Generally speaking, the discrepancy between CNKI’s duplication checking word count and the paper’s word count may be due to the following reasons:
1. Different character counting methods: CNKI’s duplication checking system counts all the characters in the paper. Numbers are counted, including spaces, punctuation marks, etc. The Word document of the paper usually only counts the pure text content, excluding spaces and punctuation marks. This may result in a discrepancy in word count between the two.
2 Differences in format and typesetting: When CNKI’s duplication checking system processes documents, it will uniformly remove information such as formatting and typesetting, and only retain plain text content for duplication checking. The Word document of the paper may contain various formats and layouts, such as fonts, font sizes, line spacing, paragraph spacing, etc. These factors will affect the word count statistics.
3 Chinese, English and symbol conversion: There may be some differences in how the CNKI duplication checking system handles Chinese, English and symbol conversion. For example, in a Word document, an English word is counted as a whole, while in the CNKI duplication checking system, an English word may be split into individual letters for calculation.
4 Citations and references: The references and footnotes cited in the paper are usually included in the duplication check of CNKI’s duplication check system. This part of the content in the Word document of the paper may not be included in the total word count.
It is relatively common that the number of words in a paper is different from the actual number when checking for plagiarism. For example, formal plagiarism checking systems such as CNKI, VIP, paperfree, papertime, etc. all calculate based on characters.