My graduate school doesn't offer TurnIt facility.
All tools available online charge money.
How can a I check plagiarism free of cost before submitting my research paper ?
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6Surely if you wrote the paper you already know whether you plagiarised any of it? – avid Sep 03 '20 at 06:59
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@avid, some sentences need to be paraphrased. – user366312 Sep 03 '20 at 07:03
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2@user366312 care to elaborate? Do you mean you wrote some sentences that you think are to similar to sentences in published papers? Or do you mean you copied them and want to check whether you can get them past some software? – Christian Sep 03 '20 at 07:07
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5@user366312 There is no need to paraphrase. If you need to copy a sentence from another paper, you need to do so with a citation and a very clear indication that it is copied (e.g., quotation marks and italic fonts). Hiding the copying by paraphrasing is plagiarism too. If the tool is detecting the sentences as similar by coincidence then it is not a problem. Nobody with a clean conscience would need to check their paper for plagiarism. – Tom van der Zanden Sep 03 '20 at 07:19
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@Christian, I wrote some sentences that I think are too similar to sentences in published papers – user366312 Sep 03 '20 at 07:39
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2Then I do not see a problem. If you wrote them yourself they are probably something like "standard sentences". I fully agree with @TomvanderZanden - if you took them from another paper you have to cite them anyway. – Christian Sep 03 '20 at 07:53
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Depending on the type of paper, 10-20% flagged as potential plagiarism are totally fine. There are many standard sentences used, e.g., to describe a figure or in the lit review. If you cite all the content (incl. ideas) you use, you're fine. – Stephan Z. Sep 03 '20 at 08:01
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Ask yourself a simple question: Did you plagiarise?
Assuming the answer is no, there's no need to check whether you plagiarised.
user2768
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Some online tools are detecting some sentences which need to be paraphrased. – user366312 Sep 03 '20 at 07:03
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Even if you know you didn't plagiarize, there is value in knowing, before submitting, whether widely used checkers will falsely report that you did. – Nate Eldredge Sep 03 '20 at 18:02
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1@NateEldredge You'd merely learn that widely used checkers don't work, but we know that already – user2768 Sep 04 '20 at 08:09
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Yes, but we also know that many institutions and journals use them anyway, and that a false positive can be at least a hassle for the author, or even affect the fate of the paper. It is not good but it happens. So the author might want to know up front if this is an issue, or want to reword their paper to avoid the false positive, even though they should not have to. – Nate Eldredge Sep 04 '20 at 14:13