How to Check for Plagiarism

Choose a plagiarism checker that matches your needs. Most students use tools like Turnitin (if provided by the school), Grammarly, or the EssayGenius plagiarism scanner. Ensure the tool checks against both public web pages and private academic databases. Upload your document or paste your text into the interface. Start the scan and wait for the tool to generate a similarity report. This report highlights every string of text that matches an existing source on the internet or in published journals.

Review the percentage score provided by the tool. A high score (e.g., 30%+) often indicates heavy reliance on external text, while a low score (e.g., 5%) usually suggests original work. However, you must examine individual highlights. Detection tools often flag common phrases, bibliography entries, and properly cited quotes as matches. Your goal is not to reach 0% similarity, but to ensure that every highlighted section is either common knowledge or accompanied by a correct citation.

Compare highlighted text against your original sources. If the tool flags a sentence that you intended to paraphrase, check if the structure is too similar to the original. If you find more than three consecutive words that match the source exactly, you must wrap the text in quotation marks or rewrite the sentence entirely. Cross-reference every flag with your reference list to confirm that an in-text citation exists for every borrowed idea, even if you are not using a direct quote.

Edit the flagged sections by applying better paraphrasing techniques or adding missing attribution. Once edits are complete, run a final scan. This second check ensures that your revisions did not inadvertently create new matches and that all previously identified issues are resolved. Save a copy of the final report for your records as proof of your originality check.