How-To

How to Check for Plagiarism in Google Docs

By Brian Burgess

Published April 14, 2022

Plagiarism is taking somebody else’s work and passing it off as your own. If you want to check for plagiarism in Google Docs, use this guide.

There will always be those who seek to find the quickest route to finishing a piece of work. If you take content from another source and pass it off as your own, there’s a word for it—plagiarism.

Plagiarism is a huge problem in academia and the business world, but that doesn’t mean you have to accept it. If you want to stamp out the problem, you’ll need to know how to check for plagiarism.

If you’re using a document editor, like Google Docs, you can, and there are a few tools you can use to get the job done. Here’s what you’ll need to do to check for plagiarism in Google Docs.

Use a Plagiarism Add-on for Google Docs

One straightforward method for checking for plagiarism in Google Docs is to use an add-on. Add-ons allow you to add extra functionality to the editor, whether it’s creating diagrams or, in this case, checking for stolen content.

To use a plagiarism add-on in Google Docs:

1. Open your Google Docs document.
2. Click Add-ons from the toolbar and select Gett add-ons.
   
3. In the next menu, type plagiarism into the search bar and locate a suitable plagiarism toolbar. Look for an add-on with the most users and highest-quality rating, and amount of downloads. In this example, we’re using Plagium.
4. Once you’ve found an add-on, select it in the search results, then press Install. In this example, we’re using Plagium, but you may want to check the instructions for using other plagiarism tools.
5. Wait for the add-on to be installed. After a few moments, you should see it appear in the Add-ons menu.
6. To check for plagiarism, select a section of the text and press Add-ons > Plagium > Check section.
   
7. You’ll see sections of text that are plagiarized in the Plagium menu bar on the right, as well as a similarity percentage. The higher this value, the more text that is plagiarized, based on the tool’s findings.
   

Of course, depending on the document you have and the tool you use, your results will vary. Some similarity is expected due to common words, but anything above 10-15% is probably suspicious.

Use Grammarly

One of the tools we use here at groovyPost is Grammarly. Not only will it check your document for spelling and grammar errors, but you can also use it to quickly check for plagiarized content.

You’ll need to make sure you have a Grammarly Premium subscription to do this, however.

To use Grammarly to check for plagiarism:

1. Open your Google Docs document.
2. In Google Docs, select File > Download and choose a suitable format (typically DOCX).
   
3. Next, open Grammarly in your web browser and press Upload.
   
4. If the document doesn’t open automatically, press the uploaded document in the Grammarly document list.
5. In addition to checking for spelling and grammar errors, Grammarly checks for plagiarism within the document, comparing the text to sources it identifies online.

Stopping Plagiarism in Google Docs

Those are just two methods you can use to check for plagiarism in Google Docs. Remember, you might prefer a different add-on for Google Docs. Just go to Add-ons > Get add-ons and try an additional extension. Try various add-ons until you find the best one for you. You can also use websites like Copyscape to quickly compare two documents to see if there are any similarities.

If you’re an academic or professional and need to write an essay, learn how to set up MLA format in Google Docs or add and format a text box in Google Docs.