Review of source-code plagiarism detection in academia

Abstract

Plagiarism is a big concern in academia and it can be a problem in every course. Plagiarism occurs when someone present others work as their own. Students plagiarize in different areas: homework assignments, essays, projects, etc. In this work focus is on programming courses and plagiarism in programming assignments. While source-code plagiarism detection, is in some way very similar to text plagiarism detection, it is very different in other ways. So, a lot of research is done focusing on source-code plagiarism. Some questions that are researched in this field are: what is considered plagiarism in programming assignments, how to perform plagiarism detection in programming assignments, how to do it automatically, what tool(s) to use, how students cheat in programming courses, how they try to obfuscate cheating, and many other questions. This work is a review of important research papers in the field of source-code plagiarism detection in academia. This paper tries to answer some of the mentioned research questions and give indication to future work.