What is Turnitin.com, and how does it work?
Turnitin.com is web-based plagiarism detection software owned by Turnitin.com, Inc., and is available to instructors at Indiana University's Bloomington, Indianapolis, East, Fort Wayne, Kokomo, Northwest, and South Bend campuses. At IUB, as of August 2009, 1076 instructors have obtained accounts, and over 190,000 papers, written by 42,600 students, have been submitted.
Turnitin.com can be used as a deterrent, but also as an educational tool to teach students how to work with sources and to improve paraphrasing and quoting skills.
Students or instructors submit electronic versions of essays to Turnitin.com. Turnitin.com then produces an originality report. This report shows the instructor the results of Turnitin.com's comparison of the essay to content on the web, to Turnitin.com's database of student writing, and to some databases of common full-text journals.
The repository to which papers are compared currently consists of three primary databases:
- Both a current and an extensively archived copy of the publicly accessible Internet
- Commercial pages from books, newspapers, and journals
- Student papers already submitted to Turnitin
If a student submits a paper, the teacher can allow the student to view the report; if the instructor makes the submission, the report is not available to the student.
The Turnitin.com at Indiana University Bloomington page contains information for both faculty and students, as well as links to information for using Turnitin at other campuses. Also, see Turnitin.com at IUPUI.
For more information about standards of academic integrity at IU, including disciplinary procedures for academic misconduct, see the Code of Student Rights, Responsibilities, and Conduct.
Instructors at IUB may submit academic misconduct reports online.
Last modified on August 25, 2009.
