Turnitin is a plagiarism detector used widely throughout UK universities.  Turnitin compares work submitted against its comprehensive database to identify acts of plagiarism. This system is embedded into our Moodle platform in order to ensure that all work is authentic and adheres to our academic expectations of originality, is correctly referenced, and is deemed as clinically rich work. 

Turnitin provides a percentage score and report of how similar your work is to existing material, and can be used as a guide for both yourself and your tutor to highlight possible plagiarism and/or poor academic practice.

As such, please ensure you accept the Turnitin Terms & Conditions, so that you can use Turnitin throughout your course. It is compulsory to accept this user agreement, which must be done on the full website on a laptop or desktop and not on the Moodle App on a mobile or tablet device. You will find the user agreement when you enter the "Advanced" section in a reply to the Academic Forum for the first time.

Worried About Turnitin Score?

There isn't a set percentage that is acceptable, but the lower the better. Please note that Turnitin may sometimes also recognise your referencing as copied and pasted; however, if the referencing is done correctly, you will not be marked down for it.

We would advise that if your similarity index is "high" (around 40% and above) and you want to reduce it, check that: 

(a) Quotation marks (“...”) are used around every quote, and the source is cited.

(b) You are not overusing quotations.

(c) Your own words are not too similar to the original text. 

If direct quotes are surrounded by double quotation marks (“...”) and the author is acknowledged, generally, Turnitin will ignore this text. However, some Harvard referencing styles use single quotation marks (‘...’). Turnitin recognises these as text matches rather than quotations. 

Some Turnitin settings create a high similarity index that you can’t fix, for example, when Turnitin matches quotations, bibliographies, and strings of commonly used text (5-8 words long). If you notice this in the report, please rest assured that tutors are trained to consider this by filtering out any erroneous matches. 

Conclusion

The similarity score is a tool for learning, not a punishment. As long as you are writing in your own words and not copying from others or your sources, there is no reason to be concerned.

These tools help us and tutors "scan the horizon" for potential issues related to academic integrity. One higher score alone will never trigger action - it would only be used to support an academic investigation if other concerns were raised.

Multiple Submissions to Turnitin

Unfortunately, we do not support multiple submissions to Turnitin on the Academic Forum. Students are welcome to use online alternatives to check the originality of their work.

A popular one is Grammarly: Click here to go to the Grammarly Plagiarism Checker website

Note: These free plagiarism checkers often have a lower frame of reference than Turnitin's databases, which means that their scores are likely to be lower than what you will receive through Turnitin.