What is Turnitin®?

Turnitin is a web-based plagiarism detection service that evaluates the originality of students' work by comparing their electronic documents to online sources and the Turnitin databases. Turnitin searches for textual matches from current and archived copies of publicly accessible Internet pages, including published works, journals, and publications. Turnitin is most effective as a deterrent, but can also be utilized as a means to teach students how to work with sources and to raise awareness of paraphrasing and quoting skills.

How Does Turnitin® Work?

Once a paper has been submitted to the database, an originality report is generated that highlights text matches to other documents. If a student submits a paper, the instructor can allow the student to view the report. If the instructor makes the submission, the report is not available to the student. Faculty will then need to review and evaluate the report to determine if plagiarism is present.

If you plan to use Turnitin for assignments in your course, you will need to add a statement to your syllabus such as:

As a condition of continued enrollment in the course, you agree to submit all assignments to Turnitin® for textual comparison or originality review for the detection of possible plagiarism. Students will understand that faculty have the right to submit any written assignments to Turnitin®.

Setting up a Turnitin® Account

1. To get started with Turnitin, faculty need to obtain the Account ID number and the account join password from the account administrator in the Lamar Soutter Library (Nancy Harger).
2. Then go to http://www.turnitin.com and click on the New User link to the left of the Sign In button on the homepage.
3. Create your profile and you will get your own username (email address) and password.
4. Click the button to log in to Turnitin.
5. On your homepage, click the add a class button to create a class.
6. For further questions, contact Nancy Harger.

See also the Instructor Quickstart Manual.

For More Information

See the Instructor User Manual (PDF, 8.3 MB)