Viper Plagiarism Scanner

Viper is a free - after registration - plagiarism scanner for the Windows operating system. It compares selected local documents against Internet findings, previously submitted documents and local document repositories and displays its results to the user in the end. The developers of the plagiarism scanner are not revealing lots of information about the process which makes it difficulty to judge its effectiveness. Comparison of local documents works flawlessly while the online scanner remains somewhat mysterious.

The user has to create an account with the service to be able to log into the software. Once logged in it is possible to add documents, the software is able to work with the formats txt, doc, rtf and html - and compare these documents against local and Internet resources.

Local resources can be selected by adding folders to the plagiarism checker. The contents of the folders will be analyzed. It is possible to submit the contents to an online database by clicking on the Publish button. This is however not a requirement. The benefit of publishing the data is that documents scanned by other users will be compared to those documents. The process is rather unclear as there are no information about the data that will be submitted in that process.

Searching the Internet for similarities to documents that have been added in the first step is the last option of the plagiarism checker Viper. It is again unclear how and where the search is performed. Results will be shown in the end. Documents that have been discovered in the process will be shown with ratings to make it easier for the user to identify how similar they are to the original documents. Reports can be saved in the end to archive the results.

The number one reason to use Viper is probably to check local documents against other local documents as this is the only transparent process of the plagiarism scanner. Internet search could probably also be conducted by simply entering a few sentences of a document into a search engine (don't forget the "").