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Before submitting any paper to an instructor, make sure and check your paper for plagiarism. You may have plagiarized without even knowing it, so here are some steps you can take to protect yourself:

Submit a Google Alert
Google Alert (currently in Beta) scans the web for any content similar to what you’ve written. Right now, you can submit up to 256 characters of text per alert (and up to 1000 alerts). This means you can submit random sentences from your paper and find out if there is any similar content in Google’s database.

Use Article Checker
Another free service to check for plagiarism is Article Checker. This website will allow you to submit your entire paper, and will give you some pretty good results very quickly. It’s not as thorough as Google Alerts, but still worth doing.

Know the Rules
As always, it’s good to review all the rules regarding plagiarism so you don’t make some innocent mistakes. Purdue University has several articles to help you avoid plagiarism. Check them out.

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