ABSTRACT:
Academic documentation are often subjected to review and extensions. These documentations contain design and implementation of academic models channelled at resolving domineering problems at the time of publication. These academic outputs and recommendations are then implemented and used for economic planning and governance in many developed countries. In academics, students are expected to review existing models to have historical view of solved problems; and propose (either by extension or innovation), a version suitable for the current prevailing challenges. It becomes a concern to observe that in recent time innovative additions or creativity are lacking, rather a reinvention of the wheel has become the order of the day. Most works are simply a copy of existing works. This is what is known as plagiarism. In order to curb the menace of plagiarism in Nigeria, the National Universities Commission ordered the use of TurnItIn across tertiary institutions in Nigeria. There are however two major drawbacks of TurnItIn in Nigeria, which are: high cost of subscription and access to only indexed portals. The latter in particular is a major issue due to the lack of a centralized and networked portal of student documentations across tertiary institutions in Nigeria. To curb plagiarism among Nigerian students, it is exigent to network the various repositories in each university and then design a checking algorithm that would crawl the network for academic content. It is on this premise that this paper presents a local content checker for student theses. In this paper a web based document archiving system was developed upon which a crawling process was simulated. Results of the develop checker were similar to those obtained by TurnItIn.
Keywords:
Academic documentation, Crawling, Plagiarism, Frequency count and text matching