What is Turnitin?

Turnitin is a web-based electronic system designed to locate and report similarities between the form and content of student assignments and other material. When a student’s work is submitted to the site, advanced search technology checks it against current and archived internet content. It also matches submissions against a database containing millions of past and current assignments by other students at thousands of institutions in more than eighty countries.

Turnitin marks a significant advance in the University’s detection of academic plagiarism, but is also used to help students to improve their knowledge of academic citation and referencing so that they can learn and develop these practices in their own work.

What is Turnitin?

Turnitin is a web-based electronic system designed to locate and report similarities between the form and content of student assignments and other material. When a student’s work is submitted to the site, advanced search technology checks it against current and archived internet content. It also matches submissions against a database containing millions of past and current assignments by other students at thousands of institutions in more than eighty countries.

Turnitin marks a significant advance in the University’s detection of academic plagiarism, but is also used to help students to improve their knowledge of academic citation and referencing so that they can learn and develop these practices in their own work.

How do I access Turnitin?

If your department allows student submission and you are enrolled on a module which allows students access to the system, you will be sent an email, giving you the name of the class and a password.

When you log in for the first time, you will have the opportunity to change your password and any personal information. Remember your new password, as you will need it to access Turnitin in the future. Once you have completed these details, you can follow the links to your Turnitin Student Homepage.

How do I submit work to Turnitin?

Double-check the document you wish to submit. Make sure that it is the latest version and that it is correctly formatted and referenced, and note the name and location of the file on your computer. Turnitin accepts documents written or saved in most versions of Microsoft Word (doc, docx), WordPerfect (wpd), PostScript (ps, eps), Rich Text Format (rtf) and plain text (txt), as well as HTML and PDF files, although submissions in Word are recommended for most courses.

Your Turnitin Student Homepage displays a list of classes in which you are enrolled. Click on the name of a class to open your Class Portfolio, which will contain a list of assignments. Assignments are created by your tutor or course leader, so if you are in any doubt about which assignment you should submit, contact your department for clarification. Note, too, that all assignments have a start date (in green) and an end date (in red), and that you will not be able to submit coursework after the assignment cut-off date has expired. Clicking on the name of an assignment displays the rubric, if included, and any other instructions or notes.

To the right of the assignment title is the "submit" column. Clicking the small page-icon in this column opens the submission box. Enter a title for your paper, browse to your file on your computer and click "submit". Confirm in the next stage and you’re done! A digital receipt for your submission will be automatically sent to you by email.

How can I access my Originality Report?

The results of Turnitin’s searches are contained in an Originality Report and summarised in a percentage score called the Similarity Index. If your tutor has allowed students to see their own reports, you will be able to view it as soon as it has been generated. This can take a few minutes or an hour or more; if you are submitting a replacement for a previous draft, you may have to wait up to 24 hours.

From your Turnitin Student Homepage, select the class to which you have submitted work to open your class portfolio. Your Similarity Index will appear as a percentage in the "contents" column to the right of each assignment title. Percentages are colour-coded, with the lowest percentages in blue and the highest in red. Please remember that even quite high percentages do not automatically indicate that plagiarism has been identified, and there are several other factors that could result in a high similarity index. Therefore, if your Originality Report returns a high percentage of matches, DO NOT PANIC. Continue to the next sections, which show you how to view and interpret your report.

Are there different ways of viewing my Originality Report?

You can view your Originality Report in several ways. Viewing options can be selected in the "mode" pull-down menu at the right of the toolbar. By default, the "show highest matches together" option is selected. See the example here: In the selected mode, your Originality Report is divided into two halves. The panel to the left displays the text of your assignment, with any passages that have been matched by Turnitin highlighted and colour-coded. The panel to the right contains a list of sources to which the highlighted material has been matched. To view the source material in its original context, click each of the highlighted links; the original source will open in a new window.

What does my similarity Index mean?

It is important to know how Turnitin displays its results in order to understand what the percentage of matches (the Similarity Index) means.

The most vital thing to remember is that a high Similarity Index does not necessarily indicate a high incidence of plagiarism. Turnitin can only identify similarities between submitted work and other sources. It cannot classify those matches, nor judge whether they constitute plagiarism. That decision can only be made by your tutor or course-leader, based on their knowledge and experience.

Turnitin identifies several kinds of matches, not all of which imply any kind of academic wrong-doing, or even careless referencing.

What are "innocent" matches?"

Some common phrases are likely to occur in many articles and essays on the same subject. In these cases, Turnitin will report similarities to some online text and to student papers submitted to the system, but these similarities are coincidental and often inevitable; a tutor would ignore such similarities when interpreting an assignment report.

Some types of assignment are more likely to contain these kinds of "innocent" similarities, particularly those answering a very prescribed, tightly-focussed question (in which many students may be expected to use very similar expressions and phrases), some technical, scientific or legal assignments which tend to employ established phrases, expressions and terminology, and textual analysis assignments, which may contain sizeable examples from the poem, novel, or passage being discussed.

Turnitin may also identify "innocent" similarities between the assignments of a number of students on the same course if they share a common essay title, for instance, or if every submission includes a departmental cover-sheet.

What about quotations?

Turnitin will also highlight material which you have quoted from another source, whether you have correctly attributed it or not. Obviously, matches like these will be ignored by your tutor.

How do I exclude matches from my bibliography?

A common source of "innocent" matching in your Originality Report will often be the assignment’s bibliography. To remove these matches from your report, click the "exclude bibliography" link on the toolbar. Turnitin will ignore all the entries in your bibliography and adjust the Similarity Index percentage automatically.

Why are there matches to sources I haven't used?

In the default "show highest matches together" viewing mode, Turnitin will display only one source for each section of unoriginal text, even if other matches have been found on the internet or in journals, books and essays. This is known as "masking".

To view other identified matches for the same section of text, pull down the "mode" menu to the right of the toolbar and choose "show matches one at a time". The right-hand panel will now display a list of other sources identified by Turnitin. In the case of the matches in the sample Originality Report , the second viewing mode revealed not only two matches to student submissions (in 2007 and 2008) to Heriot-Watt University (Edinburgh), but also several submissions to the Universities of Bristol, Kent, Middlesex, Sheffield Hallam, Plymouth, Westminster, Cranfield, Leeds, Northumbria, Portsmouth, Swansea, Purdue Indiana, the Middle East Technical University in Turkey and to no less than eighty-five internet web-pages, including Wikipedia.

Remember that a match by Turnitin does not necessarily indicate the original location of that text, only that similar text can be found in those locations.

Why can't I view other student assignments?

As well as identifying sources in books, journals, articles and on the internet, Turnitin matches submitted work against past and current student submissions at this and other universities and colleges across the world.

This is because all student papers submitted to Turnitin - including your own - remain the intellectual property of their authors and institutions, and cannot be viewed without permission of the participating university or college. When necessary, however, your tutor or head of department can request permission to view other students’ papers.

Where can I find more information about using Turnitin?

For more detailed information about using Turnitin, follow this link to Turnitin's online Student QuickStart Guide:
https://submit.ac.uk/usage_jisc/tiiuk_student_guide.pdf

For more information about Plagiarism, click here:
http://www.essex.ac.uk/plagiarism/

For more information about correct referencing and citation at Essex, click here:
http://www.essex.ac.uk/myskills/skills/referencing/referencingSkills.asp