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.

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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.
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.

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

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Examples

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

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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 IDCopyleaks Scan ID
USER-9876-DOC-Auser9876-doca
Submission_ABC_123submission-abc-123

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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.