Originality Reports

When an assignment is submitted to Turnitin.com, the software generates an "originality report."  This report indicates what percentage of the assignment is either similar to (or exactly matches) other sources found on Internet pages or in the Turnitin database.   Papers that are submitted to Turnitin are compared against:

1. billions of internet documents,
2. an archived copy of the internet,
3. our local databases of submitted student papers,
4. Gale's InfoTrack One file and Emeralds Publishing commercial databases.

Any matching text it finds is detailed in an Originality report sent to your assignment inbox. You can exclude quoted material, bibliographic material or a single source and when you run the report. Although Originality reports can be effective at helping to identify suspected cases of pla­giarism, Turnitin works even more powerfully when used as a deterrent.

How to Interpret Originality Reports

Originality reports provide a summary of the match­ing text found in a submitted paper. When an Origi­nality report is available to view, an icon will appear in your assignment inbox.  The color of the report icon indicates the overall sim­ilarity index of the paper, based on how much match­ing text we found. The possible similarity indices are:

1. blue (no matching text)
2. green (1 word-24% matching text)
3. yellow (25-49% matching text)
4. orange (50-74% matching text)
5. red (75-100% matching text)

Instructors should always examine these originality reports and use their own judgment to determine whether or not plagiarism has occurred, keeping in mind that Turnitin.com is simply a technological tool to assist instructors and students in this regard.

NOTE: These indices do not reflect Turnitin’s assess­ment of whether a paper has or has not been plagiarized. Originality reports are simply tools to help you find sources that contain text similar to submitted papers. The decision to deem any work plagiarized must be made carefully, and only after careful examination of both the submitted paper and the suspect sources.

The Originality Report has several modes: Direct Source Comparison, Cumulative Mode, and Single Source Mode. You can exclude quoted material, bibliographic material or a single source and run the report again.