Software for Assessing the Performance of Anti-plagiarism Programs

“Vasile Goldis” Western University of Arad, Engineering and Computer Science Department, 86 Rebreanu St., Arad, Romania

^a anaaji@uvvg.ro

Abstract

Detecting plagiarism is one of the current issues concerning the process of publishing scientific papers. There are numerous anti-plagiarism programs on the market, some of which are free, other proprietary. However, with a few exceptions, they cannot detect changes brought to original texts, but can only identify copy-pasted paragraphs of a certain length (number of words). The software that we developed and which we are presenting in this paper is based on an original algorithm using Java, and is aimed at assessing the performance of anti-plagiarism software. This program shows that such software has vulnerabilities and can be easily sidestepped, especially by programmers. The algorithm’s method consists of reading a .docx document, and then replacing every fifth word in the sentence with a synonym existing in text files attached to the software. At the end, when the algorithm completes its cycle, the result is saved in a new .docx document. In order to demonstrate the effectiveness of our program as a tool for assessing the performance of anti-plagiarism software, the paper presents a comparative analysis of 4 such programs, based on the percentages of originality and similarity obtained.