Microsoft announced an interesting novelty for those users who use Word for their academic work or as part of their writing tools.
In one of the next versions of Microsoft Word a tool will be implemented that works as if it were a plagiarism checker, but with a completely different vision.
This tool called similarity checker is developed by Bing Search, and is intended for the user at the time of writing their document. So its main purpose is not related to a teacher trying to detect plagiarism in the work of his students, but rather to teach and raise awareness about the correct way to work with references, citing the sources and giving the corresponding attributions.
As shown in the image, the user can request this tool to verify a certain paragraph of the document looking for similarities in different sources. Once this process is carried out, it will show you the percentage of similarity with other online sources and the necessary tools to cite the text correctly, using different styles of bibliographic references.
So with a simple click, the tool will add the quotation marks and the original author or source of publication in the document, taking care of the text format. And all this dynamics will develop during the writing process. All modified text blocks will be underlined in green to easily identify them in the editing process, or if the user wants to change the place or directly delete it.
At the moment, this new tool is being tested with a group of Office 365 users, but they plan to officially implement it from July. And like all new writing-related features Microsoft releases, it will first be implemented in English and then extended to other languages.
