Deliberate plagiarism is purposely copying works from books, articles, webpages, or someone else's paper and representing it as your original work. Alternatively, accidental plagiarism occurs in a few different ways:
- Incorrectly citing another person's works
- Failing to paraphrase another person's works — even when citing it correctly
- Reusing your own previous papers and inadvertently representing it as a new idea
A plagiarism checker works by comparing the submitted copy against known existing content. This sort of similarity checker flags instances of duplicate content, allowing the writer to modify those areas to avoid any claims of plagiarism.