Best Plagiarism Checking Tools to Use in 2019

Every college student knows how important it is to deliver original content when it comes to writing essays, research papers, or book reports.

17:46 24 July 2019

College teachers are very strict about plagiarism and citation issues, and for good reason. Using another person’s ideas and thoughts without giving appropriate credit to or acknowledging him or her is considered a serious academic offense which cannot go unpunished. Still, sometimes, students commit plagiarism unwittingly, merely because they don’t know how to properly reference this or that source. A good few students don’t even bother to familiarize themselves with common referencing conventions and thus fail to give credit to sources they consulted to write their papers. As a result, such papers may be deemed unoriginal and entail such unpleasant consequences as fines, suspension, and even expulsion from an education institution. Luckily for us, there are such handy tools as plagiarism checkers. They are designed specifically to help students and teachers locate instances of plagiarism within a certain paper. If you don’t want to hand in a plagiarized essay and risk your academic degree, you should start using plagiarism detection tools. We’ve decided to help you find the most reliable programs that can quickly and effectively check the originality of your papers. We’ve put together a top five list of the best online plagiarism checkers you can start using right away.

# 1 PapersOwl Online Plagiarism Checker

If you’re looking for an online plagiarism checker free, you should definitely check out PapersOwl’s creation. The PapersOwl plagiarism detection tool can come in handy when you need to check your paper, no matter how long it is, for possible plagiarism. All you need to do is either to copy-paste your text into a corresponding field or upload the entire paper using the “Upload file” button. Once you click the “Check for Plagiarism” button, the tool will start checking the uploaded query text against billions of contents and looking for possible matches. Depending on the length of your paper, the scanning process may take up to several minutes. You’ll get a comprehensive plagiarism report after the checker does its job. PapersOwl also enables you to download the report in any format to your computer or any other device. 

The uniqueness percentage is the first thing you should draw your attention to. As a rule, it’s allowed to include twenty percent of direct quotations. Consequently, you can go satisfied with eighty percent of uniqueness, provided that all your quotations are formatted properly. If the uniqueness of your content is less than eighty percent, don’t hesitate to rewrite the parts that are deemed unoriginal.

#2 Turnitin

 

If you’re in search of a longstanding, time-tested plagiarism detection solution, opt for a classic, which is Turnitin. It’s an Internet-based service that allows both students and educators check the originality of academic papers. Turnitin boasts the largest inner database of students’ papers, scholarly articles, and other sources against which you papers will be checked once submitted to Turnitin. If your document’s similarity to some other sources exceeds the allowable limit, it will be automatically deemed plagiarized. Apart from standard plagiarism finding features, Turnitin provides feedback and “encourages discussion and collaboration among students,” and offers grading assistance.

On the downside, Turnitin is available only through your education institution’s subscription. So, if your school hasn’t purchased one, you won’t be able to use Turnitin’s plagiarism prevention software.

#3 Grammarly

Our list of the best plagiarism finders will be incomplete without Grammarly. Similarly to PapersOwl and Turnitin plagiarism checkers, Grammarly can quickly scan an uploaded document for any similarities across billions of documents in multiple databases. Once the program finishes checking your paper, it will underline the allegedly plagiarized sentences and provide links to the sources that are exact matches to your query text. Still, Grammarly is famous not only for its plagiarism detecting features. It’s also considered one of the best online proofreading tools that can check your paper for grammar, spelling, punctuation, and syntactical mistakes. You’ll be able to use Grammarly to its fullest, if you purchase a premium version. A monthly subscription will cost you about $30. Still, if you’re planning on checking your academic papers on a regular basis, we recommend that you avail yourself of an annual subscription, which is about $140.