Plagtracker Wants To Rid The Web Of Plagiarism

Plagiarism is a major concern these days. The web is a huge place and you might not even realize that someone sitting on the other side of the world has used your content and passed it off as their own. Some Google-fu helps to find out if someone has plagiarized content that has been attributed to them. All you have to do is search. But besides this what if there was a service which helped you scan the big old web and see who has plagiarized your content in the easiest possible way.

Plagtracker is one of those tools. It is an Ukranian startup that is looking at solving the plagiarism problem once and for all. The service employs a unique algorithm which sorts out all the written content that you upload and checks them against existing pages on the Internet. The plagiarism report is shown to you depending on the number of words in your document. Mostly the report is delivered in a minute. Plagtracker works on a freemium pricing model, where you can scan documents containing up to 5000 words for free. A premium account is required for anything beyond that. Pricing is very customizable. You can either pay $14.99 for the month and use it on an unlimited basis or you can pay $1 per document check. The premium account lets you upload documents and get your grammar checked besides the unlimited usage benefits.

To test it, I uploaded a document on Plagtracker to see how it works. I used the text of one of my published articles to see what the service would throw up. Yes, it correctly matched the content to the published segment and even showed websites that were syndicating the content. There were 31 matches in total.

What I did here is not really the original point of Plagtracker. The service is geared more towards academics and helps students and educators to see if plagiarism happens in project papers and research papers. This is a valuable tool for an educator to check and see how much of the project material submitted is original. Students can quickly run their projects through this service to see if there is any unintentional plagiarism. The service already has a huge database of academic papers which it uses to match with submitted documents. Besides education, you can use Plagtracker to do casual checks about your or some other person’s writing on the Internet.

The service works well enough and is fairly easy to use. There is however the issue of references in your articles not being understood and being flagged as plagiarism. The picture below shows something I wrote at random. It has a lyric from RHCP which is clearly made out to be so. The service disregards this and still flags it. The service’s FAQ points out that Academic references are removed when you use the premium service.

I would highly recommend this service to educational institutions in India. Other people who write or work in digital publishing should also have a look at it.

Website | Plagtracker

Top Image Source | ncsu

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