Turnitin is a program for checking the originality of texts. It checks the student’s text against a large international database of articles, journals, books, websites and theses, and looks for similarities between the student’s text and the sources in the database. It gives feedback in the student’s text, where the similarity to the texts in the database is indicated as a percentage.
I wish to have my thesis checked in Turnitin before submitting it into Laturi. Is this possible?
It is possible to have a tesis checked in Turnitin via Moodle but unfinished theses should not be indexed in to the Turnitin-database. University of Oulu students’ finalized theses plagiarism detection takes place in Laturi.
I have used layout software for my thesis. Does this affect the use of Turnitin?
Turnitin requires that the text is in machine-readable format. It the thesis has been converted to image format with layout software or image editor, plagiarism detection is not possible. It is recommend to use vector-based layout software (e.g. Adobe InDesign) or text editor (e.g. Microsoft Word).
How should I interpret the Turnitin analysis?
It is important to remember that similarity does not necessarily indicate plagiarism! The similarity percentage is always proportional to the length of the text, i.e. for short texts the percentage can be much higher than for long ones. The similarity report also includes correct quotations and the list of references, which naturally increases the percentage. Achieving zero percentage is not required, as it can even be impossible to achieve. Turnitin Similarity is meant to be used as a tool to correct and help in the writing of academic texts, as well as detect intentional plagiarism.
Read Instructions on how to interpret the Turnitin Similarity report.
Turnitin shows almost 100% similarity as the system already contains an earlier version of my work. How should I proceed?
In the Turnitin report, you can exclude certain matches if it’s clear that the work compares to an earlier version that has only been slightly modified. You can hide these matches using the Exclude Source button.
The main user can also remove works from the Turnitin database if new versions have been made and their similarity needs to be excluded from Turnitin's comparison archive. To do this, provide the oid number of the original work to be removed to the turnitin@oulu.fi. The oid number can always be found by clicking the info button in the upper right corner of the Turnitin report, and then looking in the "Submission ID" section.
