Missouri State University subscribes to an on-line service for preventing (or catching) plagiarism in written documents, Turnitin.com.  In some classes, it may be required that papers be submitted by all students for an assignment, and in other classes or for other assignments, this submission may be optional.  Submissions are done by uploading a document to the Turnitin.com website.  This handout is to help students set up a student account, do the uploading, and obtaining the resulting "originality report". For help in interpreting this report, see your teacher/advisor.  The tutorials provided on the Turnitin.com homepage will also help you to interpret your similarity report, as well as provide assistance with other navigation issues.

 

SETTING UP YOUR ACCOUNT

If you haven’t already used Turnitin.com, you need to set up a student user account. This is simple:

 

1. Go to the website: Turnitin.com

2. Click on “New Users” in the upper right corner, and then click on “Student”

3. Now you need to indicate the “class” in which you are enrolled. There is a dummy class created for any student on campus wanting to check his/her thesis. The class ID number is 2579553, and the password is “thesis”.

 

USING YOUR ACCOUNT

Once you have logged in to your account, you should see all classes in which you are “enrolled”. To upload your thesis draft, do the following:

 

1. Click on the class (Thesis Writing), and then on the particular assignment (Thesis Rough Draft).

2. Click on the icon for submitting a document (green cross on piece of paper)

3. “Browse” and upload your thesis. Hit “submit” at the bottom of the page. A preview of what you uploaded will appear, and you will need to hit “submit” again if this is the correct document.

 

Now that you have submitted your document, you will want to look at the originality report on it. This will show all sections of matched text, even if they are properly cited. Therefore, everyone has some matching text. This is usually <10%, if all the text is original, but higher if quotes and references are included in the document. To look at this report:

 

1. Go to your Portfolio (list of submitted documents)

2. Click on the similarity bar under “contents” that shows your % match. The page that opens will show your text on the left, and matching text plus its source on the right.

3.  On the originality page that comes up, you can click on options near the top in order to exclude quoted materials and the bibliography. Doing this will decrease the similarity percentage.