New Technology Helps Prevent Accidental Plagiarism

A number of authors and journalists caught up in plagiarism cases over recent years, including Doris Kearns Goodwin and Ruth Shalit, have argued that it was all an accident. Those claims resonate with anyone who has worked with large amount of research material in different electronic files, or with less-than-stellar research assistants.

Well, now there is a way to check your own work for plagiarism. The company iParadigms LLC, long a maker of plagiarism prevention software used by publishers and universities (it created Turnitin) has introduced a new service target at individual writers and researchers. You can check it out at research.ithenticate.com. The company describes the product this way:

Using the web-based interface, a user submits a document for comparison to iThenticate's extensive data repository. Within seconds, iThenticate produces a report that highlights content matches and provides links to significant text found within iThenticate's databases. 

Unlike other plagiarism detection services, iThenticate compares every submitted paper to a massive database of content from over 80,000 major newspapers, magazines, scholarly journals, and books as well as a database of over 12 billion current and archived pages of web content. In addition, iThenticate checks materials from over 13,000 scholarly journals and more than 150 STM publishers.

That sounds like pretty good protection to me. And it's not crazily expensive, either -- just $50 for a manuscript of up to 25,000 words. That's small change given the damage that a plagiarism charge can do to a career.