Plagiarism Analysis

Alternative questions:

• Does it account for collusion?
• Does PlagScan check for documents other than those on the internet?
• Which publisher databases are available to PlagScan?

PlagScan's plagiarism search is based on four types of sources:

1. World Wide Web: We use Microsoft Bing to search the World Wide Web. Anything indexed by Bing is available for a plagiarism check. Additionally, we can scan academic sites and those of particular interest to our customers, thereby providing coverage of internet content uniquely tailored to their needs.

2. Your Repository / Collusion Checking: You can upload files and compare them with the document you want to analyze. For organizations: You have the additional option of creating/importing your organization-wide repository, so you can cross-check the documents of all the users on a given platform.

3. Cooperating Publishers: PlagScan has millions of articles from thousands of academic and scientific journals available for your plagiarism checks.

4. Plagiarism Prevention Pool (optional): If you choose to contribute your documents to the plagiarism prevention pool, you can compare them with documents from other PlagScan users. NOTE: Other users will not gain full-text access to your documents that way, but will only be able to see their own matches with your documents.

Learn more on our page Algorithm and Sources.

Unfortunately, we are not allowed to access Google services such as Google Search, Google Books and Google Scholar like a private user, due to terms of use and copyright protection of the published authors and Google's terms of service. Currently, Google does not allow access to its API for use cases, where the search results are not shown directly, because that violates their business model and agreements with the publishing industry. We are regularly checking our options and will immediately provide coverage of Google content as soon as the regulations undertake the respective change.

For crawling web content, we use Microsoft Bing as backbone to enhance our available internet content in addition to our own web index, focusing on scientific and academic relevant sites.

The time it takes to process a document depends on multiple factors, such as its length and the prevalence of its topic online. Generally, you can assume that your report will be finished within 10 minutes. However, during peak hours with very high server load, it may take a bit longer to process your documents. We apologize in advance and ask that you check back the next day. If by then your upload and analysis are still not finished, please contact us immediately.

You can either view your plagiarism reports directly with a browser, or you can download them as .pdf files. The MS Word .docx report is particularly useful, since plagiarism findings are annotated directly within the Word document.

We support all popular text formats, as well as ZIP archives of text documents. Depending on the format, a minor change in the original formatting may occur. PlagScan supports the following text formats:

Supported text formats:

The only entity of your document is the one you uploaded yourself. As soon as you delete a document, no plagiarism check can use it for comparison. The only possibility to plagiarize yourself using PlagScan is, if you upload a document (or slightly modified versions of it) several times and set your data policy to check against your own documents.

Scientifically/technically speaking, if you have published text before, you also need to cite your own work properly in a new publication. It doesn't really make a difference, whether it is your own or someone else's work. Ethically, it makes all the difference, of course.

No! PlagScan offers much more than that. We check with online sources as well as internal databases and everything you or your organization has previously uploaded. We also scan parts of sentences. PlagScan provides a quick and systematic check of entire documents, not only parts of a document that are suspicious.

PlagScan can basically process any language. Plagiarism scanning works for any language that uses international UTF-8 encoding. This means that text of any language containing Latin, Arabic or Cyrillic characters can be checked for plagiarism (exceptions are only the syllable- / pictogram-based languages like Japanese, Korean, Chinese).

Yes, you can resubmit different drafts of your work. But remember to adjust your data policy within the settings in order to not check against your own documents. However, you may have documents within your account you want to check your document against. In that case, you can choose to delete any older versions of the document you have submitted – otherwise, it would be listed as a possible source. This would lead to false-positive detections and a possibly confusing report. You can still deselect this "self-plagiarism" source easily, within the interactive report.

Yes, the analysis continues on the server – even if you go offline. If you have activated the email notification option, we will inform you about the results upon completion.

No. PlagScan also searches .pdf and other document files which are accessible online as well as anything you submit to your account or organization repository. Additionally, documents from cooperating publishers, which cannot be found online or are locked behind a paywall are included in the analysis. Optionally, we compare your text with documents in our Plagiarism Prevention Pool, which includes billions of online sources.

PlagScan highlights matches between documents directly in your document as well as in the sources. We provide you with different kinds of plagiarism reports:

• PlagLevel - The most basic report type. The PlagLevel is a percentage that indicates what proportion of your text has been found in other documents.
• Interactive online report - Viewable directly in the browser. You can interactively jump to all matches and potential sources. You can edit and comment the report, save your work, and share it with your colleagues.
• List report - A summary, where all matches are listed by sources.
• .docx report - Highlights matches directly in the text by generating an MS Word Document with the plagiarized content highlighted (currently this option is only available for documents with less than 10 MB and no more than 100,000 words).

You can very easily upload several documents by holding your keyboard's CTRL key while selecting the files you wish to upload. Additionally, you can upload .zip-archives. Documents within the .zip-archive will automatically be labeled according to the .zip archive name. In order to see those labels activate the advanced user interface within the settings.

If you are using an older version of Microsoft Word, please consider installing a Microsoft update. This ensures making older Word versions fully .docx document compatible.

Yes. Simply select the desired documents and press check at the upper right corner. You can also select all documents with the same label at once. Your documents will always be checked one at a time in order to account for collusion. For uploads containing several documents, PlagScan waits with the start of the first plagiarism analysis until each document upload has been completed and is available in the database.