What is Turnitin?

The University has an institutional licence for Turnitin.com, a USA-based electronic plagiarism detection service which is available to staff across the University. There is no charge for using this service. Essentially, this is a service for checking student assignments in electronic form (e.g. as a MS Word file) for plagiarism.

 

When a document is submitted to Turnitin, it searches for similar text on the web, in ProQuest's ABI/Inform, Periodical Abstracts and Business Dateline databases, in Gale databases and in some thousands of books in digital libraries. It also compares the assignment with others submitted by other students in the same class. It then produces an "Originality Report" that highlights matching text and identifies the website or document that it may have been copied from.

 

If you want to know more, go to http://turnitin.com where you can read an introduction to the service (see "New to Turnitin?") and download user guides for both teachers ("instructors") and students (see "Training Materials").

 

More information

• Submitting assignments to Turnitin
• Turnitin legal issues
• Getting started with Turnitin
• Getting help with Turnitin