Abstract

Nowadays, the technology usage is a massive practice where internet and digital documents are considered as powerful tools in both professional and personal domains. Although, as useful as they can be in a proper way, wrong practices can appear easily, where the copy & paste or plagiarism phenomenon is not far away from this. Documents' copy & paste is a world-wide growing practice, and Chile is not the exception. Therefore, all levels of educational fields, from elementary school to graduate students, are directly affected by this. Regarding to this concern, in Chile it's been decided to tackle the plagiarism problem among students. For this, we apply Social Network Analysis to discover groups of people associated to each other by their documents' similarity in a plagiarism detection context. Experiments were successfully performed in real reports of graduate students at University of Chile. © 2010 Springer-Verlag.