AcPgChecker: Detection of Plagiarism among Academic and Scientific Writings

Abstract

The unacknowledged usage of Intellectual Property (IP), for example, academic or scientific writings, is considered plagiarism. People get involved in this unethical practice in order to achieve rewards or society's attention effortlessly. For example, students often copy & paste from other's documents to achieve better marks. However, it is crucial to detect plagiarism to reward the actual owners of IP like academic or scientific writings. The existing studies are better at identifying external online sources of plagiarism for a given document. However, busy academics need to identify plagiarism among a set of offline writings or documents more often. To this end, we develop a tool named AcPgChecker to assist busy academicians. Initially, this tool measure similarity among a set of documents using a well-known information retrieval technique, Cosine Similarity. Then, it compares the measured similarities with a predefined threshold to detect plagiarism. The main attractions of this tool are: it is open source and freely available for anyone whereas equivalent existing tools are very expensive.