Using Internet based paraphrasing tools: Original work, patchwriting or facilitated plagiarism?

In short

Free online paraphrasing tools can rewrite whole passages. The authors ran an experiment on part of a published text and report that online originality-checking services performed poorly at linking the rewritten output to its source.

What it looked at

An experiment passing part of an existing publication through easily accessible paraphrasing sites. Two sites were compared for output quality, and the result was checked with online originality-checking services. The paper also discusses clues for staff.

What it means for teaching

Matching services alone may fall short on machine-paraphrased text, going by the authors' report that they struggled in this experiment.

Limits

A demonstration using part of one publication, with two paraphrasing sites compared, so it cannot show how common or how reliable such results are. How many checking services were used is not stated.

Cited 223 times by other papers, as counted by OpenAlex in November 2026. A count measures attention, not quality.