ERIC Number: EJ938440
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2004
Pages: 12
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-0899-3408
EISSN: N/A
Available Date: N/A
A Comparison of Source Code Plagiarism Detection Engines
Lancaster, Thomas; Culwin, Fintan
Computer Science Education, v14 n2 p101-112 2004
Automated techniques for finding plagiarism in student source code submissions have been in use for over 20 years and there are many available engines and services. This paper reviews the literature on the major modern detection engines, providing a comparison of them based upon the metrics and techniques they deploy. Generally the most common and effective techniques are seen to involve tokenising student submissions then searching pairs of submissions for long common substrings, an example of what is defined to be a paired structural metric. Computing academics are recommended to use one of the two Web-based detection engines, MOSS and JPlag. It is shown that whilst detection is well established there are still places where further research would be useful, particularly where visual support of the investigation process is possible. (Contains 4 tables.)
Descriptors: Foreign Countries, Plagiarism, College Students, Student Evaluation, Programming, Programming Languages, Computer Science Education, Computer Software, College Instruction, Internet, Computer Uses in Education, Search Engines, Comparative Analysis
Routledge. Available from: Taylor & Francis, Ltd. 325 Chestnut Street Suite 800, Philadelphia, PA 19106. Tel: 800-354-1420; Fax: 215-625-2940; Web site: http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals
Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Descriptive
Education Level: Higher Education; Postsecondary Education
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: N/A
Identifiers - Location: United Kingdom
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A
Author Affiliations: N/A