About Turnitin

Link directly to Turnitin at www.turnitin.com. It is not necessary to link through the University Libraries' Web site first.

Turnitin is a Web-based plagiarism prevention system used by thousands of institutions around the world. The University of Southern Mississippi first licensed use of the service in 2004.

Student papers are submitted through the Turnitin Web site at www.turnitin.com. Instructors have the option to submit papers themselves or ask students to submit their own papers.

The Turnitin search engine compares the contents of each paper to the contents of its own database. The Turnitin database includes information from the following sources.

• Student papers submitted to Turnitin (at USM and elsewhere)
• Published articles, books, and reports from proprietary databases
• Current and archived pages from the publically-accessible Internet

Turnitin generates an "originality report" for each paper submitted. The originality report includes an "overall similarity index" based on the percentage of text within the student paper that matches text from Turnitin's own database. For each passage of matching text, the source is identified. The "direct source comparison" window shows matching passages of text side-by-side with the original source material.

Although no tool is 100% effective in detecting plagiarism, Turnitin is effective because:

• Turnitin may deter intentional plagiarism as students realize their papers may be submitted
• Turnitin may be used as a tool to teach students appropriate use of secondary sources
• Automatically generated reports save time for instructors
• Turnitin can search millions of papers submitted by other students. This allows you to find out, for example, whether the same paper was already submitted by another student in a different class.