How to detect Internal and external plagiarism and what are the methods of removing them ?

March 02, 2020

Plagiarism is a practice of imitating the author’s language and representing them as one’s own. This crime is done without providing any acknowledgment of the source, which ultimately leads to serious consequences. When this wrongful act reached numbers, many software programmers were informed to design plagiarism checker software to identify the database. The pasted text is compared to millions of text on the web pages to scan a similar language or expressions if plagiarized.

How to check plagiarism?

Today, nearly 30 percent of the websites face duplication issues. The cookies in the plagiarism checker identify the identical and non-identical passages. Once you scan the results via the software, the report will be in green and red. The lines which are non-plagiarized are in green color whereas the lines which have already been published are highlighted with red color. Hence, make sure to be authentic while writing.

What are its different types ?

There are currently two major types of plagiarism i.e. internal and external. Internal plagiarism is confined to your website while the external type is extended to other websites.

Internal plagiarism

  1. WWW Versions v/s non-www webpages: Nowadays, some pages have prefix as www while some pages on the same website do not have this prefix. Although both the versions have similar content they run against each other for a no. 1 ranking. Any search engine will not be able to select amongst the several versions of a single website.
  2. Transitions in URL: When two links reach the same place, it is called URL variations. For example in any e-commerce page, t-shirts are available in the clothing section and in the sale section.
External plagiarism

There are multiple methods that can be used for detecting if the content is plagiarized, two of them are listed below:-

  1. Language independent detection: in this process, common characters in the content are evaluated across different languages by the detector. This evaluation is made on the basis of unique characteristics, length, and words used.
  2. Language dependent detection: in this process, text characters restricted to one specific language is used. It is convenient and easy to scan as this method uses characteristics like frequency count of the words.
  3. Content-based methods: These content-based methods are further divided into:-
    1. Latent semantic Analysis: This methodology is used to create a matrix of rows and columns. Here, synonyms are compared with each other and the matrices are repeated until the entire word list is contrasted.
    2. Fingerprint analysis: In this technique, you can compare two or more documents with the help of biometrics. A fingerprint can be created to check if the content is similar or not.
  4. SCAM Algorithm: SCAM (Standard Copy Analysis Mechanism) is a measuring technique for detecting the overlaps by comparing a specific paragraph amongst the test and the registered documents.
How to resolve the issue ?

The different unique resource locator of your webpage might be having the same contents. To resolve this internal plagiarism, you can go for a canonical URL that allows search engines like Google, Yahoo to check the content and rank it top the ladder. In case of the external type, you can reach to the website owner for removing or modifying the content that you seem is a duplicate and you can report to the search engine so that they can remove the copied site.

Moreover, you can always reach to "checkforplag" for plagiarism check. Click on the go button and modify it if the percentage of plagiarized lines is more than zero.