Techniques for Spotting Plagiarism

More discoveries about plagiarism. Well, having discovered one silly teenager (she goes by Ali Renee Royster or Alianna Rene'e on Facebook, and by Alianna Renee on poetry.com) who has been plagiarizing my poems, I have now discovered the big leagues of plagiarism -- Baidu.com and China.com. They have wholesale importation of content.

I have tried out a number of tools for plagiarism tracking, but the simplest and least expensive approach is to just pick a sentence with an unusual combination of words and search on it in Google. It also suggests to me the advantage of having some unique word in your text that you can search on, perhaps in a reference where it might be less obvious.

http://mashable.com/2012/08/29/plagiarism-online-services/ lists some tools for detecting plagiarism.

I enclose an example plagiarism search on the title and first stanza of the opening poem in Silicon Valley Poems, California Weaving using the metasearch engine ixquit.com

First three results

Poems 2000-1 - Alistair Davidson's Personal Web Site
www.alistairdavidson.com/poems_2001.htm - Proxy - Highlight
And grass turned golden against the bluesky. ... summerblossoms, the greentreesoasis-likein the goldenhills. The almostperpetualbluesky.
Silicon Valley Poems

www.alistairdavidson.com/SiliconValleyPoems.pdf - Proxy - Highlight
It beginswith the beauty Vegetation Grass, the springflowers, summerblossoms, the greentreesoasis-likein the goldenhillsThe almostperpetualbluesky.

Weaving <3, by Alianna Renee
www.poetry.com/poems/317063 - Proxy - Highlight
It begins with the beauty Vegetation Grass, the spring flowers, summer blossoms, the green trees oasis-like in the golden hills The almost perpetual blue sky.