Check for plagiarism in DOC, DOCX, PDF, RTF and PDF documents

Plagiarism is a problem for all kinds of people – teachers, lecturers and researchers alike. When you are dealing with large amounts of data, weeding out the copies is a nightmare, and that’s where CopyCat comes in.

CopyCat is a small program that doesn’t require installation. As soon as the interface appears, how to use the tool becomes obvious – add your source document to the “source list” area by pressing the add button, add your document to be compared in the “comparator list” area, and press start.

When CopyCat has finished analyzing your files (it supports DOC, DOCX, PDF, RTF and PDF and can scan two documents in different formats), you can view, compare and print the results by choosing “analyze”. You can also export the results as an Excel file.

Although CopyCat does a lot of the donkey work for you – manually comparing documents is very tedious – the results are very rough. The tool highlights matching sentences in yellow and leaves new data in white. It analyzes by sentence, however, so even changing “an” to “the” is enough for CopyCat to decide that a sentence is original, even though a human might vehemently disagree.

All in all, CopyCat makes an admirable attempt to tackle an unpleasant job with which humans could really do with some help. It’s clear, efficient and easy to use, but unfortunately isn’t sensitive enough for anything but the most basic comparisons.

CopyCat is a simple, clean tool for making basic comparisons between a range of document formats.