Skip to main content

Understanding Turnitin

If you are submitting written assignments for your course, your instructor will use a tool called Turnitin to make sure you haven’t plagiarised in your work. Learn more about the feedback provided by Turnitin.

Turnitin is text-matching software. It’s used to detect plagiarism in written assignments submitted online. It scans everything that’s been uploaded for text matches. If something is copied from another source and it’s not cited correctly, it will be detected. The reason RMIT uses Turnitin is to ensure academic integrity.

It’s important that any written work is your own or that you acknowledge that it has come from another source. Turnitin works by matching the text in assignments against electronic, print and other sources. This includes books and journals, websites, archived materials, and other students’ assignments, from global universities. It detects incorrect citations and both accidental and intentional plagiarism. Turnitin makes sure that intellectual property is respected.

Turnitin is constantly being updated with new entries. Assignments submitted by you and your classmates are scanned and added to the database. The similarity score is the percentage of text from your assignment that exactly matches other sources on the Turnitin database.

There are five possible similarity ranges, from 0–100%. The colour of the report icon represents the score. It’s very unlikely that your report icon will be blue, but don’t panic. The score is just an indication of matching text and will be interpreted by your teacher depending on your discipline and the assignment. In some courses you may be able to redraft, using the report to see which areas need adjusting.

One way to improve your similarity score is to paraphrase. Avoid direct quotes unless they are important, for example when quoting literature, law or religious texts. Citations are critical to the success of your assessment. They validate your work and support your point of view.

There are some great resources on the Learning Lab to help you practice paraphrasing and citing. For more help on using Turnitin go to their website.

When you submit your work to Turnitin, a similarity report will be generated. Your instructor will review this report to help them determine whether you have referenced everything correctly, or whether you might have plagiarised.

Understanding the similarity report

The similarity report shows the amount of text that matches other texts, including websites, academic journals, and material previously uploaded to Turnitin. This may include work that you've submitted to RMIT in the past, as well as assignments from other institutions around the world.

The similarity report will tell you the percentage of your text that matches other materials. The match overview section highlights parts of text that match or are very similar to sources already on Turnitin. How the text matches are spread out is more important than the percentage. If you have large chunks of text which are highlighted, this could mean that more careful paraphrasing is needed. In some cases, you can make changes and upload your work again to produce a new similarity report. Check your course guide on Canvas to see if you can do this.

If there are small matches, look at these carefully. Correctly cited and formatted quotes may be highlighted, depending on the Turnitin settings. Additionally, items such as course titles, teacher names, and assignment titles may be highlighted in Turnitin.

Reducing the similarity score

These tips can help you reduce your similarity score:

  • If chunks of text are highlighted, then you need to paraphrase further as the wording is still too close to the original source.
  • Check that your quotations have double quotation marks. Single marks will always be ignored by Turnitin.
  • Check the settings. You can reduce the percentage immediately by excluding quotations and your reference list. Note that changing the settings does not impact what your instructor sees.

Videos and images on this page by RMIT, licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0