Preventing Plagiarism Tips and Techniques

If you're looking for information on preventing plagiarism, tips and techniques exist that will help you to protect yourself and your work. In a world where information is distributed freely over the Internet, it's getting even more difficult to keep track of the writing you produce.

Is someone stealing your work?

It can be tough to prevent plagiarism, but with a few tips and techniques you can keep it under control. Fortunately you have copyright law on your side, though you will still need to work at making sure your rights aren't being infringed upon. Here are some tools that will help you to keep your written work safe.

Copyscape is a great tool that allows you to enter a URL for a place where your work is located, and it checks the Internet for examples of your exact phraseology used in documents somewhere else. This utility is free to use and is one of the most valuable resources you have for tracking your work on the Internet. Many businesses and universities use Copyscape to make keep plagiarism under control.

Creative Commons is a not-for-profit organization with one goal in mind: making it easier for creatives to share their work, consistent with copyright laws. What does this mean? Essentially Creative Commons assists writers (and others) in licensing their work to a degree that others can easily discern what is available for reuse and what is not. For more information, check out their FAQ.

Assignment Proof is a program that allows you to scan documents and figure out who's using parts of your work elsewhere, including the use of subtle grammatical patterns that may be unique to you. Assignment Proof has both a free and paid version.

So, someone is stealing your work and you're not OK with it. What can you do to make them stop? Plagiarism Today, an online organization whose goal is to help writers prevent the theft of their work, has several suggestions for what you can do before calling an attorney about Internet plagiarism. If you think that your work has been stolen, try taking some of these actions:

Keep your work safe!

1. Find your plagiarist
2. Contact the plagiarist
3. Find the host where the stolen work resides
4. Contact said host
5. When all else fails, conduct search engine warfare
6. Do it all over again.

What it comes down to, especially on the Internet, is that plagiarists are a dime a dozen. When you beat one, three more pop up. Under such circumstances, it might be a good idea to consider prioritizing what uses are completely uncomfortable with, and letting some of these thieves go and do their thing. Sure it's not ideal, but neither is spending half of your waking hours tracking people who copied your work.

It can be tough preventing plagiarism, tips and techniques notwithstanding. In the deluge that is today's Internet, it can often feel like you're swimming upstream in trying to deal with what seems like unethical behavior. If you would like more information on preventing plagiarism, here are some more resources you can check out:

• If you want to add a Creative Commons logo to your webpage but don't want to use a graphic, here's a handy HTML tag you can use instead.
• This forum post on Webmaster World contains a great discussion about how to prevent plagiarism. Here is an additional thread that talks about SEO-friendly ways to prevent the theft of your work.
• Here are a handful of other useful tools made specifically for preventing plagiarism.

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