A Quantitative Comparison of Program Plagiarism Detection Tools

In this work we compare a total of 9 different tools for the detection of source code plagiarism. We evaluated the plagiarism or copy detection tools CPD, JPlag, Sherlock, Marble, Moss, Plaggie and SIM and two baselines, one based on the Unix tool diff and one based on the difflib module from the Python Standard Library. We provide visualizations of the output of these tools and compare the performance of each tool when running it on different tasks by comparing both the F-measures and the area under the precision-recall-curve (AUC-PR). We compare the performance using these metrics on each task and identify the best performing tools.