In 2014 plagiarism detection can seem like a purely technological affair. Between amazing technologies to detect text, images, audio and video copying, it seems like anyone should be able to put a work through a supercomputer and learn whether or not it’s plagiarized.
However, human intuition and instinct still play as big of a role as technology in spotting plagiarism.
Part of this is because, despite how far technology has advanced, there are still types of plagiarism that computers can’t spot. However, even in cases where plagiarism can be detected by a machine, there’s often too much content to feed everything into the available tools. As such, having a good idea on what to check can be very useful.
So what are some of the signs that a work might have a plagiarism issue? There are actually dozens of potential tip offs and we discussed three common ones in academic environments in 2011.
However, here are five potential red flags that you can look for when checking out a piece of text. Though these aren’t outright convictions of plagiarism, they might make a work worth a deeper look.
