Q. How do I check my work for plagiarism and similarity with Turnitin?
Turnit in self-check is a tool to help you detect plagiarism in your draft assignments. Turnitin checks your work against a database of academic texts and internet sources to give an originality score. It’s a good tool to help check you have cited your sources correctly and avoid accidental plagiarism.
To use self-check, go to Learn.Gold and search for Students Turnitin Induction. Join the course area for the current academic year and follow the steps to submit your draft. When you submit your work, it’s securely stored, anonymised and will be destroyed when you no longer need it.
The check takes about as long as it takes to make yourself a cup of coffee, so use this opportunity to take a well-deserved study break. When you go back to the self-check page you’ll see a similarity score. Remember, Turnitin can only detect similarity, which isn’t quite the same thing as plagiarism. Certain types of assignment like literature reviews will inevitably produce a higher percentage similarity as you’re summarising all the published work on a topic.
If you click on the score you’ll get a detailed report. Use the report to check you’ve cited all your sources correctly. You can speak to your Subject Librarian or Academic Skills tutor if you need help with this.