CitePlag is a web-based tool to assist users in efficiently examining academic documents for suspicious text and citation similarities, which may point to potential plagiarism. The algorithms used by CitePlag are based on the Citation-based Plagiarism Detection concept, a novel approach developed by the Information Science Group at the University of Konstanz.
CitePlag provides a customizable side-by-side visualization 1 of text and citation similarities to detect potential plagiarism. The suspicious document appears on the left and the potential source document is displayed on the right. The visualization of text and citation similarities is customizable to the user’s preferences under the settings tab 2 .
A scrollable central document browser 3 allows for quick interactive document navigation. The browser schematically compares the two documents using the CbPD algorithm selected 4 and draws connecting lines between matching citations. Document sections highlighted in darker red represent stronger citation- based document similarities.
In a collapsible cluster side tab 5 additional documents with high similarity scores can be selected for comparison with the suspicious document and a list of recommendations for semantically similar articles is given. The cluster view tab also allows the user to set weighting coefficients for the individual CbPD algorithms, thus forming a hybrid CbPD algorithm with customized emphasis.
Note
To demonstrate the unique characteristics of the CbPD approach a plagiarized text excerpt from the dissertation of K.T. zu Guttenberg is used as the default text.