How to Detect and Eliminate Plagiarized Content?
Finding and removing plagiarized content is one of the most important steps that you have to take before finalizing your content. Plagiarism brings a whole string of consequences in its wake – all of them being in the “very much dangerous” category.
In this post, let’s take a look at how you can detect plagiarism in your content and then subsequently get rid of it.
Step 1: Use Online Plagiarism Checkers to Detect Plagiarism
Looking for plagiarism in a piece of content is fairly easy. You just have to use an online plagiarism checker.
But, simple as the process may be, it’s actually very tricky. Using a tool just requires a few clicks of a button. However, finding the right tool to use itself is pretty challenging.
The thing about plagiarism checkers is that there is no way to verify their results. In other words, if you use a particular tool and it skips a certain part of the plagiarized text (by labeling it unique), you won’t actually get aware of it.
Not unless you use a better tool afterward…
The point is that you have to pick a reliable tool that you can trust. Here are a couple of ways in which you can do that:
- Look up online blog posts and articles published by reliable sources on plagiarism checkers. Take a look at what online sources have to say about the top ten or top five plagiarism checkers. A lot of times, you can find the unanimous top-ranking tools in articles like these.
- Do a simple search about plagiarism checkers and see the top results in the SERPs. It takes something to rank near the top, and if you see a tool floating somewhere around there, you can take it as reliable. Of course, after getting an idea about the tools using these methods, you should try them out yourself to get an idea of their accuracy and features.
Step 2: Rewrite the Plagiarized Parts
Once you are done finding the plagiarized parts, the first and simplest way to get rid of them is just doing some rewriting. Once you rewrite the plagiarized parts, there will be no resemblance left in the text. And this would automatically mean that the plagiarism would get eliminated.
There are some pointers that you have to keep in mind when rewriting the text.
1. Synonymizing the text is an easy and effective way to rewrite it (when used in conjunction with other techniques). When using synonyms in place of the original words, you need to make sure that you pick only the ones that are contextually accurate. Some words can technically be synonyms of one another, but they can be very different in terms of context and intent.
2. Along with adding synonyms, you should also make other alterations to make the overall rewriting process more effective. You can try changing the structure and arrangement of the sentences. You can also try merging or breaking them at places.
3. Changing the voice of the sentences i.e., from active to passive and passive to active, is also a good way to make the changed version look drastically different from the original.
A quicker way to rewrite content is to use an automated article rewriter. Article rewriters are basically online tools that do the same type of stuff we’ve mentioned in the above three points. They reword content on their own without needing constant human intervention.
Step 3: Add Citations
This is something that we should explain in detail before continuing.
In our current context/situation, adding citations can be the third step in the process i.e., after the rewriting bit, or it can be simply the second step on its own.
When a piece of text is rewritten, it has to be cited depending on how extensive or otherwise the changes are. If there are many changes in the text, it won’t need citations since it won’t be, in reality, related to the original content except in concept. But if the changes are sparse, you have to cite the source where the text is originally from.
This is the situation in which adding citations is the third step.
On the other hand, another way to use citations is to just run the plagiarism check, find the plagiarized parts, find the sources, and then cite those sources in front of the plagiarized parts. That way, you’ll basically be saying, “I don’t own this content, and I’m using it from elsewhere.” This counts as giving credit. And when you give credit, you’re not plagiarizing anymore.
Conclusion
Eliminating plagiarism from content is fairly easy if you know what to do. In the post above, we have discussed the main steps that you can follow. The main thing you have to take care of is to pick high-quality tools for plagiarism detection and rewriting purposes. If you take care of that, you will be able to go through the process smoothly.