What is Turnitin?
Turnitin is a ‘text-matching’ software which is designed to educate students regarding appropriate citation and referencing techniques. Turnitin does this by comparing a student submission against an archive of Internet documents, Internet data, a repository of previously submitted papers, and subscription repository of periodicals, journals, and publications. Turnitin then creates an ‘Originality Report’ which can be viewed by both lecturers and students, which identifies where the text within a student submission has matched another source.
It is important to note that Turnitin does not detect plagiarism. Turnitin will only match the text within a student’s assignment to text located elsewhere (e.g. found on the Internet, within journals or on databases of student papers). Correct interpretation of these results by both lecturers and students is essential for the successful use of Turnitin.
Turnitin Resources
Assignment Setup
- Creating an assignment
- Customizing the Similarity Report
- Setting Similarity Report availability
- Submission indexing options
- Turnitin setting for multiple submissions
The Similarity Report
- How your students submit to an assignment
- Accessing the Similarity Report
- Bibliography and quote exclusion definitions
- Excluding content from the Similarity Report
- Excluding an individual source
- Excluding search repositories
- Excluding text from the Similarity Report
- Re-including a source
- Interpreting the Similarity Score
- Using the search