Originality and Plagiarism Checks for Every Draft
Whereas AI detection focuses on identifying AI in a draft, similarity checking zeroes in on what runs against every draft and what a percent actually means. Moreover, what tools can do and where they reach their limits is captured in this exercise.
How Originality and Plagiarism Checks Work
Every draft is asked two different questions, and only one of them is probabilistic. AI detection is a guess about how a given text was written. Similarity checking examines the actual strings and compares them to a database of already published materials. It then shows where the overlap is. A match is indisputable; a detector score is based on subjective opinion.
Copyscape and Copyleaks filter duplicate content, while Originality.ai focuses on the plagiarism side of things. Where appropriate, Turnitin Similarity is run as well. This check is performed in the final stages after a writer takes their last pass and is done on the entire document following a review from an editor. The check is done prior to any files being attached to email messages for delivery.
What comes back doesn’t come back as a grade. A report may show overlap because the writer quoted a source and attributed it, because the piece has an address, a product specification or a standard line of legal text, or because a proper noun appears in the order it always does. Only one class of match is an issue, and differentiating them is an editor’s responsibility.
- The writer submits a final draft with a source list and working notes.
- Before applying any tool to a text, the editor reads the notes and the final draft.
- The text as a whole is checked for duplicate content using the similarity tools.
- Context for every flagged passage is read and marked, not as a batch.
- Reports are bundled and attached to the delivery email with the draft.
Why the percentage is not the point
A four percent similarity score made entirely of quoted, attributed material is fine. A one percent score that turns out to be a stolen sentence is not. We read the matches, never the summary line.
Why Originality and Plagiarism Checks Matter for Human Writing
Hiring a writer doesn’t make an essay original in of itself. Writing is a form of imitation, and even if a writer does hire another to help them, the writing won’t be original. A hiring writer might, for instance, use a favorite phrase and copy it into their notes. They might not do it purposely, and they might totally forget about it. A hiring writer may also sell a paper to somebody, and then recycle the same piece of work under a different owner. These plagiarism-checking tools were made because it is not possible to determine whether the essays were written honestly with clean text.
This has its advantages for you commercially. When two pages have the same content, a search engine is forced to pick one and the other has no added value. A publisher who republishes someone else’s content deserves and will have to respond to a complaint. Neither situation is a good outcome for the few minutes it takes to do the check.
Reuse across clients is most concerning because it’s the one the buyer cannot detect externally. Copyright in your piece transfers to you on delivery, meaning if the writer resells those paragraphs, they are, in effect, selling the copyright to something that is no longer theirs to sell. The check is how we verify, and the source list is how we determine the direction of borrowing.
- A concept explained in different, original, and creative words.
- Information that has been obtained from a source but not cited.
- Information rewritten from a different language.
- Pages that are inaccessible and/or behind paywalls, or are currently absent from a tool’s index.
- Anything published after the day the check was run.
What Happens if Originality and Plagiarism Checks Find a Problem
The editor starts reviewing a submission without commentary. Attributed quotations are left as is and noted in the report. Template material is recorded and is left as is. Genuine overlap is noted and the draft is returned to the author with the overlapped material highlighted and a same-day due date. Delivery times are limited to no greater than three days and the editor’s schedule allows for almost no leeway in that time.
If a problem makes it all the way to your inbox, it’s more likely that you will hear from us before you hear from a reader. You will receive the corrected draft, the report detailing the changes, and a straight explanation of the original match. The two rounds of revisions included in each order will cover the revision, and if the work is unusable the refund policy will apply.
Your conversation with the writer will happen outside of this document. Rather than making a judgment, I will start with a question. Sloppy note-taking and intentional plagiarism can’t be differentiated in a report, and they are not comparable behaviors. A first real incident warrants investigation and discussion. Plagiarism that occurs intentionally, or plagiarism that happens after a warning, will result in a loss of engagement, in the same way that plagiarism detected by a text-to-human software would.
- The untouched report files, just as the tools generated them.
- The source list the writer actually worked from.
- A rerun of the checks after any revision.
- The editor’s justification or rationale for match clearance.
What a rejected draft costs you
Nothing. Drafts that our team check systems mark as failed do not leave the system and cost nothing but a day.
Originality and Plagiarism Checks FAQs
Yes, for every order of every length, at the hundred-word minimum. There is no option to add on. Each hundred words is ten dollars, and we collect a one percent fee. Checking is part of what the writer and editor do.
You receive the reports with your delivery email, even if you don’t ask for them. If you need to receive them in a different format for a compliance file, or need them at a different time, please send an email to support@articled.org and include your order reference and someone will send them to you.
Not as a standalone service. Sending pre-written copy as a reference on a brief will help us locate instances where text appears to be copied, but the checks we conduct and the results we report are based on the text that our writer provided as a draft.
There is no threshold because the number means very little on its own. A report with all quotes as matches ships as is. A report containing a single unsourced sentence will not ship, regardless of the total.
The tool is working correctly when a match occurs. The editor records it as your material, and it stays in the draft. Please tell us at the brief stage which pages are yours so that note is accurate the first time.
Badly, and we must make it clear we do not mean that in a good way. We ask for citations in footnotes for quotes used in text when the original source is in a foreign language so the borrowing is noted in the source list even when no system is able to detect it in the report.
One limit deserves mention. These tools search their own indexes, not everything ever written. A clean report means no overlap was found in what the tools can see. This is useful to know and is a smaller claim than total originality. It is better for you to hear that from us than work it out for yourself.
Content a person actually wrote
$10 per 100 words, and the writer keeps all of it. Our 1% sits on top, 0.5% goes to trees, and no generated text appears anywhere in the process.