No. PlagScan also searches .pdf and other document files which are accessible online as well as anything you submit to your account or organization repository. Additionally, documents from cooperating publishers, which cannot be found online or are locked behind a paywall are included in the analysis. Optionally, we compare your text with documents in our Plagiarism Prevention Pool, which includes billions of online sources.
Related FAQs
Alternative questions:
- Does it account for collusion?
- Does PlagScan check for documents other than those on the internet?
- Which publisher databases are available to PlagScan?
PlagScan's plagiarism search is based on four types of sources:
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World Wide Web: We use Microsoft Bing to search the World Wide Web. Anything indexed by Bing is available for a plagiarism check. Additionally, we can scan academic sites and those of particular interest to our customers, thereby providing coverage of internet content uniquely tailored to their needs.
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Your Repository / Collusion Checking: You can upload files and compare them with the document you want to analyze. For organizations: You have the additional option of creating/importing your organization-wide repository, so you can cross-check the documents of all the users on a given platform.
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Cooperating Publishers: PlagScan has millions of articles from thousands of academic and scientific journals available for your plagiarism checks.
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Plagiarism Prevention Pool (optional): If you choose to contribute your documents to the plagiarism prevention pool, you can compare them with documents from other PlagScan users. NOTE: Other users will not gain full-text access to your documents that way, but will only be able to see their own matches with your documents.
Learn more on our page Algorithm and Sources.
Unfortunately, we are not allowed to access Google services such as Google Search, Google Books and Google Scholar like a private user, due to terms of use and copyright protection of the published authors and Google's terms of service. Currently, Google does not allow access to its API for use cases, where the search results are not shown directly, because that violates their business model and agreements with the publishing industry. We are regularly checking our options and will immediately provide coverage of Google content as soon as the regulations undertake the respective change.
For crawling web content, we use Microsoft Bing as backbone to enhance our available internet content in addition to our own web index, focusing on scientific and academic relevant sites.
The time it takes to process a document depends on multiple factors, such as its length and the prevalence of its topic online. Generally, you can assume that your report will be finished within 10 minutes. However, during peak hours with very high server load, it may take a bit longer to process your documents. We apologize in advance and ask that you check back the next day. If by then your upload and analysis are still not finished, please contact us immediately.