Interpreting PlagiarismSearch Similarity Report

Swift and Accurate Plagiarism Detection

Every potential client of our website needs an exhaustive plagiarism check of their written works. If you are one of our prospective customers, you are surely interested in learning about the features of the required end result, namely an originality report. This article divulges the particularities of PlagiarismSearch similarity report.

How to Check Paper for Plagiarism

Despite a variety of tools that offer to check text for plagiarism (basically, any text, in any language), you have to estimate all your demands before choosing the ultimate software. Although any average checker can scan your texts, your focus should be on the end result. It is essential to realize whether your reports contain all the necessary details. What is more important, the accuracy and relevance of plagiarism detection should be your priority. Indeed, if you check plagiarism online, especially using a free tool, your results will likely be semi-accurate or confusing. Some amateur similarity checkers show too high or too low percentage of coincidences, as their algorithms are weak to scan against an abundance of databases all over the web.

Now you would ask, how to get plagiarism report? Firstly, make sure you have enough submissions or words on your balance to scan your paper for plagiarism. Secondly, copy the required text into the main box on the website or upload your file using OneDrive or DropBox. You can also attach the document directly from your computer or by URL. Further, you can check the plagiarism or its absence when clicking on "Check Your Text" under the box. For your convenience, we discern all the possible text formats, such as doc, docx, txt, RTF, PDF, xls, xlsx, html, epub, xml, odt, org etc.

Alternatively, written works are checked via LMS, such as Moodle, which is typically preferred by educational establishments with a constant flow of assignments. Besides, many clients find it convenient to use our Google Docs Add-on – they do not even need to visit our website to check their texts. The add-on is especially effective if you initially produce and store your compositions in Google Docs. Only remember to stay logged in within our system.

PlagiarismSearch is a high-profile software that delves into 15 billion web pages, miscellaneous databases that contain over 50 million texts, 25 000 magazines, newspapers, journals, and books. There is also a possibility to upload your own archive of previous works. This feature will be elucidated further in the article.

Plagiarism Report Overview

Now that you know the basics of plagiarism detection, you are ready to move forward to comprehend even more useful features. So, what is plagiarism report? This is the end result of the plagiarism detection process. In simple words, you scan your text for similarities, and then you receive a percentage of coincidences.

The originality report generated by our tool has its special features. Evidently, you will not be satisfied after obtaining a mere plagiarism percentage. Therefore, our report is multi-layered, allowing you to delve into an in-depth investigation of the matched sources. Every coincidence is highlighted in a certain color that reveals a low, average, or high percentage of plagiarism. The matched text discloses an active link that leads directly to the original source or several sources with comparable information. Similarity score shows you not only the percentage of equivalent sentences but also the number of matched words.

When you check text for plagiarism via our software, you can choose various options to discern similarities. Sometimes, it is enough to scan your texts via web repositories. However, a variety of the available Internet sources is quite impressive. PlagiarismSearch scans against billions of up-to-date sources along with archived web content, such as older publications in online magazines, scholarly journals, and independent manuscripts or published books. Frequently, our clients need to search for similarities only against their own databases. This is where our feature called Storage becomes applicable. It allows our customers, both educational and corporate ones, to scan new texts against their previous writings. How is this feature employed? You simply upload your archives into our system, making it your personal Storage. If you need to check against your Storage, tick this option below the box and the detector will identify all your former works. It helps to avoid self-plagiarism.

If you need all-encompassing plagiarism detection, then it is advisable to choose all the possible options we offer: scanning against web databases and your uploaded repository. In this case, our tool includes all those databases into its search. Subsequently, your plagiarism report will be as detailed as possible.

Last but not least, to maintain the highest accuracy of plagiarism detection, you should pay attention to the options in your Search settings. Before starting to check your text for coincidences, we suggest that you tick:

Only Latin characters (which helps to prevent cheating by using Cyrillic letters);

Exclude references;

Exclude in-text citations;

Search on the web;

Search on my storage.

Please note, it may not always be necessary to scan texts against your Storage, so this option should be unticked to avoid redundant matches. One more tip: incorrectly formatted in-text citations can be discerned as plagiarism. Hence, make sure you put quotation marks around the sentences, which should be cited.

You definitely want your plagiarism search to be effective and we do everything possible to ensure that, introducing the latest technical features into our tool. Still, you can significantly improve the level of plagiarism detection if you use the options in search filters properly.

Plagiarism Report Meaning

After we delved into the initial steps of plagiarism detection, it is time to teach you how to read plagiarism report. Primarily, we would like to focus on the older version of our report.

So, you already inserted the required text into PlagiarismSearch box or uploaded a file into our system. We hope that you ticked all the needed options and unticked the unnecessary ones to check for plagiarism as effectively as possible. Afterward, the similarity detection process begins. It takes from several seconds to several minutes, depending on the length of your work. Besides, previously scanned papers are checked even more quickly. After you obtain your similarity report, you will likely be interested in the found plagiarism score meaning. Let us divulge its focal details.

When you check your work for plagiarism on our website, you will see a slightly different visual representation than in the downloaded pdf report or in your Google Docs add-on. However, all the reports equally show the date and time when you uploaded your text for plagiarism check, the precise number of words, as well as similarity percentage. If your paper is plagiarism-free, you will see 0% of plagiarism and no words or sentences will be highlighted in special colors. In contrast, even if minor plagiarism was detected, it can be highlighted in any potential color of the similarity report. For instance, if your text has 2% of plagiarism, it is considered a low percentage of coincidence. Yet, it may indicate the analogous sentence found in a different source, which can be deemed original. This very sentence plagiarized word-for-word will be highlighted in red, denoting the highest possible level of plagiarism. It means that you need to rewrite it, as it is highly unlikely a 100% similarity of one sentence is unintentional.

Let us elucidate the meaning behind each color you may see in your report. Those discrepant hues were made to conveniently identify the amount of plagiarism from the recognized source.

What does it mean when a text is green?

If you see that some parts of your text are highlighted in Green, it has determined around 15% of plagiarism, having compared your sentences to the ones found in the particular source.

What does it mean when a text is yellow?

If certain parts of your paper have been highlighted in Yellow, it means that around 30% to 50% percent of your text was taken from the found source. Sometimes, 65% of secondary similarities may be highlighted in yellow if the initial coincidence is no more than 50%.

What does it mean when a text is red?

Red specifies the highest percentage of plagiarism, which starts from 75% of similarities in a certain sentence. The more red-highlighted sentences you have in your work, the higher your general similarity score becomes.

Additional Colors

When scrutinizing your report, you may also see sentences highlighted in blue and purple. Basically, those colors are not related to the plagiarism percentage. The purple shade indicates an in-text citation, while the blue shade highlights references or bibliography you used.

Many returning clients, who have been using various similarity tools in order to compare their accuracy and expediency, reported that it is much more convenient to use a plagiarism checker that uses the color gradation to discern various plagiarism levels along with the additional nuances of formatting, such as quotations and works cited.

How to Use Our Interactive Complete Report

You can try our new interactive plagiarism report which offers you a number of new features. It is both convenient and easy to use. You can switch on this option using the following settings:

My profile – System – Use new reports design

Tick the option ‘Use new reports design’ and save changes to enjoy the benefits of a new design of PlagiarismSearch report.

Sample Report and Explanations

1. You can download a pdf version of a report that you can share, if needed.

2. In the top right corner of the report, you will see an overall percentage of plagiarism, the number of words in the text that has been checked, as well as the date and time when you uploaded the file for checking.

3. Right below the logo of PlagiarismSearch.com, there is a list of search settings: Only Latin characters, Exclude references, Exclude in-text citations, Search on the web, Search on my storage, Exclude User ID, and Search on sites. You can see the settings chosen for this particular document with green ticks, while the others will have a sign of a red cross.

4. Underneath, in brackets, you can see the number of potential sources of plagiarized material: Sources (10) and a list of clickable links. You can click on each of the numbered links to check the relevance of the identified source to each case of plagiarism in your text. Depending on the search settings you have chosen, you will see either only results from the web or both the online sources and documents from your personal storage. On the right from each source, you will see a percentage of plagiarism for this particular part.

5. Looking through the text of the document, you can see that some of the parts are highlighted with one of the colors: red, yellow, violet, turquois, or blue.

6. For your convenience, there are the icons at the bottom of each page that give interpretation of every color so that you did not have to go back to the explanations every time you want to check on the originality of a certain piece of text. Thus, red color means plagiarism, yellow – similarities, violet – citations, turquois – references, and blue – character replacement. You can see that each highlighted part is accompanied with one or more numbers. They refer to the sources that PlagiarismSearch has identified on the web and in the personal storage. Clicking on the numbers, you will open the link that corresponds to this particular passage.

How to Reduce Similarity in Your Written Works

If you check plagiarism in your texts regularly, you may be interested in the authenticity of writing itself. It means high plagiarism levels do not contribute to the progress of your work and hinder you from fulfilling your academic or business purpose. Although all plagiarism checkers would become useless if authenticity finally prevailed, the statistics show that there is a significant demand to check papers for similarities in all the existent spheres. PlagiarismSearch team values transparency, so we gladly encourage original writing and contribute to authentic thinking without copying and pasting as well as paraphrasing. Consequently, we came up with useful tips to help you reduce similarity in your essays, articles, and other publications, without falling back on cheating. The latter sly tactic concerns students, who can trick their professors by inserting alternative alphabets into their texts, rewrite the entire paragraphs, making the borrowed ideas look like their own, and even alter their documents' formats. Our guidelines are mainly for those who produce original pieces based on an abundance of the researched material. Sometimes, you may not notice that you missed quotation marks or the author's name in the brackets. It also happens that certain excerpts are accidentally pasted into your draft document, making an ambiguous amalgamation of the original and plagiarized sentences. Of course, if you decide to check plagiarism in your draft via our tool, PlagiarismSearch will instantly show you the drawbacks of your writing and you will know what should be improved. Yet, we recommend that you learn the following brief tips by heart.

All the used sources must be cited

If you do not want your professor or editor to dismiss your work because of the enhanced level of plagiarism, pay attention to in-text citations and references formatting. As a university student, you must be familiar with such typically used formats as APA, MLA, Harvard, Chicago, and Turabian. The guidelines of those academic writing styles contain a range of material on proper quoting and bibliography arrangement. If you know those rules, accidental plagiarism related to improper citing will not occur in your essays. Also, pay attention to formatting endnotes or footnotes, as our tool sees plagiarism in those additional texts as well.

Never forget about the quotation marks

Whenever you forget to put quotation marks around the cited sentence or paragraph, you will receive a high plagiarism score highlighted in red in case you use a published source. Sometimes, quotation marks can be put around one phrase, which particularly denotes an opinion that is evidently not yours. Keep in mind, practically all online checkers identify double quotation marks, so using single quotation marks would be impractical. Yet, it is wrong to think that quotation marks will make your work plagiarism-free. Even if the actual similarity score is reduced, a paper full of quotations will look suspicious. If you scan such a quote-satiated essay through PlagiarismSearch, your similarity report will look all purple. A well-written research should combine both original ideas and citations of reputable sources.

Word-for-word copying even in a few sentences is an "epic failure"

Of course, every student, blogger, and scholar must understand that even a few sentences copied word for word will exacerbate the quality of an initially insightful story or a scrupulous independent investigation. This way, such instances of 2-5% of plagiarism occur when your work seems to be flawless at first sight, but then the entire sentence highlighted in red spoils the whole impression.

Online plagiarism report generated by PlagiarismSearch is able to identify discrepant levels of plagiarism, from the lowest to the highest. If your paper contains all the levels of plagiarism, it will be surely flamboyant, but it will have to be significantly improved.