The answer will help instructor to identify whether the student wrote the paper himself. Checking the reference page can help a lot. Check the original sources that provided in the reference list and look through them. Also you can submit some unique words from the paper to Google, for example. This can help to find some online sources from where the student could plagiarize. You can also check term paper mills. Nowadays there is a lot of plagiarism detective software available. For example, EVE 2.2. Also a paper can be check by submitting to Turnitin.com. It compares the paper to the Internet sources and to other papers. There are also some similar online links to determine the plagiarism like: Plagiarism.com, InteqriGuard and MOSS. To check the paper online is one of the easiest ways to determine the plagiarism. All of the ways to determine plagiarism that are listed above can be very helpful. Careful evaluation of the paper and checking all the sources will indicate whether the paper was plagiarized.