This is a quick post to show those that maybe getting frustrated with the Scorum Plagiarism tool that they are not the only one's and that the tool is actually flawed to a considerable degree at the moment, so don't worry it does not mean your work is not unique, their tool just lacks the sophistication between identifying similar topic focused articles that are in fact unique but contain similar phrases and keywords.

So my most recent article on Scorum (Mark Knight's Unfair Treatment by Media for Serena Williams Cartoon) was flagged as only being 66% unique which I was very surprised at because I wrote the entire article from scratch and even when referencing research from other websites I pretty much rewrote most of it excluding possibly a few sentences so I thought at worst a 5% flag would come up not a 34%!

Image of Scorum plagiarism checker showing my article as only 66% unique

I decided to try identify some of the conflicts by converting parts of the text I thought may have been similar and turning them into images instead. This actually made it worse (lol) as my article went down to 63% uniqueness, so I pretty much gave up on the idea.

Copyscape Exposes Flaw in Scorum's Tool

I have been writing for over 10 years now so I do have a good idea of when my work would have the potential to really get flagged as being borderline copied for certain snippets of research so I knew this one wasn't one of those articles.

So I decided to run the same work through Copyscape - a professional plagiarism tool I have been using for around 5 years now to see to what degree their tool would say I have copied existing work on the web.

Their tool came back with the top result being only 3% copied from another website compared to Scorum's 12%. For me this tell's me Scorum is off with their tool by atleast 3-4 times that of Copyscape which is a big discrepancy and the sort that can give writers a headache. Admittedly Scorum's tool is in it's infacy and needs more work to become a sophisticated plagiarism checker. So for anyone else that is getting frustrated out there, don't worry your work is most likely unique and the Scorum checker is to blame not you!

The above image shows the top 2 results that Copyscape found my article was similar to but only by 3%!
Full Copyscape results

This image shows the full results from Copyscape for my article, their tool works by showing you the most similar articles to yours at the top of the results. There were only two articles containing 3% and the rest only contained just 1% identical content.

Let's hope Scorum fix this tool to identify more accurately truly copied work sometime in the near future or we all could be missing out on a fair chunk of SCR if we write about topics that are already hot in the media but which we decide to take a different angle or opinion on them.