Originality isn’t just our name – it’s in the foundation of everything we do. With so much content being created each and every day, being able to ensure the originality of your work has become just as important as your knowledge or expertise in the content itself! Originality is your key to cultivating and maintaining credibility, respecting intellectual property rights (yours and others) and about sharing innovative new ideas and perspectives that are entirely your own.
Although they say that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, that doesn’t mean that you should put up with duplicates in your work. In order to detect duplicates, we first have to take a step back and understand what originality really means, what duplication is and why it happens, and most importantly, what to do about it. Let’s take a closer look.
Originality is the very heart and soul of research, academia and creativity. It’s what sets truly groundbreaking, game-changing works apart from reproductions. In science, healthcare, technology and other fields, original research and ideas advance knowledge. In the world of entertainment, originality captivates and inspires audiences. In business, originality creates competitive advantages and innovative products.
But with so much originality out there, it’s inevitable that your work gets copied – either accidentally or purposefully. The problem, however, is that this duplication devalues your work – all of your effort, your ideas and your concepts. That’s why it’s so important to be able to detect duplicates and protect yourself.
Duplication isn’t just copying someone’s text verbatim. It can also happen if they paraphrase your ideas without properly giving you credit. Sometimes duplication is intentional, such as in the form of academic plagiarism. Other times it’s purely unintentional and caused by oversight. Unintentional plagiarism happens when writers fail to cite their sources or mistakenly believe that a source is so well-known, it doesn’t need attribution.
The good news is that there are many tools that can help prevent plagiarism, check for plagiarism, act as a duplicate text checker and even help to manage references and citations. We share a few of our favorites below.
There are several ways to go about checking for duplicate content depending on the type of content you’re checking. Here are some of the best methods to check duplicate content:
No one knows more about your writing style, tone and “personality” than you do. Before you turn to technology, cross-check your own work against your sources to make sure you’ve shared ideas accordingly and appropriately and cited them when necessary.
It always helps to have a set of fresh eyes looking over your work. A peer review can potentially catch duplicates that you might have missed.
There are a wide range of plagiarism checkers available online, both free and paid. Just remember that you get what you pay for, as premium tools offer more extensive access to databases and research journals than free tools. Try out Originality.AI’s robust plagiarism checker for yourself alongside or separately from our acclaimed AI detection and uncover any potential duplicate text that could be hiding in your work.
If you’re looking for a duplicate checker that works for data or code, tools like MOSS (Measure of Software Similarity) or Dedupe.io (for data sets) can be invaluable.
Projects are currently underway on GitHub to craft systems capable of identifying similarities in video. Others include TinEye and Google Images reverse image search to help identify the source of an image.
If you’re worried about plagiarism and want to carefully and accurately manage your sources, tools like Mendeley and Zotero can help you organize and track your sources. This greatly decreases the risk that you’ll unintentionally duplicate someone else’s work by making sure that you properly cite your sources.
Although numerous sophisticated tools to detect duplicate text exist, the process of detecting duplicates isn’t without its challenges, including:
Skillful paraphrasing, appropriating ideas from other texts and other types of advanced plagiarism are able to evade detection by many plagiarism tools. To help with this deeper plagiarism, it’s important that we, as a society, cultivate critical thinking and analytical skills when evaluating the work of others. Encourage students to develop their own perspectives rather than just parrot what others say.
Even the best online plagiarism checkers, both free and paid, are not 100% accurate, 100% of the time. It’s important to better understand the limitations of these tools and not rely on them as the be-all, end-all gauge as to whether something is considered plagiarism or not. Even after using a plagiarism checker, a detailed human review should follow which can help curb the potential for false positives while highlighting actual issues that may exist in a paper.
Doing this requires a deep knowledge and understanding of the subject matter or the topic being covered, which today’s AI generators and other writing tools can’t mimic.
Beyond taking these steps to help curb accidental plagiarism and paraphrasing, another excellent, long-term method of helping to detect duplicates happens through society as a whole.
We’re already starting to see this happen, initially as more of a backlash against AI, but now more of an instinct to value what’s truly unique and human. In order to further cement this kind of original thinking, it’s important that we educate and make people aware of all of the reasons why we’re working to preserve originality. That means promoting ethical and transparent research, encouraging creative and critical thinking and working together in a way where ideas can be freely shared and discussed.
Above all, it’s important to remember that whether you’re checking for plagiarism or you want to check duplicate content, all of these services are tools and aren’t designed to replace human ingenuity, creativity and judgment. Using technology in a way that’s balanced and open can help more people not only embrace the open exchange of ideas but also help prevent the problem of plagiarism and duplicate text from becoming more pervasive.
We invite you to try Originality.AI’s reliable, detailed plagiarism checker along with our other suite of helpful content tools, including our award-winning AI detector, readability checker, fact-check analyzer tool and much more to help you check text for duplicates and uncover many different instances of plagiarism while helping to keep your writing authentic, creative and of course, original.