Improved Plagiarism Detection

We are pleased to announce that significant progress has been made on our most requested feature -- improved plagiarism detection.  Our originality detection service now utilizes improved matching and displays a list of matching sources (if any are found).  This will allow users to see which websites contain information that matches the content from their submitted paper.

How Does Your Plagiarism Detection Work?
We get this question a lot.  First, let me say that papers submitted to our service are NOT used as part of future originality checks.  Sites like TurnItIn collect and store documents as part of their plagiarism detection service.  Instead, Paper Rater searches the Internet to find documents that match the paper that you submitted to us for review.  If the paper that you submit already exists publicly on the Internet, then the Paper Rater plagiarism detection will most likely find it.  And, due to our recent update, any matches will be accompanied by links to the sources, so that you can see for yourself the page(s) that triggered the low originality score.

Shorter Text Submissions

Prior to now, Paper Rater has considered it bad policy to allow shorter documents to be processed.  This is due to the fact that the tips you receive after submitting your paper are the result of statistical analysis of the text.  Many of these analyses require a large enough sample size (in words) to truly be effective.

Nevertheless, our users told us (more than once) that we should be allowing shorter pieces of text to be submitted.  We are listening.  As of this writing PaperRater.com will process pieces of text under 500 characters similarly to larger text with the following caveats:

• Originality detection will be disabled
• Vocabulary analysis will be disabled
• Transitional phrases will not be analyzed
• Raw statistics will not be displayed

Spelling, free grammar correction, and word choice tips will still be given.

Thanks for the valuable feedback!