Optimising and automating the choice of search strings when investigating possible plagiarism
Conference paper
Child, M. and Culwin, F. (2010). Optimising and automating the choice of search strings when investigating possible plagiarism. 4th International Plagiarism Conference. Newcastle 2010
Authors | Child, M. and Culwin, F. |
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Type | Conference paper |
Abstract | This paper describes how to optimise the use of Internet search engines when investigating a document for possible non-original content. Services such as Turnitin do not guarantee to identify all non-original content, leading tutors to have to conduct manual searches when suspicion of non-originality remains. Previous studies have suggested that the investigator should manually select memorable phrases from the paper and submit them to a general search engine. The studies in this paper demonstrate that selecting phrases at random is just as effective. Several corpora of documents were obtained from a number of different academic areas, and several phrases were obtained from each. Strings, of increasing length starting with a single word, from these phrases were submitted to specialised and general search engines and the number of hits recorded. A common finding of these searches was that, in almost all cases, strings of six words were sufficiently distinct to uniquely identify the document that the string was taken from. One consequence of this is that totally automated tools are possible for this search-engine based non-originality detection technique. |
Keywords | Plagiarism, academic integrity, non-originality analysis, internet search engines |
Year | 2010 |
Accepted author manuscript | License File Access Level Open |
Publication dates | |
2010 | |
Publication process dates | |
Deposited | 02 Dec 2020 |
https://openresearch.lsbu.ac.uk/item/8v789
Download files
Accepted author manuscript
Optimising_and_Automating_the_Choice_of_Search_Str.pdf | ||
License: CC BY 4.0 | ||
File access level: Open |
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