Turnitin: How to use (guide for students)

Turnitin is a text-matching tool/software and is used by universities to check assignments and projects submitted by students to check for instances of academic misconduct.

What is Turnitin?

Turnitin is an assignment collection and originality checking tool which is used by thousands of educational institutions worldwide. It is used for plagiarism in a student’s submitted work.

Once the student submits their work online, the work is then checked against a database of the web, publications, and over one billion previously submitted student papers.

Originality reports are produced showing the individual matches, highlighting improper citation and potential plagiarism.

When the student submit a file, the Turnitin software will generate a Similarity Report that displays the percentage of similar text between your submission and a number of external sources, including internet documents, archived internet data, previously-submitted Turnitin papers, and a database of periodicals, journals, and publications.

Your professor might ask you to submit your work to Turnitin in order to take advantage of its originality checking features and to provide marking and feedback to you on your work.

It’s a good idea to develop better academic writing skills to avoid unintentional plagiarism (i.e. where you have used the work of other people without acknowledging their contribution to the development of your thoughts, ideas, analyses and conclusions).

Note: A higher Turnitin percentage scores may not necessarily mean that a paper contains plagiarised material or improperly used material – it is up to the tutor to make that decision. The Similarity Report only shows similarities between your submission and other sources and it is up to the student (and the professor) to decide whether the work is plagiarised and/or whether the student has cited the sources correctly.

What types of files does Turnitin accept/read?

Turnitin accepts a wide range of file types for upload into an assignment:

• Microsoft Word document
• Open office text document (.odt)
• Corel WordPerfect
• HTML
• Adobe PostScript
• Plain text (TXT)
• Rich Text Format (RTF)
• Portable Document Format (PDF)

For more detailed information about acceptable file types please see this page.

Making Sense of the Originality Report

Originality Reports are documents Turnitin produces to show how much of the content is plagiarized. It highlights the parts where the system finds a match between a student’s coursework submission and Turnitin’s database of previously submitted student papers and other online text sources including internet websites and published books, periodicals and journals.