Citation-based plagiarism detection: Practicability on a large-scale scientific corpus

AbstractThe automated detection of plagiarism is an information retrieval task of increasing importance as the volume of readily accessible information on the web expands. A major shortcoming of current automated plagiarism detection approaches is their dependence on high character-based similarity. As a result, heavily disguised plagiarism forms, such as paraphrases, translated plagiarism, or structural and idea plagiarism, remain undetected. A recently proposed language-independent approach to plagiarism detection, Citation-based Plagiarism Detection CbPD, allows the detection of semantic similarity even in the absence of text overlap by analyzing the citation placement in a document's full text to determine similarity. This article evaluates the performance of CbPD in detecting plagiarism with various degrees of disguise in a collection of 185,000 biomedical articles. We benchmark CbPD against two character-based detection approaches using a ground truth approximated in a user study. Our evaluation shows that the citation-based approach achieves superior ranking performance for heavily disguised plagiarism forms. Additionally, we demonstrate CbPD to be computationally more efficient than character-based approaches. Finally, upon combining the citation-based with the traditional character-based document similarity visualization methods in a hybrid detection prototype, we observe a reduction in the required user effort for document verification.