Free anti-plagiarism checkers for your college papers

The word plagiarism comes from the Latin plagiarius meaning "kidnapper."

What is Plagiarism?

 Plagiarism is the act of using someone else's words, sentences, or ideas and passing them off as your own without giving proper credit to the original source. Cutting and pasting is so easy that many people plagiarize without meaning to.

You might be plagiarizing if you:

* Submit someone else's work as your own.
* Buy a paper from a papermill, website, or other source.
* Copy sentences, phrases, paragraphs, or even ideas from someone else's work, published or unpublished, without giving the original author credit.
* Replace select words from a passage without giving the original author credit.
* Copy any type of multimedia (graphics, audio, video, Internet streams), computer programs, music compositions, graphs, or charts from someone else's work without giving the original creator credit.
* Cut and paste together phrases, ideas, and sentences from a variety of sources to write an essay.
* Build on someone else's idea or phrase to write your paper without giving the original author credit.
* Submit your own paper in more than one course without permission of the teachers.

Note that whenever you paraphrase, summarize, or take words, phrases, or sentences from another person's work, it is necessary to indicate the source of the information within your paper using an internal citation. It is not enough to just list the source in a bibliography at the end of your paper. Failing to properly quote, cite or acknowledge someone else's words or ideas with an internal citation is plagiarism.

Checking for Plagiarism

If you want to check your own paper for signs of plagiarism, you can use the following free online services:

1.       Article Checker is a free web plagiarism checker, article checker, and duplicate content checker tool. It also scans your web page for others who may have copied it.
2.       The Plagiarism Checker is a free online application, developed by University of Maryland, where you can check the paper or except from the paper for duplicate content.
3.       Another free online service – Plagiarism Checker – allows searching for the selected phrases or text excerpts on the Web.
4.       Dupli Checker – Allows searching for duplicate content through Google, Yahoo!, and MSN search engines.

Viper – Free anti-plagiarism scanner

Viper is the plagiarism checker of choice! It scans over 10 billion resources, has an easy-to-use interface and highlights areas of plagiarism - totally free!

Main Features:

* Check your essay against 10 billion sources
* Scan against essays on your computer
* Scan against essays published on the Internet
* Easy side-by-side highlighted comparison
* Free, unlike most other scanners
* 100% accurate

Web site: http://www.scanmyessay.com/features.php