What is plagiarism?

According to the dictionary, plagiarism is stealing someone’s ideas and presenting them as yours. As the name suggests it is clear that it is not the practice that is encouraged and not a good thing to do. Despite being common knowledge various types of plagiarism are found daily. 

Plagiarism has many kinds. One of them is called cyber cheating. If any material in text format is copied and claiming it as yours. Then you are guilty of cyber cheating. 

For example, if any text on the internet is present that is not written by you and has a name yours written on it then it is also called cyber cheating. You just simply cannot present a text like yours that is not written by you. 

Plagiarism most of the time is unintentional by students and writers. As with the help of the internet, there is so much data on pretty much everything that every text seems related to. 

You can find similarities between text written by you and someone else on the same topic if you compare. Also, the internet has made the search for material easy. Another reason is that facts and figures cannot be changed, so your textual material ends up matching with someone else’s. 

As plagiarism is such a hot topic these days in the world of freelance writers then you must know some of the facts about it. 

7 facts that you should know about plagiarism in 2021

1.    Tools detecting plagiarism are everywhere 

If your text does look like that you have copied it from somewhere then you can be accused of having plagiarized content. The best practice is to avoid such cases as much as possible. The present technology of the internet has made it convenient and simple. 

As a student, you don’t have to rely on your instructor to tell you that your essay is plagiarized. There are so many tools that are free and easy to use. Such plagiarism checker tools can be used by anyone. A few of them are mentioned below: 

Prepostseo (plagiarism checker)

Prepostseo has designed a really useful tool to detect plagiarism. The website has developed some amazing features that are free of cost and easy to use as well. Some of the features of this plagiarism checker are: 

• Copy-paste the content or upload the file on the website if you want to check the plagiarism. 
• It gives the option of uploading the file from One Drive or Google drive as well. You can attach the URL of the file as well. 
• Multiple languages option is available and you can select whichever language your text is in. 
• Plagiarism of 1000 words can be checked in a single go. 
• The website does not require any sign-in option. 
• As a premium user, you can check the plagiarism of 15000 words at once. 
• The tool shows the percentage of plagiarism present in the text as well as highlights the plagiarised lines. 

Plagscan

Plagscan is another free plagiarism checker tool available online 

• There is no software or application for the tool
• To check the plagiarism in a file you have signed up on the website 
• After that, a confirmation email will confirm the activation so you can select the free test credit 
• Free test credit means you can check the plagiarism of 2000 words online
• After uploading the file the tool will look for similarities with other sources
• The matched sources will be highlighted with the color bar. 
• In the end, the list of all the matched sources is given that gives you an idea of all the plagiarised sources 

Paper rater

Another AI-powered plagiarism detection tool is paper rater.

• Along with detecting plagiarism it also checks grammar and spelling errors. 
• Documents uploaded on the paper rater are saved and kept confidential. 
• You need to log in to the website to use the plagiarism checker 
• The basic version is completely free and allows you to submit 5 pages per submission 
• 5 submissions can be used in the free version per month 
• The premium version allows 20 pages per submission and you can 200 submissions per month

2.    Limitations of free plagiarism checker

• Free plagiarism checkers sometimes do not detect all the plagiarism. 
• There is a lot of advertising content on the website that users have to deal with. 
• The biggest drawback is the word limit. 

3.    Is plagiarism illegal? 

Plagiarism is illegal and not accepted in educational institutes as well as in the blogging community. It can harm the reputation of the owner of the text. However, it is not always the matter of life and death and consequences are that much more serious. 

You can check the plagiarism in the document by using any of the above-mentioned tools and removing the highlighted part of the text. These plagiarism checkers will color-bar the sentences which are copied and can either be removed or paraphrased. 

4.    Plagiarism is not always about text

We talk about detecting textual plagiarism a lot. However, plagiarism is not always about the text. It can either be an image and table or graphical content. For example, someone can use your data in text in the table or figure format. There is no limitation in stealing. If you are dealing with the text then you must be careful about this kind of plagiarism as well. 

5.    Effects of plagiarism 

There are quite a lot of societal effects of plagiarism. If you are a writer and you write to make a name out of it then plagiarism can seriously damage your reputation. 

We suggest you not steal the ideas from other sources. You can take the inspiration and write in your own words but copying someone else’s works is quite unethical. 

6.    Plagiarism checker tools are not an alternative to the human analysis 

Although plagiarism detection tools may seem perfect, they can never be the replacement for human analysis. Internet plagiarism is also a different case and can be studied differently. 

These tools are also not the alternative of the trained academic specialist who can detect plagiarism in an academic file or document. For instance, copying a complete paragraph from someone else’s book is a very serious kind of plagiarism and the plagiarism checker tool might be able to detect it. 

But if someone has failed to cite a correct reference of medical information in a research paper then these tools will not be able to e able to detect it and a specialized person assigned to this task can only detect it. 

But plagiarism checker tools work perfectly fine for internet bloggers whose competitors are also online writers. 

7.    Old plagiarism cases are continuously appearing 

One of the most interesting facts about plagiarism is that old cases of plagiarism are always appearing on the surface. For example, using photographs of someone else’s and naming them as yours. A BBC investigation revealed many photographers were accused of using plagiarised photographs. 

Conclusion 

We have tried to list all the interesting facts about plagiarism. As plagiarism is becoming the concern of a lot of people with the increase and boom in content writing. Before that plagiarism was only the concern of the people in academia. 

With so much demand, developers have decided to solve this problem by creating tools that can detect plagiarism and copied content in just a few seconds. Above we have discussed some of these tools. Some also have a free version that can be used by anyone. Being a writer one must benefit from this kind of tool.