Plagiarism Checkers

I've been asked about catching plagiarism several times recently so here are some tools that could help out with this. 

One of the easiest things you can do is to copy and paste a small section of the text in question into Google and put quotes around it.  If the work is plagiarized, Google will often return a search with the page(s) that contain the exact phrase you searched for.  From there, it's usually easy enough to spot the rest of the plagiarized text on the webpage.

There are free tools that can make this even easier.  The Plagiarism Checker is a tool that allows you to copy and paste a section of text into a field on their website and search for plagiarism.  In my tests it worked better than some of the alternatives.

The one free tool for detecting plagiarism that I thought detected plagiarism the best was Plag Tracker.  I liked this tool because it gave a percentage of plagiarized work in its report and reported multiple sites where the identical work appeared.  One thing I didn't like about this site as much is that it doesn't consistently seem to be as fast as Plagiarism Checker.  One of the times I attempted to use it, the service delayed my results and emailed a report to me later in the day.  I still appreciated the detailed report, but I found having to wait a bit of a turn off.

There are other services out there, but I found both of these to be better than the others I tested.  Feel free to recommend you favorite resource for catching plagiarism and I'll be sure to pass it along.