Terra Novus Labs has announced Novus Scan, plagiarism checker for Mac OS X Lion. It costs US$16.99 and is available exclusively through the Mac App Store in the Utility category.

Novus Scan, an offline plagiarism checker, enables users to build a database of documents and then scan the database, searching for copied text. Users can import documents into its database using drag ‘n drop or a file open dialog, import text that they’d like to scan, and Novus Scan compares the text to its document database using a two-step, word-by-word scanning algorithm.

Novus Scan can detect exact matching phrases at least eight words long and inexact phrases that are longer than eight words. The search results are shown in an user interface that displays the user’s document and the potential source documents side-by-side. A report generator enables users to create a printed or PDF format record of the scan results.