For those interested in experimenting with plagiarism detection tools, Christopher Pappas presents 10 free options.

Top 10 FREE Plagiarism Detection Tools

The act of taking someone else’s ideas and passing them off as your own defines the concept of “plagiarism”. As it is shown by the growing educational concerns, plagiarism has now become an integral part of our digital lives as technology, with the billions of information it gives us access to, led to the exacerbation of this phenomenon.

Anti-Plagiarism Anti-Plagiarism is a software designed to effectively detect and thereby prevent plagiarism. It is a versatile tool to deal with World Wide Web copy-pasting information from the assignment of authorship. The goal of this program is to help reduce the impact of plagiarism on education and educational institutions. At present, it distributes free software to detect plagiarism. Checking documents in a format *.rtf, *.doc, *.docx, *.pdf
DupliChecker DupliChecker is a tool 100% free to use. Just copy-paste, or upload your essay, thesis, website content or articles, and click ‘search’, and you’ll get the analysis reports within seconds.
PaperRater Paper Rater offers three tools: Grammar Checking, Plagiarism Detection and Writing Suggestions. It is a free resource that is developed and maintained by linguistics professionals and graduate students. It is absolutely free to use and it allows you to check for plagiarized parts in your students’ essays.
Plagiarisma.net Plagiarisma has a search box as well as a software download available for Windows. Users can also search for entire URLs and files in HTML, DOC, DOCX, RTF, TXT, ODT and PDF formats.
PlagiarismChecker PlagiarismChecker.com makes it simple for educators to check whether a student's paper has been copied from the Internet. Users can also use the "Author" option to check if others have plagiarized their work online. It is very easy to use as it does not require any download or installation.
Plagium Plagium is a free plagiarism detection tool. It’s very easy to use. All you have to do is paste in the original portion of text (max 250 characters) and hit "search. It is available in six languages and an Alert feature is also available.
PlagTracker Plagtracker is another online plagiarism detection service that checks whether similar text content appears elsewhere on the web. It starts scanning all internet pages and more than 20 million academic works for any plagiarized copy. After scanning, you will receive a report with details about your work.
Viper Viper is a fast plagiarism detection tools with the ability to scan your document through more than 10 billion resources, such as academic essays and other online sources, offering side-by-side comparisons for plagiarism. It’s free and you can download it very easily. Just keep in mind that it requires a download. Just note that Viper is available to Microsoft Windows users only.
SeeSources SeeSources is an online, automatic and free plagiarism checker. Choose MS Word in the formats (.doc/ .docx) or HTML in the formats (.htm) or text (.txt) or text document (max. 300kB, 1000 words). With "Start Analysis" the source search begins. You will be updated about the progress continuously, search takes about 1 minute per document.
Plagiarism Detector Plagiarism Detector is a software especially designed keeping the growing content requirement over the internet in mind. Equally useful for teachers, students and website owners. It scans the documents and detects plagiarism and provides an instant report. Your content should not be in a specific format. You simply need to copy/paste your content in the provided window and press search button