Testimonials
I am an editor, and I submitted a chapter of a highly suspect book I was working on to Turnitin. A surprisingly large amount (about 50 percent) of the text had been copied verbatim with no citations from other sources. Publication was stopped immediately and the book was dropped. Plagiarism is a real problem in the publishing industry as well as academia, and this site is a valuable resource!
Jennifer Murtoff, editor
View more testimonialsTechnology
The proprietary technology behind Turnitin and iThenticate is called document source analysis. It was developed by a team of UC Berkeley researchers and computer scientists to perform fast, intelligent textual searches on very large repositories of data such as the World Wide Web. Document source analysis makes use of a series of custom algorithms to create unique digital fingerprints of text documents, which are then compared with the fingerprints of other data compiled in our local databases.
These databases are the result of exhaustive web searches designed to locate and catalog information likely to be used for plagiarism. Our web crawling robots retrieve millions of documents from the internet every day, and by focusing on sites like online paper mills, academic resources, online encyclopedias, and news agencies, we have been able to assemble an in-house version of the internet tailored to provide the most comprehensive and efficient plagiarism-detection searches available anywhere.
In addition to crawling the internet, we also fingerprint and index papers submitted to us for plagiarism prevention. Our database of submitted papers currently contains millions of documents, and we add thousands of new papers every day. Comparison of new submissions against this database ensures that papers can never be bought, recycled, or traded among students from different years at varying classes and institutions.
The results of our searches are compiled in custom Originality Reports, which can be made available to instructors seconds after papers are submitted.