The role of social connections in plagiarism detection

Abstract

Plagiarism is considered as an unethical act. Over the past few years its rate has increased considerably due to a widespread access to electronic documents on the Web. Existing tools for plagiarism detection are not efficient enough and if we want to successfully prevent these kind of acts we must improve today’s plagiarism detection approaches. The paper proposes a framework for improved detection of plagiarism, where we focus on integration of information from social networks, information from the Web and semantically enriched visualization of information about authors and plagiates. Visualization enables exploring data and seeking of advanced patterns of plagiarism. We also developed a special tool to support the proposed framework. The results of evaluation confirmed our hypothesis that employment of social network analysis and advanced visualization techniques improves plagiarism detection process.