Scribbr Plagiarism Checker

The Scribbr Plagiarism Checker is powered by elements of Turnitin’s Similarity Checker, namely the plagiarism detection software and the Internet Archive and Premium Scholarly Publications content databases.

No, the Scribbr Plagiarism Checker does not publish your document in any public database (unlike other plagiarism checkers).

In addition, you can delete all your personal information and documents from the Scribbr server as soon as you’ve received your plagiarism report.

The Scribbr Plagiarism Checker, in partnership with Turnitin, compares your document against the largest and fastest-growing content database in the world:

• Over 91 billion current and historical web pages.
• Over 69 million journal articles and books from more than 1,700 publishers such as Springer, IEEE, Elsevier, Wiley-Blackwell and Taylor & Francis.

The Scribbr Plagiarism Checker does not have access to Turnitin’s global database with student papers. Only your university can add and compare submissions to this database.

The Scribbr Plagiarism Checker compares your document against the largest content database in the world. It will detect any similarities with documents in that database.

However, you might be unsure if all of the sources you used are in that database – for example, because some of your sources are unpublished. In this case, you can make use of our Own Sources Checker. Here you can add all the sources you want to a private database and compare them with your own document.

The Scribbr Plagiarism Checker takes around 10 minutes.

For documents larger than 25,000 words it can take a bit longer. You will be shown an estimate on the order overview page.

As soon as the check is done we will send you an email.

No, you will never get a 100% match, because the Scribbr Plagiarism Checker does not store any documents in a shared database.

The Scribbr plagiarism report is similar to the report your supervisor will see, but there are two main differences:

Access to more detail and resources

The Scribbr Plagiarism Checker is optimized for students, which means that you will receive a detailed report with extra information and resources to fix and prevent plagiarism.

No access to private university databases

Your university might have a private database with submitted student papers that your document is compared with. The Scribbr Plagiarism Checker (or any other plagiarism checker) does not have access to this database.

However, many papers and theses are also published in public databases. The Scribbr Plagiarism Checker will compare your text with all documents that are in these public databases.

The Scribbr Plagiarism Checker checks your document for plagiarism once per upload. We recommend that you follow two simple steps to thoroughly revise all text snippets that might be plagiarized.

By following those steps, you can be confident that you have removed all plagiarism from your document. It is therefore not necessary to reupload your document for a new Plagiarism Check. If you would still like to perform a second or third check, you can purchase each new check at the regular price.

Step 1:  Review every similarity found by the Plagiarism Check

Think about whether or not the match makes sense to you:

• Is the match a correctly cited quote, part of a reference list, or a general statement that does not relate to a specific author? Then you don’t have to revise it. You can simply exclude the similarity from your total score.
• Is the match a text snippet (e.g. a series of words or a whole sentence) that you have copied from a publication without citing the source? Then move on to step 2.

Step 2: Revise each potentially plagiarized text snippet

There are two ways you can fix a similarity:

• Paraphrasing: Rewrite the snippet in your own words. Be careful: Simply rearranging the sentence or replacing a few words with synonyms is not sufficient to remove plagiarism. It’s best to delete the similarity and write the idea again from scratch to ensure the phrasing is completely original.
• Quoting: If you want to use the author’s exact words, put the text snippet in quotation marks.

Whether you paraphrase or quote, a citation is always required. Do you need more help revising your similarities? Have a look at our step-by-step guide.