Library Assist: Answers

When you put through a practice Turnitin submission, you will be provided with an ‘Originality Report’ with percentage scores for how much your work matches other sources. Checking through the report carefully can help you to identify potential plagiarism breaches and correct these before you submit your finalised assignment. 

When you first receive your report:

• make a note of your overall percentage match. You can exclude quotations and the reference list/bibliography by clicking on the filter icon.
• the report also gives percentage matches against individual sources. What will be acceptable here will vary depending on your assignment, but be mindful that you wouldn't ordinarily want to draw upon any one source too heavily. 
• go through the body of the report to see where Turnitin has highlighted any passages or sentences. If any of these do not have in-text citations, you could be at risk of a plagiarism offence for not clearly acknowledging your sources.
• if you have given in-text citations but the highlighted passage/sentence is not a direct word-for-word quotation, consider whether you could better paraphrase that section so that it less closely resembles the original text.

Important: the overall percentage is just an indicator, and it should be noted that if you are using good quality academic sources there will be an element of matching anyway – a score of 0% would look suspiciously as though you’ve drawn upon sources nobody else has used. Please remember that your academics make the final judgement as to what percentage match is acceptable and/or whether any plagiarism offences have occurred. If a guide percentage is not mentioned in your assignment brief or course materials, please contact your lecturers for clarification as the library is unable to advise on the figure that would be allowed.

For more advice on understanding the originality report, have a look at this explanation or watch this introductory video. You can also contact the Skills for Learning team for general support about avoiding plagiarism, including how to reference and paraphrase correctly.