Aspiring writers, freelancers, bloggers and students take note! There’s a new war against plagiarism heightened by the recent rash of content theft, more notably amongst bloggers and freelance journalists.  Here are 5 simple detect plagiarism of your content.

1. How to Look for Copies of your Work Online

Undoubtedly the most well known in the field for fast, accurate searches, Copyscape is every plagiarist’s nightmare! It functions by finding sites that have copied content without permission simply by typing in your URL.  Copyscape is free, but has a premium edition that allows more powerful tools like batch Search, which you can use to check your entire site for copies in a single click, up to 10,000 pages.

2. How to Detect Plagiarism in the Work of Others

Article Checker has been around for a long time, as its classic look belies. However, the adage œold is gold certainly holds true, as this site has been time-tested to be reliable in what it claims to do. Simply copy and paste the text of the article you want to search for, and Article Checker will scour either Google, Yahoo, or both for signs of plagiarism online. This can be useful if you’re an editor trying to root out the œreal writers from the œcopy & paste-rs.

Alternatively you may also want to check out The Plagiarism Checker developed by the University of Maryland which processes documents and intelligently decides which phrases to searches on.

3. How to Remove the Possibility of being Falsely Accused of Plagiarism: College Students Alert!

Created with college students in mind, PlagiarismDetect is a relatively new site which requires registration for a free account. It promises detection for text and phrases to ensure assignments are 100% original, which means that students can now think ahead to prevent being wrongly accused of plagiarism. However, that’s not to say that others can’t benefit from its services as well.

It even supports document uploads so you can just send it your entire assignment for it to be processed.  The site has proven to be accurate and encourages users to use it on a regular basis as newer and more advanced features are being added to it by the day.

4. How to check for Plagiarism using Yahoo! Search

This site has received numerous recommendations all over the web, so it’s worth a shot. Plagium is a reliable site which has makes use of Yahoo’s Search API to search the Internet for plagiarism. As far as efficiency is concerned, ratings have shown that it does nearly as well as CopyScape Premium, so you can rest assured that it will deliver results.

It has a clean and simple interface which doesn’t support ads, so for all those ad-haters out there, this site is especially for you. Just make sure to donate a little to support their cause.

5. How to Root Out Plagiarism Offenders…and Get Your Fair Share of Money!

Fair Share is a free service site that helps detect plagiarism via RSS feeds. In a matter of seconds, you’ll get results in a personalized RSS feed encompassing billions of websites. Targeted at bloggers and Webmasters who want to keep track of how their content is being used, by whom and where, Fair Share works with Creative Commons licenses to sniff out where content reappears, how often it is used and whether the content is linked or not.

An excellent choice for bloggers and others who can’t afford or don’t have the time to use a more advanced system. Plus, as the above picture suggests, you can even demand payment from the ad networks who run the plagiarized content!

Bonus Links for Reference

• 13 Simple Tactics to Prevent, Detect Content Plagiarism – A great preventive guide on how to deal with content plagiarism
• WordPress Plugin: Digital Fingerprint ” detecting content theft – An awesome wordpress plugin which helps you track down content stolen from you
• Reduce Content Theft with WP-CopyRight Pro WordPress Plugin – A wordpress plugin which disables copying from your site (I’ll leave it to you to decide if it’s too extreme and whether it hurts you more in the long run)
• How to Report Abuse to WordPress.com – A guide to reporting spam and abuse to WordPress.com
• How to Deal with Online Plagiarism: When People Copy your Blog Articles Without Permission – An excellent step by step manual on how to deal with plagiarism when it happens to you.
• Plagiarism Today – An up to date resource on the topic

This article was written by Aaron Pek & James Yeang.  Contact me if you wish to become a writer for this blog.