Harnessing Academic Integrity Among Students: Implementation of a Novel Web-Based Application for Plagiarism Detection and Prevention

Academic integrity fosters a culture of honesty, trust, and respect within the educational community. Evidence indicates that manual plagiarism checks through human judgment remain prevalent in undergraduate theses, terminal assignments, and group projects in developing countries. To fill this gap, we engaged with students and staff of the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, Ghana, to propose a new plagiarism detection architecture, a novel open-source algorithm, and a web-based application for plagiarism detection and prevention. We demonstrate the performance of our algorithms, discuss the results, and suggest avenues for future research to advance this field.