Most frequently asked questions
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First things first: Your documents are NEVER available on the public internet after you upload them to PlagScan. As a single user, nobody has access to the full-text of your documents as long as you do not explicitly share your plagiarism reports. Here is a list of how your documents can serve as a source for others, based on their respective settings (again, WITHOUT sharing the full-text).
| Internet | User database | Organization database | Plagiarism Prevention Pool | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Compare with web sources | never | - | - | - |
| Check against my documents | never | + | - | - |
| Share with my organization | never | + | + | - |
| Become part of the Plagiarism Prevention Pool | never | + | + | + |
PlagScan uses an encrypted document transfer method (256-bit SSL via HTTPS) for maximum security. If you would like to activate encryption prior to logging in, select https://www.plagscan.com. Secure Socket Layer (SSL) is the protocol that enables this safe data transfer via the internet. The SSL protocol makes sure that sensitive data, such as credit card information, cannot be read or manipulated. Many browsers such as Microsoft Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera, Chrome and others support SSL. The use of SSL is indicated by a padlock icon somewhere in your browser. The position of this icon may vary based on which browser you are using.
Your personal data are never sold or passed on to anybody by PlagScan or our business associates. Read more in our data protection guidelines.
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.
1. Make sure you use the right login:
- Username and password if you created an account
- Social-media logins (Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Facebook)
2. If you forgot your password:
- Go to the Login page and click on Request a new password.
- You will get an email with your new password.
- Make sure to change your password (in your account settings) to something you can remember.
You can find a list of organizations using PlagScan for plagiarism searches in our Success Stories.
After your registration, we send a confirmation email to your email address.
Click on the confirmation link to activate your test credits.
If you have already clicked the link, please read the FAQ I haven't received my test credits after registering and confirming the email.
PlagScan allows you to create multiple organizational users at the same time. If you have a user table in digital form, you can upload it via a table file (.csv, .xls, .xlsx, .ods from MS Excel or another spreadsheet program).
Absolutely. PlagScan provides an Application Programming Interface (API), which allows you to integrate PlagScan's functionality into your existing system. For example: After the student submits a document, the analysis automatically occurs in the background. When the teacher accesses the paper for grading, the annotated version would already be there. This way, possible plagiarism can be considered during the teacher's normal grading routine and no extra work is necessary. Please have a look at our integration documentation.
Organizational users can create assignments with deadlines and generate a submission code. With this code, third parties can upload their documents directly through the plagiarism portal to the user account. The organizational user is then able to flag the documents uploaded with that particular code in order to keep track of them.