Plagiarism is rife on the internet. Countless sites simply scrape and display other people’s content without permissions while others offer paid downloads of purportedly original text either for your own site or for a homework assignment. Needless to say, there are powerful tools out there that let you test a given web page, essay or article for the presence of excerpts and chunks of text that may have appeared elsewhere. One of the best, which I’ve been using to validate text for a while now and to track down plagiarism is the aptly named Plagiarism Checker.

The free version of the tool is available to all, simply copy and paste the worrisome text into the form and click “check the paper”. A boon for bloggers, publishers and teachers. You can also upload whole MS Word documents for checking. The site then breaks up your text into chunks and searches the web for duplicates. If no plagiarism has occurred then each chunk will come back OK. If there has been duplication, you will get an alert and can then drill down to see where the text originated if it wasn’t the author’s own work.

Webmaster Brian Klug allowed Sciencetext access to the pro version for review purposes, which he says is three times more precise and ignores text in quote marks (it assumes quotes are quotes and will inevitably appear elsewhere, so doesn’t flag them as plagiarism). There is also a campus version that allows all educators at an institution and, of course, their students to check their work. The original site was created as a University of Maryland at College Park Department of Education project.