Citation based plagiarism detection

Abstract

This paper describes a new approach towards detecting plagiarism and scientific documents that have been read but not cited. In contrast to existing approaches, which analyze documents' words but ignore their citations, this approach is based on citation analysis and allows duplicate and plagiarism detection even if a document has been paraphrased or translated, since the relative position of citations remains similar. Although this approach allows in many cases the detection of plagiarized work that could not be detected automatically with the traditional approaches, it should be considered as an extension rather than a substitute. Whereas the known text analysis methods can detect copied or, to a certain degree, modified passages, the proposed approach requires longer passages with at least two citations in order to create a digital fingerprint.