Best Plagiarism Checker for Research Papers
Learn what to look for to find the best plagiarism checker for research papers and some of our top recommendations.
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Finding the best plagiarism checker for research papers is a little different than choosing one for other types of academic work.
Unlike more opinion-based essays, research papers often require a ton of citations and paraphrasing, making it easy for writers to borrow a sentence or miss a reference — and even harder for readers, editors, and teachers to catch it.
Finding a plagiarism checker that’s accurate and reliable enough to catch subtle or complex types of plagiarism (even if it’s accidental) can be challenging.
Read on for our top picks for the best plagiarism checker for research papers, and what to look for when selecting one.
Best Plagiarism Checkers for Research Papers (TL;DR)
- Originality.ai: Best for web or online-based plagiarism and AI content detection
- iThenticate: A top pick for journal submissions and education institutions
- Scribbr: A popular option for student papers and other academic assignments
What to Look for in a Plagiarism Checker for Research Papers
When assessing a piece of academic writing full of facts and analysis, not just any plagiarism detection tool will do.
Here’s what to look for in a plagiarism checker for research papers:
- Accuracy. Plagiarism can result in serious academic or professional consequences for writers, so a highly accurate tool that limits false positives is an absolute must.
- AI content detection capabilities. It’s not only using another author’s human-written text that may be considered plagiarism. Research-heavy academic journals like Science won’t accept ChatGPT-written content as they consider it AI plagiarism, making a tool with AI detection capabilities critical.
- Coverage. A key consideration is which databases or information a plagiarism detector scans to identify plagiarism (does it scan academic or institutional databases or online sources), coverage can vary by the type of plagiarism checker.
- Citation handling. Some checkers enable users to filter out properly cited sources, like quotes, to better focus on originality.
- Detailed reports. A comprehensive plagiarism detection report should pinpoint the flagged text and provide its original source for verification.
- Affordability and accessibility. Some detectors are targeted for more institutional use, so plans and pricing may be out of reach for individual researchers or small teams.
Although these are all considerations when looking for a quality plagiarism detector, some factors may rank higher in priority depending on the use case. For instance, some may prioritize accessibility and AI detection features, while others have different requirements for the tools.
Additionally, it’s important to note that a plagiarism detector should not be the only measurement to establish academic standing or identify academic cheating.
Best Plagiarism Checker for Research Papers: Top Picks
Ready to start narrowing down your options? Here are our top picks for the best plagiarism checkers for research papers.
1. Originality.ai
Best for web-search-based plagiarism & AI content detection in research papers
For its accuracy, affordability, accessibility, and more, Originality.ai stands out as the best web-based plagiarism and AI content detection tool.
For researchers and educators, Originality.ai enables users to quickly check text for both AI and plagiarism in a single scan.
With research papers in mind, Originality.ai features:
- An AI-powered plagiarism checker with up to 90% accuracy that detects even complex types of plagiarism, whether it’s patchwork, mosaic, or simply unintentional
- A 98% accurate Lite AI detection model built for academics and educators, with an under 1% false positive rate
- Budget-friendly subscription-based and pay-as-you-go pricing options
- Detailed reports that show an overall plagiarism confidence score, highlight any matched phrases, and provide the associated sources for further review
- An all-in-one patented toolkit, Originality.ai also features a fact checker, readability tool, and grammar checker for comprehensive text verification
It’s important to note that Originality.ai doesn’t scan academic databases or institutional databases.
As a web-search-based plagiarism checker, it’s an excellent choice for identifying potential instances of plagiarism (including complex types of plagiarism) from content that appears in Google search results.
As researchers have more access to online resources for conducting research than ever before, a plagiarism checker that checks for potentially matching content in search results is becoming increasingly important.
2. iThenticate by Turnitin
A top pick for journal submissions and education institutions
If you’re looking to detect plagiarism in research papers with a platform that also offers LMS (learning management system) integrations, try iThenticate by Turnitin.
Built with faculty, researchers, and graduate students in mind, iThenticate is designed to help institutions confidently submit plagiarism-free work to journals and other respected publications.
iThenticate features:
- Access to various content databases, including web pages, open-access journals, books, and other scholarly resources
- Partnership with Crossref, enabling users to use the same plagiarism tool as many publishers
- AI detection for organizations only
- Similarity reports highlighting potentially plagiarized text, with confidence scores and links to original sources
- Options to filter out quotes and citations
Although there’s a lot to like about iThenticate, one of its main limitations is its accessibility.
As noted above, iThenticate’s AI detection tool is for organizations only and is missing from the individual plans, requiring these users to pay for and use a separate tool.
Even without the AI detection feature, iThenticate has a high cost. Submitting a single manuscript to iThenticate under an individual plan costs about $125, which may put it out of reach for solo researchers and small teams.
In contrast, with all-in-one solutions like Originality.ai, you can perform all the checks you need in one place.
3. Scribbr
A popular choice for student papers and other academic assignments
Whether you want to identify plagiarism in college research papers or even in-depth assignments, Scribbr is a popular option.
Since it’s partnered with Turnitin, the same kind of detection software as some universities use, Scribbr can help students identify plagiarism in their work and amend it before submitting the assignment.
With Scribbr, users can:
- Run premium plagiarism checks to get similarity scores, as well as matching sources to any flagged text
- Compare any potentially plagiarized text beside the original to assess the similarities
- Upload previous assignments to check for self-plagiarism
- Run grammar and spelling checks in Word
- Detect AI-generated content
Scribbr is also a more cost-effective option than iThenticate, charging only around $20 per small document (7,499 words).
However, it’s easy to see how this can still add up, especially for individuals and teachers who want to verify their text more than just occasionally.
So, if you have multiple texts, papers, or articles to scan Originality.ai is a better choice, with flexible pricing options.
Learn more in our Scribbr AI detector review and Scribbr plagiarism checker review.
Try One of the Best Plagiarism Checkers for Research Papers Today
If you’re looking for a patented plagiarism checker that’s accurate, affordable, and accessible, and also offers the most accurate AI Detector, Originality.ai is the top choice.
Ready to review your content with confidence? Sign up for Originality.ai today.
Discover more resources for education:
- AI Detection for Education
- How Can AI Detect Plagiarism in Research Papers?
- What Is the Best Plagiarism Detector for Teachers?
- How Do Professors Check for AI?
- Are Colleges Using AI Detectors?
- Grammarly Plagiarism Checker Review
- Copyscape Plagiarism Checker Review
- How to Support Students to Avoid Plagiarism in Assignments
- 5 AI Detectors Used by Colleges and Universities for Research
Jess Sawyer
Frequently Asked Questions
No, that’s one of the benefits, only fill out the areas which you think will be relevant to the prompts you require.
When making the tool we had to make each prompt as general as possible to be able to include every kind of input. Not to worry though ChatGPT is smart and will still understand the prompt.
In The Press
Originality.ai has been featured for its accurate ability to detect GPT-3, Chat GPT and GPT-4 generated content. See some of the coverage below…
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Originality.ai did a fantastic job on all three prompts, precisely detecting them as AI-written. Additionally, after I checked with actual human-written textual content, it did determine it as 100% human-generated, which is important.
Vahan Petrosyan
searchenginejournal.com
I use this tool most frequently to check for AI content personally. My most frequent use-case is checking content submitted by freelance writers we work with for AI and plagiarism.
Tom Demers
searchengineland.com
After extensive research and testing, we determined Originality.ai to be the most accurate technology.
Rock Content Team
rockcontent.com
Jon Gillham, Founder of Originality.ai came up with a tool to detect whether the content is written by humans or AI tools. It’s built on such technology that can specifically detect content by ChatGPT-3 — by giving you a spam score of 0-100, with an accuracy of 94%.
Felix Rose-Collins
ranktracker.com
ChatGPT lacks empathy and originality. It’s also recognized as AI-generated content most of the time by plagiarism and AI detectors like Originality.ai
Ashley Stahl
forbes.com
Originality.ai Do give them a shot!
Sri Krishna
venturebeat.com
For web publishers, Originality.ai will enable you to scan your content seamlessly, see who has checked it previously, and detect if an AI-powered tool was implored.
Industry Trends
analyticsinsight.net
Frequently Asked Questions
Tools for conducting a plagiarism check between two documents online are important as it helps to ensure the originality and authenticity of written work. Plagiarism undermines the value of professional and educational institutions, as well as the integrity of the authors who write articles. By checking for plagiarism, you can ensure the work that you produce is original or properly attributed to the original author. This helps prevent the distribution of copied and misrepresented information.
Text comparison is the process of taking two or more pieces of text and comparing them to see if there are any similarities, differences and/or plagiarism. The objective of a text comparison is to see if one of the texts has been copied or paraphrased from another text. This text compare tool for plagiarism check between two documents has been built to help you streamline that process by finding the discrepancies with ease.
Text comparison tools work by analyzing and comparing the contents of two or more text documents to find similarities and differences between them. This is typically done by breaking the texts down into smaller units such as sentences or phrases, and then calculating a similarity score based on the number of identical or nearly identical units. The comparison may be based on the exact wording of the text, or it may take into account synonyms and other variations in language. The results of the comparison are usually presented in the form of a report or visual representation, highlighting the similarities and differences between the texts.
String comparison is a fundamental operation in text comparison tools that involves comparing two sequences of characters to determine if they are identical or not. This comparison can be done at the character level or at a higher level, such as the word or sentence level.
The most basic form of string comparison is the equality test, where the two strings are compared character by character and a Boolean result indicating whether they are equal or not is returned. More sophisticated string comparison algorithms use heuristics and statistical models to determine the similarity between two strings, even if they are not exactly the same. These algorithms often use techniques such as edit distance, which measures the minimum number of operations (such as insertions, deletions, and substitutions) required to transform one string into another.
Another common technique for string comparison is n-gram analysis, where the strings are divided into overlapping sequences of characters (n-grams) and the frequency of each n-gram is compared between the two strings. This allows for a more nuanced comparison that takes into account partial similarities, rather than just exact matches.
String comparison is a crucial component of text comparison tools, as it forms the basis for determining the similarities and differences between texts. The results of the string comparison can then be used to generate a report or visual representation of the similarities and differences between the texts.
Syntax highlighting is a feature of text editors and integrated development environments (IDEs) that helps to visually distinguish different elements of a code or markup language. It does this by coloring different elements of the code, such as keywords, variables, functions, and operators, based on a predefined set of rules.
The purpose of syntax highlighting is to make the code easier to read and understand, by drawing attention to the different elements and their structure. For example, keywords may be colored in a different hue to emphasize their importance, while comments or strings may be colored differently to distinguish them from the code itself. This helps to make the code more readable, reducing the cognitive load of the reader and making it easier to identify potential syntax errors.
With our tool it’s easy, just enter or upload some text, click on the button “Compare text” and the tool will automatically display the diff between the two texts.
Using text comparison tools is much easier, more efficient, and more reliable than proofreading a piece of text by hand. Eliminate the risk of human error by using a tool to detect and display the text difference within seconds.
We have support for the file extensions .pdf, .docx, .odt, .doc and .txt. You can also enter your text or copy and paste text to compare.
There is never any data saved by the tool, when you hit “Upload” we are just scanning the text and pasting it into our text area so with our text compare tool, no data ever enters our servers.
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This table below shows a heat map of features on other sites compared to ours as you can see we almost have greens across the board!
