Turnitin is one of the softwares that can be used to check plagiarism. It is a paid software and it is a web-based software. Which means it is not something that you can download and install on your computer. So, in order to check plagiarism in Turnitin, you need to use it through your browser.
How to create an account
You need to go to your browser and then you need to type in ‘Turnitin.com’. It will take you to ‘Turnitin’ page and you need to make sure that you have a paid account as it is a paid software. Usually, the higher education commissions provide this software to universities or faculty members.
If you are a single and a first-time user, it is going to ask you a few questions. For example, the area to which you belong to and some other things but just answering a few questions you can just log in by giving your email address and password so
Create a Class
Once you log in, it is going to give you a screen where you need to Add a Class and update ‘Class Type’, ‘Class Name’, ‘Enrolment Key’, ‘Subject Area’, ‘Student Level’, ‘Class Start Date’ & Class End date’, then click on ‘Continue’ button, then a new Class with the given name (say ‘Sample’) will be created. Now you can check the plagiarism of your document. The next step is that you click this ‘Sample’(Class Name), now it’s a new class. You will have to create an assignment before you go on checking your plagiarism.
Add Assignment
Click on ‘Add Assignment’, and it’s going to take some time and it’s going to take you to another page, which will ask you a few more questions. Give a title to the assignment, say ‘Assignment Check’, then give a point value, which can be updated as a 100-point value. Then update ‘Start Date’, ‘Due Date and ‘Post due date’, and then there are some optional settings too. Then click on ‘Submit’. ‘Class’ is now created.
Uploading the Single file to check for Plagiarism
You need to click on ‘View’ under the field ‘Action’. It will then take you to another window, in which it will ask you to submit files. Next, you are going to go to the ‘Submit file’. On the top of this page, there is a submit ‘Single file upload’. So, you need to fill in your first name ‘abcd’, and your last name ‘efgh’, and enter a Submission title, for example, ‘Assignment Check’. Under ‘What can I submit?’, upload the document which needs to be checked from your computer or Google drive or from Dropbox ‘Assignment Check’ and click on ‘Upload’ and submit.
Uploading the Multiple files to check for Plagiarism
If you want to check more than one file, under ‘Submit’, select ‘Multiple File Upload’, update the details, first name, last name, and title, but now upload multiple files which need to be checked for Plagiarism and then click on ‘Upload All’ and then Submit. It is going to take you to the box and that’s a confirmation that your submission is complete. Wait for Turnitin to check for Plagiarism and refresh the page until you see a percentage under the field ‘Similarity’. If it shows any percentage, click on that, will take you to another window, it’s going to give a text-only report.
Decoding the Plagiarism Report
Once you get the Text report, you can always scroll down to see the complete plagiarism file because it was a small document which is why it’s only going to show very few words now on top of it, you can see that there is a word count, for eg: 100 words. We can see different colours here there’s a red colour, green colour or the blue colour. Basically, those indicate from which all references/sources the data has been picked up and how many percentages each. So, if you want to see that if somebody really has had copied it from somewhere. The Black coloured texts are the ones not copied from anywhere. In order to remove Plagiarism, we need to paraphrase the different coloured Texts except for the black-coloured ones.
Downloading Plagiarism Report
Some people are interested in getting the pdf version of this plagiarism report. So if you want to do that you need to just go to the ‘Document Viewer’ on the left top corner. And once you click this document viewer, is going to take you to the pdf format of this report, whatever formatting you have done in your word file is going to convert it to pdf file. In the bottom left corner there’s an option of printer download, so once you click this it’s going to give you option of download pdf of the current view for printing.
Conclusion
The Software, ‘Turnitin’ helps in highlighting the statements that have been copied and the source from which they were copied with the different colour texts.
Digi Assignment can always guide you to check Plagiarism through the help tips to use ‘Turnitin’ to assess students’ assignments or thesis or any documents that have been submitted for approval.
