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Research Skills: Start

What is Turnitin?

Turnitin is an online text-matching software that compares your assignment with other texts. Texts include:

  • Internet-based documents
  • articles from journals, magazines, books
  • student assignment previously submitted to Turnitin

Turnitin reports the level of similarity between the submitted text and other texts. It is used academic institutions thoughout Australia and around the world to:

  • promote academic integrity
  • support students in developing academic writing skills
  • detect plagiarism

In addition, from May 2023, Turnitin detects use of Generative AI with a high degree of accuracy. 

Turnitin

turnitin

Turnitin helps develops your skills as a writer as well as using information effectively and ethically. It helps you to use 'your own words' and to reference other authors' work in your writing. These are important skills in developing critical literacy and to avoid plagiarism. 

Your teacher will direct you to submit assignments to Turnitin via Canvas. The submitted work is then compared to a enormous database of web, journal and academic content to assess similarities to other works.

You can submit work to Turnitin more than once, however, second and subsequent submissions may take 24 hours to be processed.

Turnitin FAQs

What you don't need to cite