That is why we created PlagScan

Broadly speaking plagiarism is about stealing language and ideas. This often happens through copying text without acknowledging the source. To conceal the plagiarism texts are often slightly reworked, for example by mixing several sources.

There has always been copying, but the Internet pushed the problem to a new dimension: Works on every topic are available in seconds, copy & paste even saves the typing. Instead of learning or exhibiting independent thinking and working, ever more learners or authors choose the alluring shortcut, copy from Wikipedia or "copy, shake & paste" from several sources.

We would love to check your text against all document in the world - however this would take pretty much forever for billions of documents. For that reason we look for thematically related texts. We have developed special statistical methods to find the most relevant documents.
PlagScan bases this search on the Internet and optionally your own and the PlagScan database. For Web documents we use the index of .
The selection of related documents texts makes up the set of potential sources, which are meticulously compared for similarities with your text. In principle the agreement of three words suffices, so that sources can be found in spite of the usage of synonyms and reordering.
Results of the plagiarism check are presented in the following report formats:

• The shortest report is simply a number, the PlagLevel. This number tells you what percentage appears literally in other texts.
• To see at a glance which sources contain the same text the list of matches with links. All potential sources are listed here with the matching phrases.
• Probably most useful for marking is the comment report in MS Word. Here potentially plagiarized phrases are highlighted directly in your document using Word's commenting function. The comments on the side next to the text show where a phrase was found, including a hyperlink to the source. This way you can make up your mind whether a match is plagiarism or acceptable citation during regular proofreading.

In principle this job could be done by oneself testing suspicious text passages at popular search engines by hand. PlagScan does here serve as support for the examiner by removing this rather monotonous and time consuming work with algorithmic thoroughness. Even though a final inspection by a human is obligatory, automatic plagiarism search of PlagScan does the most vexatious part for you.

PlagScan is on the one hand already in use at many schools and universities to analyze homework, theses and dissertations. On the other hand it is used by 'unique content' retailers to assure the uniqueness of their author's texts. In succession you find an excerpt of organizations searching for plagiarism with PlagScan.
Depending on your requirements, accounts for single users and organizations are available.
PlagScan has been under active development in a limited test version since June 2008, available at seesources.com.

'Just checked two of my articles for testing purposes in order to find subsequent plagiarism. Good hit rate! I will get back to your service any time.'

Dr. Katja Löhr-Müller, attorney from Rüsselsheim, Germany