Leave Out Quotes and Your Reference List
Updated
In the Google Docs™ add-on sidebar, tick Quoted text and/or Reference list under Exclude before you click Check. Excluded text isn’t sent, checked or charged, so properly quoted passages and your bibliography don’t inflate your score. The results say what was left out.
Quotations and reference entries are supposed to match their sources — that’s what citing looks like. But a checker can’t tell a correctly quoted sentence from a copied one, so they push your similarity score up. Excluding them gives you a score that reflects your own writing.
Exclude quotes and references from a check
- Open the sidebar: Extensions › Plagiarism Checker Plus › Check this document.
- Under Exclude, tick Quoted text, Reference list, or both.
- Look at the line under each option: it shows what the add-on found, or None found / No list found. The word count updates to show what will actually be checked.
- Click Check document. The results note what was left out.
Your choices are remembered for next time, for every document you check.
What counts as quoted text
- Text inside quotation marks: straight "…", curly “…”, low-high „…“ and guillemets «…».
- Block quotes — paragraphs that are indented on every line, the usual format for long quotations.
- Reference entries with a hanging indent (first line out, the rest indented) are not treated as block quotes. Use Reference list for those.
What counts as a reference list
The add-on looks for the last paragraph that consists only of a reference-list heading such as References, Works Cited or Bibliography. Everything from there to the next heading (or the end of the document) is treated as the reference list. Putting appendices under their own heading after the references keeps them in the check.
If the sidebar says No list found, check that the heading is on a line of its own with nothing else in the paragraph.
What exclusion changes
- Not sent. Excluded text never leaves your document.
- Not charged. Only the words that are checked count against your word allowance.
- Not highlighted. Excluded passages can’t match, so they won’t be highlighted.
- Flagged in the report. The full report on the website says the check left out quotes or references, so anyone reading it knows the score covers the rest of the text.
Excluding also applies to AI checks. That’s useful, because long quotations from other authors say nothing about how you wrote. See How to read your plagiarism and AI scores for more on interpreting results.