Desktop Plagiarism Checker 2.0

Overview

Have you ever been into a situation where you have to deliver an essay in university but the use of many external sources in it makes you worry whether it will be penalized for plagiarism? It’s a very reasonable worry, since more and more schools, universities and employers make use of software that can test texts and decide if they pass or fail a plagiarism test. In this case, there are two things you might want to do before submitting your work: use a software that checks for plagiarism and depending on the results, edit parts of your work. In this review we’ll examine a software called Desktop Plagiarism Checker, which claims to detect plagiarism in articles.

Installation

Once you launch the installer you will be asked to select the language you want to use during installation. Afterwards the setup wizard will appear and guide you through the installation steps, which are not many and have no difficult settings. The main installation process is very quick, finishing in only a few seconds.

No malware (viruses, trojans, etc.) are included in the setup package, but you have to watch out in the final step of the installation procedure, since there will be two checkboxes (both checked) that ask you to launch Desktop Plagiarism Checker plus install as a “free bonus” Rapid YouTube Downloader. Uncheck the second checkbox, unless you want to install this program as well.

Supported operating systems are Windows XP, Vista, 7 and 8 (32/64-bit).

Interface

The program’s interface is not very slick or modern, but it’s simple and sticks to the point.

There is the menu bar at the top with 3 menus (File, Edit and Help) and two tabs below them (Google – Yahoo and Google Scholar – Google Books). The contents of both tabs are mostly the same- the only thing that’s different is in which database the program searches for duplicate content. There is a big text box in the middle of the window, where you paste the text that you want to check for plagiarism, and below it are two options (different for each tab) that are used for selecting the database you want Desktop Plagiarism Checker to search. Lastly, there is a checkbox at the bottom that, if enabled, makes a stricter search (“exact search”).

To begin the process, just click the “Check Duplicate Content” button.

Pros

One the first things you notice when you run Desktop Plagiarism Checker (or even before you do) is its statement that it supports more than 190 languages. This means that your text can be in any language, virtually, not restricting any kinds of users with texts in less commonly used languages.

Cons

Well, I don’t know if it’s my fault or not, but the program simply doesn’t work. After I press the “Check Duplicate Content” button, it looks like the program is processing the input text, and then it just disappears. The same happened no matter how many times I tried to with different contents and options.

And not only this, but the first time I tried to do that, it first asked me for “Authorization”- which meant that I had to enter an email and a password. This actually prompted me to sign up, and so I did, hoping for a good outcome, but after doing so, and letting the program “authorize” my account, there was no outcome at all.

So, I headed to the program’s website (plagiarism.net), where they offer a free tool that scans any text for plagiarism and gives you the results. In order to test the service for accuracy, I used text found in Wikipedia articles and portions of ebooks found in Google Books. The result every time was “100% Unique”. No matter how hard I tried, it always told me that the input text was 100% unique.

So, even if the program is having trouble to operate only in my computer, and would work correctly in another computer, it would still show wrong results, since it shares the same engine with its online service. This lead me to the conclusion that the program is fake, and doesn’t work at all.

Alternatives

Other alternatives to test articles for plagiarism are Plagtracker (freemium), Viper (free), Turnitin (paid), PlagScan (paid) and Plagius – Plagiarism Detector (paid). www.plagium.com is a very good online option.

Conclusion

Doesn’t work, at least it didn’t work for me.