Plagiarism occurs when the content is copied without permission or citation, and the problem of plagiarism has rapidly increased because of the digital era of resources available on the World Wide Web. An important task in plagiarism detection is measuring and determining similar text portions between a given pair of documents. One of the main difficulties of this task is that not all similar text fragments are examples of plagiarism, since thematic coincidences also tend to produce portions of similar text. In order to handle this problem, this paper proposed association analysis in data mining to detect plagiarism. This method is able to detect common actions performed by plagiarists such as word deletion, insertion and transposition, allowing to obtain plausible portions of plagiarized text. Experimental results employing an unsupervised document classification strategy showed that the proposed method outperformed traditionally used approaches.