Plagiarism detection or content similarity detection is the process of locating instances of plagiarism or copyright infringement within a work or document. The widespread use of computers and the advent of the Internet have made it easier to plagiarize the work of others.

Detection of plagiarism can be undertaken in a variety of ways. Human detection is the most traditional form of identifying plagiarism from written work. This can be a lengthy and time-consuming task for the reader and can also result in inconsistencies in how plagiarism is identified within an organization. Text-matching software (TMS), which is also referred to as "plagiarism detection software" or "anti-plagiarism" software, has become widely available, in the form of both commercially available products as well as open-source software. TMS does not actually detect plagiarism per se, but instead finds specific passages of text in one document that match text in another document.