Plagiarism check

Members of the four research institutes can submit their manuscripts to Lib4RI to be checked for similarities with already published work. Since many funders and publishers run manuscripts through plagiarism check software by default, the number of rejections for this reason has increased. We offer this service to help our users overcome this problem.

Guidelines

The four institutes have agreed upon specific guidelines for this service provided by Lib4RI.  This is a short summary of the most important points of these guidelines:

• This service is free of charge for any research and technical staff member of the four research institutes within the ETH Domain.
• Bachelor, master and doctoral theses should be checked by the home university. In case the home university does not provide a plagiarism check to the supervisor at the research institute, we can perform the check for the supervisor.
• You may submit your manuscript to us if: (a) you would like to see if there is plagiarism prior to submitting your article for publication; (b) a funder or a journal rejected a manuscript on the basis of plagiarism.
• Please note that we provide you with a report that shows you how similar your text is compared to other published work. We do not interpret the result, nor express our opinion whether there is plagiarism or not in your manuscript.
• Although this service is called “plagiarism check”, it is important to understand that it does not detect plagiarism, but similarities within a sequence of words in a sentence.
• We will not share your manuscript with unauthorized third parties.

More details here

How to avoid plagiarism

Put simply, the best way to avoid plagiarism is by correctly citing your sources and not copying text as is, but by rephrasing it. But of course, there are some more details to its definition and better instructions on how to avoid plagiarising - check out the resources below.