A Scan ID is a unique identifier that you assign to every scan submitted to Copyleaks. This ID acts as a crucial link between your system and ours, allowing you to manage, track, and organize your scans effectively.

Choosing a thoughtful and consistent naming convention for your Scan IDs is essential for leveraging advanced Copyleaks features, such as preventing self-plagiarism and managing large volumes of scans.

Core Requirements

While you have the flexibility to choose a Scan ID that aligns with your internal system, there are a few limitations to keep in mind:

• Character Length: Must be between 3 and 36 characters.
• Allowed Characters: The Scan ID can include lower case characters a-z, digits 0-9 and special symbols !@$&-=_()';:., ~. We recommend using lower case letters, digits and dashes for simplicity.

Unsupported Characters

Uppercase letters (A-Z) and any characters not listed above are not permitted. If your internal IDs use unsupported characters, see the section on Handling ID Mismatches.

Strategies for Naming Your Scan ID

The best approach is to create a structured Scan ID that embeds useful information. This allows you to easily identify a scan based on its scan ID and use advanced features like include or exclude specific groups of documents from a scan.

Recommended Structure

A highly effective structure is: <ORGANIZATION_ID>-<AUTHOR_ID>-<DOCUMENT_ID>

Examples

• tech-corp-employee456-q3-report
• acme-university-student123-final-thesis

Note

In plagiarism scans, this structure enables powerful filtering capabilities:

• Exclude by author: Use a pattern like *-student123-* to prevent a student’s new submission from being checked against their previous work.
• Include by organization: Use acme-university-* to compare a document only against others from the same institution.
• Focus on document types: Use *-final-thesis to analyze all final theses submitted.

For more information, see the Prevent Self-Plagiarism guide.

Handling ID Mismatches

If your internal system uses IDs that don’t meet Copyleaks’ requirements (e.g., they are too long or contain uppercase letters), the recommended solution is to generate a compliant Scan ID and maintain a mapping table on your end.

This table will link your internal entity ID to the corresponding Copyleaks Scan ID, ensuring seamless integration.

Your Internal ID	Copyleaks Scan ID
USER-9876-DOC-A	user9876-doca
Submission_ABC_123	submission-abc-123

Next Steps

Prevent Self-Plagiarism Learn more about how to exclude previous submissions from the same student to prevent self-plagiarism.

Submit a File See how to implement your Scan ID strategy when submitting a file for scanning.