If you are unsure whether or not your written work may too closely resemble your source material, ‘text-matching ‘ software is available to all Flinders University students via Flinders Learning Online (FLO) which may assist you to avoid unintentional plagiarism. Flinders University is providing the opportunity for all enrolled students to use this text-matching software, called Turnitin.

If you ‘submit’ an assignment to Turnitin, it will match the text in that assignment to a set of academic papers to identify areas of overlap in which there is either exact or inexact matching between the submitted work and source material. Assignments are compared with source material in several different databases.

Turnitin generates a report that details the percentage of submitted text that has been matched with existing sources. The report also shows the suspected sources of each section of matched text.

Reports cannot be seen by other students but may be viewed by your lecturers and tutors if you have submitted the report as part of topic requirements.  Those assignments submitted by students under the Student Learning Centre assignment will not be viewed by either other students or faculty staff but may be viewed by the Student Learning Centre staff administering the software.

  

Accessing Turnitin

If your topic coordinator has enabled Turnitin, you can access it directly through the FLO page for the topic.  

You can also access Turnitin through the Student Learning Centre's FLO page at 

http://flo.flinders.edu.au/course/view.php?id=4359.

Note that your lecturer will not be able to access the document and report if you submit it through the Student Learning Centre's FLO. 

For more information on how to submit an assignment using the Turnitin tool, please view our guide: Turnitin (PDF 1MB) .

Interpreting Turnitin reports

It is important to keep in mind that Turnitin is a text-matching software program, not a plagiarism detection device. Flinders University is offering it to students as part of its Academic Integrity Management Strategy (AIMS), for educative purposes, so that students may improve their ability to paraphrase and to understand and follow academic conventions in acknowledging sources.  

Turnitin reports provide an overall matching percentage which indicates what percentage of the total submitted paper matches existing sources in the databases. This percentage may include quotes and common phrases or blocks of text that match other documents.  Reports should then be studied further to see whether the sources of matched text have been acknowledged correctly, or whether matching has occurred simply because of the use of common phrases and expressions.

Please read the Turnitin guide for details. 

All reports must be analysed, as matched text may or may not constitute plagiarism.

For example:

  • Quotes will be highlighted as matched text but are a legitimate use of source material, provided they have been enclosed in quotation marks, their source has been acknowledged correctly, and they are not overused. 
  • Matching may occur if you have not paraphrased adequately, and your work too closely resembles another person’s work, even if you have not copied text verbatim.
  • Sentences of a generic nature may be matched but it is unlikely that these will constitute plagiarism. Example: Several authors may inadvertently write of Australia, ‘Australia is a vast country with a relatively small population’. This may be included as matching text although no plagiarism has actually occurred.

For further explanation of the analysis of Turnitin reports, drop in to the Student Learning Centre and speak to an academic advisor.