Is Grammarly Plagiarism Checker Accurate?  A Full Review

In this new world of content creation, the truth is that one must be sure that everything created is original if success has to be achieved professionally or academically. Such severe penalties are incurred in the form of lost credibility and reputation.  

Many writers and content creators use Grammarly for their grammar checking and stylistic improvements, but Grammarly also has a feature that promises to help find the copied content.  

So, how accurate is such a tool? This review will explore what Grammarly’s plagiarism checker is, its key features, how it works, and how reliable it is.  

What is Grammarly Plagiarism Checker?

The Grammarly plagiarism checker is another feature available with the current premium subscription in Grammarly. Its main purpose has been to detect copied and plagiarized text by comparing it against billions of web pages, the number of academic papers submitted, and other published content in its database.  

Grammarly provides this plagiarism detection technology to ensure its writers do not replicate any original content that someone else has put out and thus offer them peace of mind over unintentional plagiarism.  

The plagiarism checker is part of the overall writing assistant on Grammarly, meaning it also scans for spelling, grammar, style, and tone as it looks for plagiarism.  

Its focus is on students who should ensure that their original works are delivered in the academic papers submitted and content writers keen on avoiding duplicate content penalties in search engines.  

Grammarly Plagiarism Checker: Key Features

Under the plagiarism checker, diverse features make this tool convenient for anyone looking to check their content for originality. Here are some of its primary features:  

1. In-Depth Plagiarism Detection  

Grammarly compares your text against billions of web pages, academic papers, books, and other written material. It looks for exact matches and paraphrased text, which increases the chances of detecting plagiarism.  

2. Simple-to-Understand Reports  

Suppose it detects even a probable case of plagiarism. In that case, Grammarly generates a detailed report that indicates the plagiarized portions and provides information on the percentage of content flagged and links to the source from which the content appears to have been copied. Such transparency is helpful for the user who wishes to correct and improve their content.  

3. With Grammarly’s Writing Assistant  

Plagiarism Checker The plagiarism checker is part of the premium bundle within Grammarly’s main platform.  

This allows checking both the originality and quality of your content in a single pane of glass. It harmoniously combines with the grammar and style checker, so you’ll get an overall view of the quality of your text.  

4. Real-time Plagiarism Checking  

Grammarly does real-time plagiarism checks on your work as you go about writing. This allows writers to realize and correct likely plagiarism on the spot without running a separate check after completing the writing.  

5. Citation Suggestions  

What is appealing about this feature is that it not only identifies plagiarism but also gives recommendations on resolving the issue by citing the source. This ensures that a writer gives proper credit to his or her sources accurately.  

6. Secure and Private

Grammarly ensures that all files uploaded to its website are secure and not hacked. It says that it never stores nor transfers your content when you’re done with plagiarism checks, which reassures more users about the privacy of their work.  

Grammarly Plagiarism Checker: How Does It Work?

The grammar plagiarism checker from Grammarly runs your document against its massive database and compares your document. The way the process works is listed below in detail:  

1. Log-in to Grammarly 

You can plagiarize checks using Grammarly only through a Grammarly Premium account. Once logged in, you can upload from your computer and paste your content directly into Grammarly using the built-in editor.  

2 Content Analysis  

Once you upload the document to your system, Grammarly runs an in-depth analysis of your text to match with content in its database.  

The system then compares your writing against billions of web pages, articles, academic papers, etc. Grammarly employs powerful algorithms for detecting exact matches and paraphrased or reworded instances.  

3. Plagiarism Detection  

Grammarly underlines the copied text, even if it has been rewritten. They do it by matching your content to relevant material in their database, then cross-referencing it with content and articles published elsewhere and in academic journals.  

4. Detail Plagiarism Report  

Once you run the scan, Grammarly shall give you a plagiarism report. Here’s what’s in it:  

• The percentage of the text flagged for plagiarism.  

• The exact phrases or sentences that seem to have been plagiarized.  

• URLs that lead to the resources with the matching content.  

5. Recommendations and Advice  

If Grammarly identifies plagiarism in your document, it suggests ways to correct it. This might be rewriting the content or adding proper citations for it.  

Additionally, it may suggest citation of the source directly within your document while helping you stay at par with proper academic standards or abide by copyright rules.  

6. Action  

You can then pick to edit flagged content, delete it, or cite the source correctly. Grammarly plagiarism checker ensures that you do not miss any unwitting instances of plagiarism before publishing your work.  

Is Grammarly Plagiarism Checker Reliable?

Grammarly plagiarism checker is pretty accurate, but there are some subtleties while weighing its accuracy:   

1. Complete Database  

Grammarly has a large content database containing web pages, academic journals, and books. However, proprietary or subscription-based content, like Paywall articles, some academic journal databases like JSTOR, or private databases, is beyond its discovery capabilities.  

This means that even though it might be able to catch plagiarism in public stuff, there is a chance that it might miss paywall-bound content or otherwise unindexed content.  

2. False Positives and False Negatives  

Such is the case with any plagiarism detection tool, not Grammarly. It might tag some properly cited lines or phrases used very often as plagiarism (false positives).  

Similarly, it might miss a few plagiarized instances, especially if the source used is not available in its database (false negatives). Though Grammarly scans public sources pretty well, there can never be a guarantee of no missing content.  

3. Paraphrasing Detection  

One of the advantages of Grammarly is that it can pick up on paraphrased content. It doesn’t just look for verbatim matches but rather searches out text that’s rewritten so that it resembles pre-existing work.  

This makes it a useful tool to catch “light” instances of plagiarism, whereby the material might not be copied verbatim but closely resembles other work.  

4. Precision v/s Professional-Grade Tools  

Grammarly is terrific for quick, day-to-day checks on plagiarism and great for writers, students, and marketers.  

However, if you are working on professional-grade plagiarism checks, perhaps academic or legal work, something like Turnitin or iThenticate, will give you much more comprehensive scanning, especially if dealing with academic or research-based content.  

Pricing and Subscription Options

If you are someone who uses Grammarly or someone who is using Grammarly for the first time, then you should know that Grammarly has three different kinds of plans – Free, Premium and Business.  

Although the free version has a lot of features such as grammar, spelling, tone detection, conciseness and clarity, plagiarism checker is not one of them. You need to get the paid version to use that.  

Pros and Cons of Using Grammarly Plagiarism Checker

When you are talking about a certain platform, it is very important to look at the pros and cons of that particular platform. So, let’s take a look at the pros and cons of Grammarly Plagiarism Checker.  

Steps to Follow: Grammarly’s Plagiarism Checker

One of the most successful tools used to identify duplicate or plagiarized content is a plagiarism checker provided by Grammarly.  

That promises to help writers, students, content creators, and professionals ensure their work is original by scanning it against billions of web pages, academic journals, books, and other published sources.  

But how accurate is this Grammarly plagiarism checker at identifying potential plagiarism? This article will discover its step-by-step process, highlight the tool’s accuracy, and discuss its strengths and weaknesses.  

Step 1: Upload or Type Your Document  

The first step to using Grammarly’s plagiarism checker is to get your document onto the platform. Here’s how you do that:  

• Log into your Grammarly account: You’ll need a Grammarly Premium or Business subscription to access the plagiarism checker.  

• Once you’re logged in, you have two options: Upload a file from your computer by clicking the “Upload” button, then choose the document to upload from your computer. Acceptable file formats for Grammarly include .docx, .txt, .rtf, and .odt.  

• Copy or paste the text directly into the Grammarly editor: Once you have prepared your document, Grammarly will begin processing your text instantly. This is instantaneous; however, more significant documents may require a few seconds to upload and analyze.  

Step 2: Running the Plagiarism Check  

Once you upload or paste your document to an editor, then start checking for plagiarism. This is what happens in this step:   

• Real-Time Analysis: Grammarly scans your content in real-time. The moment you start typing or after uploading the document, the plagiarism checker begins searching for similarities between what you typed and the content in Grammarly’s database.  

• Scanning Against Billions of Sources: Grammarly’s plagiarism checker compares your document to a huge database with billions of web pages, academic papers, books, and other published content. It encompasses sources indexed by common search engines like Google and some publicly accessible academic databases; however, it doesn’t have access to subscription-based or proprietary academic sources (e.g., JSTOR, certain paywalled content).  

• Identifying Exact and Paraphrased Copies: Grammarly is concerned with finding direct text copies and parses copies in which words and phrases have been paraphrased. The program employs complex algorithms that identify reworded or rearranged words and phrases of published content, making it much more powerful than most common plagiarism checkers, which only alert to duplicate copies.  

Step 3: Viewing the Plagiarism Report 

Grammarly offers a plagiarism report after performing the scan. The report includes:  

• Plagiarism Percentage: Grammarly will give you a percentage indicating how much of your text has been flagged as possible plagiarism. For instance, if the grammar checker flags 15% of the document, it means that 15% of all that you wrote is matched with other texts on the internet or in its database.  

• Highlighted Text: The parts of your paper that are plagiarized will be highlighted. Each highlighted section will include a link to the source so you can see where this material exists online. This way, you can see the original material in context.  

• Source URLs: Grammarly provides live links to the original website or research paper where you copied or pasted. You click the link and navigate to the webpage or academic paper containing your copied text. This will then indicate whether the content you copied was accidental or if you have made appropriate plagiarism attributions.  

Step 4: Revising the Plagiarism Issues

Then, you should do what the plagiarism report instructs you to do. There are a few ways you can respond to the flagged content:  

• Reword the Text: If Grammarly has viewed a portion of your content as having been taken from another source and then paraphrased, you may reword the text once more to make it unique so that it very organically finds its voice in expressing your thoughts and so that you don’t keep hitting their same structure over and over again.  

• Cite the Source: If it is a quote or reference to another author, properly cite that source based on the citation style you have chosen, MLA, Chicago, etc. Grammarly often suggests citations.  

• Remove Content: If it is crap, irrelevant, or an accident- you might as well remove it and write something fresh in its place.  

• Quote Marks: Use For direct quotes quotation marks should be used on the text, and proper citation of the source is necessary. Material that should have been properly attributed will be flagged by Grammarly’s plagiarism checker.  

Step 5: Re-Running the Plagiarism Check

Run another plagiarism check on your document after making all the corrections.  

• Revise and Re-check: You can now upload or re-paste your revised paper to Grammarly again for a second plagiarism scan. This would help you confirm that your changes resolved the plagiarism issues that could have developed with new ones.  

• Final Review: When your document is clean from plagiarism checks with no serious matches, you know your work is original with proper citation. 

How Accurate is Grammarly Plagiarism Checker?

However, while plagiarism checking is a fantastic feature of Grammarly, there are various reasons why it might not be accurate:  

• Limitations of the Database

Grammarly checks your document against an extensive database of “free” web pages, academic works, and books. It’s intended to compare your work against such sources but cannot survey sources that require a subscription or are proprietary. Therefore, one of the following could be expected:  

It can potentially overlook plagiarism from academic journals, research databases, or paywalled content. It’s not as reliable for research or technical writing, content depends much on non-web-based materials.  

• Paraphrased Detection

Grammarly is pretty good at paraphrasing because it catches structural and phrasing matches. No plagiarism checker is 100% efficient. Sophisticated paraphrases may not be caught, especially in very subtle cases of paraphrasing.  

• False Positives and False Negatives

Like any plagiarism detection tool, there can be false positives (you are falsely alerting someone to plagiarized content) and false negatives (failing to catch plagiarism).  

False Positives: Common phrases or technical terms may be flagged even if they aren’t plagiarized. Grammarly will often flag highly used or quoted text, but in many cases, these shouldn’t be considered plagiarism.  

False Negatives: If the word source does not exist within Grammarly’s database or the paraphrasing was done highly professionally, Grammarly will likely not identify it as plagiarism. This is the known limitation of almost any plagiarism checker, not only Grammarly.  

• Comparison to Other Tools

The plagiarism checker is accurate for general, day-to-day content generation and writing. Still, it is no more extensive than specialized plagiarism checkers like Turnitin or iThenticate, especially for academic or research-oriented content. These hold broader academic databases collections and are designed for institutions and researchers.  

Grammarly Plagiarism Checker: Strength and Weakness

While there are certain pros and cons to Grammarly Plagiarism Checker, there are also certain strengths and weaknesses that the platform has that we need to look at.  

Grammarly Plagiarism: Comparison

In today’s digital age, it is still important to ensure the originality of any written content among students, teachers, and other professionals. So, to ensure originality and avoid plagiarism, these two tools are leading the way, namely Grammarly and Turnitin.  

Wrapping Up!

Although Grammarly plagiarism checker is a well-rounded plagiarism checker, with various tools for checking spelling, grammar and tone of a content, it is not 100% accurate when it comes to plagiarism checking. 

You cannot rely on it entirely if you are a marketer or a writer. It is helpful to a certain extent for a student, but for a professional, I would recommend you look for other, more efficient plagiarism checkers.  

Now, if you think that this article was helpful and informative, then give this article a like and at the same time comment below to let us know.  

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