About Turnitin at Pitt

Turnitin is an internet-based anti-plagiarism technology that enables faculty members to level the academic playing field for honest students. 

The past few years has seen a boom in websites offering term papers and essays from Japanese Art in the 1800’s to Neurobiology.  The demand for academic papers has significantly increased traffic for these “cheat” websites. 

Turnitin’s web-based program ferrets out matching and even partly altered phrases from web content and databases.  The software notifies the teacher if it finds similarities in submitted text.  The comprehensive software will discover similarities from content justified with proper footnotes to instances of outright dishonestly.

Use of Turnitin is a potent deterrent against plagiarism, stopping potential violators from undercutting their own education and letting honest students compete in a fair arena, thus helping strengthen the academic codes of honor.

Turnitin accomplishes this through “Document Source Analysis”, a process that uses algorithms to create a “digital fingerprint” of text documents submitted to its database and comparing it to the fingerprint of documents in its local database and automated web crawlers.  The Turnitin service then creates a color-coded “originality report” that shows any source links that have been discovered for the submitted paper.

The University has subscribed to the Turnitin.com.  Faculty are encouraged to use the service and comment on its value, performance, and effectiveness.