Frequently Asked Questions

General Questions

Where can I get further support?

In addition to our articles and frequently asked questions, there are tutorial videos available guiding you through various use cases. for various use cases are available at www.plagaware.de/info/tutorial. In case of any further questions, please don’t hesitate to contact our support desk using the contact form.

Which file types and –sizes are supported?

PlagAware natively supports Microsoft Office documents, Open-/Libre-Office odcuments, Adobe PDF files, web pages and text files up to a maximum size of 15MB and 750’000 characters (approx. 300 pages). In case you encounter issues uploading your document, please try to upload a plain text version oft he document instead. Further details can be found in the section features and specifications.

Does PlagAware check against paid contents?

No. PlagAware does not have access to paid articles like journals or specialized portals dealing with scholar theses. However, in many cases PlagAware detects copies of freely accessible summaries or abstracts of paid texts. In these cases, you have the option to license the suspected source and add it to your personal library to allow for a plagiarism scan including the paid article.

Will uploaded files be made available for third parties?

No, all texts that are uploaded for plagiarism scan or into your personal library are only accessible via your PlagAware user account. Attention: In case you are sharing a static link to a report, this report will be accessible for everybody who received this link regardless of prior registration to PlagAware. Additionally, library texts are shared among all users of the same organization licensed using the same license key. Further details can be found here.

Questions on Plagiarism Scans

How can I include own text or paid texts into the plagiarism scan?

PlagAware allows you to include user specific texts like theses, papers or paid articles into the plagiarism check. Please use the library functionality to upload text to your personal library before starting the plagiarism scan. Be sure to include library sources as sources for plagiarism scan, which is the default setting.

How can I upload multiple documents at a time?

Please make use of PlagAware’s library functionality to upload batches of documents (max. 50 documents at a time). After successful upload, you can initiate plagiarism scan for all selected texts rather than scheduling them individually. In addition, this gives you the possibility to do a cross check of all uploaded documents.

How long does a plagiarism check take?

A plagiarism check typically takes only a few minutes for short texts. However, for long texts, in case a multitude of sources needs to be analyzed or in case many scans are scheduled at the same time, it may take up to several hours to complete the plagiarism scan. If a plagiarism check is not started immediately after issuing the request, this does not necessarily mean there is a malfunction. Most likely, there are just many plagiarism scans queued.

Why does PlagAware list sources that have been cited correctly?

PlagAware lists all sources matching the checked texts. If, to what amount or under which conditions sources are considered as acceptable and well-cited is a decision that needs to be taken by the end user. These sources can be excluded easily within PlagAware to allow for a correct calculation of the percentage of copied words.

What does the color coding mean? Which percentage of copied words is considered a plagiarism?

PlagAware lets you analyze to what extent sources have been copied into the tested text, and how the sources have been modified after copying. However, PlagAware cannot make a decision whether or not a source has been cited correctly or whether the total amount of uncited sources should be considered a plagiarism (or not). At the end, this decision needs to be taken by the end user (in many cases following the organizations rules and best practices). Please see our article on rating of plagiarism checker results for further information.

Further Questions?

Please consider to get in touch with our support team using the contact form!