Verdict: Flagged plagiarism in four of the six test documents. Performed best when scanning large passages of plagiarised text which had been unchanged.
Service: www.smallseotools.com/plagiarism-checker/ | |
| What are the subscription options? e.g. free, paid only, paid and freeIf paid options, what length of subscription/price structure is offered? | Free online checker. |
| Maximum word count? (if any) | No maximum/ unspecified. |
| Resubmissions allowed? If so, is this limited? | Unlimited checks. |
| Type of scanner E.g. software download, copy and paste, upload document online. Say if multiple options are offered. | “Copy and paste’ online scanner. |
| Sources checked E.g. internet, any specific journal databases mentioned, any electronic book databases such as Google docs mentioned, past submissions from other students etc | Website – no words altered; Website – some words removed; Website – some words changed; Website – fully paraphrased; Online pdf; Electronic book. |
| File types supported E.g. doc, docx, rtf, open office, pdfs, ppts | None – the user can only cut and paste text into the online scanner. |
| Extra features? E.g. grammar checker, spelling checker | None. |
| Support offered? E.g. phone, email etc | There is no support offered for the online plagiarism checker although there is a “contact us” section for general queries relating to the checker and other aspects of the website. |
| Report / results | |
| Type of report Downloadable? Shareable? | Reports are generated within the website’s browser but these can’t be downloaded or shared. |
| Side by side comparison to plagiarism? | No. |
| Accuracy of results – Which sections were detected and which were not (make sure the correct source is identified) | |
| Basic plagiarism – copied and pasted from a website source | Detected. The online scanner correctly identified the webpage which contained material that had been plagiarised. |
| Basic plagiarism – copied and pasted from an online pdf | Detected. The online scanner correctly identified the online pdf which contained material that had been plagiarised. |
| Some words removed – copied and pasted from a website source | Detected. The online scanner correctly identified the webpage which contained material that had been plagiarised. |
| Some words changed – copied and pasted from a website source | Not Detected. The online scanner did not correctly identified the webpage which contained material that had been plagiarised. |
| Full paraphrasing – copied and pasted from a website source | Not detected. The online scanner did not identify the website which contained material that had been plagiarised. |
| Basic plagiarism – copied and pasted from an electronic book | Detected. The online scanner correctly identified the electronic book which contained material that had been plagiarised. |
| General observations Ease of use, overall experience. If other features were included (e.g. spelling, grammar check), how easy were they to use and how useful were they? | |
| Smallseotool.com provides a range of free online resources for webmasters, internet marketing consultants and search engine optimization specialists. It offers a free plagiarism-scanner as one of its free resources. The design and layout of the page is simple enough and an unlimited amount of text can be copied and pasted directly into the website’s browser to scan for plagiarism. The number of scans is also unlimited, however, a “file upload’ facility is not offered. Online support is offered and users are able to contact the website with general queries. When tested, the scanner runs text pasted into the website through various search engines to find plagiarised work and highlights each sentence in red or green to denote either plagiarised work or original content. Watching the process is quite interesting as each result pops up one below the other. It’s not as quick as some of the other online scanners, analysing 815 words in just under a minute in one example. Unfortunately, the tool was not entirely accurate. It performed best when scanning large passages of plagiarised text which had been unchanged and, to its credit, it also correctly identified the source of the website where some words have been changed – not all plagiarism scanners manage this. However, in one test, the scanner was only able to detect one plagiarised sentence in a submission which contained six plagiarised sentences in total – this would be enough in itself to prove plagiarism had occurred, however, it also demonstrates that the scanner is not as accurate as it could be. Unlike other plagiarism scanners, Smallseotool.com’s provides an “originality rating’ and, although on the face of it, this appears like a useful tool, in reality it is quite misleading. Six plagiarised documents were run through its scanner and it reported that 48% of it was “unique content” – accordingly, it was 48% out because 0% of the documents submitted contained unique content. | |