Turnitin does not check for plagiarism in a piece of work. Instead, it checks a user's work against its extensive database. If instances are found where a user's writing is similar to or matches against a source this will be flagged for your review in the match overview.
The database includes billions of web pages: both current and archived content from the Internet, a repository of works students have submitted to Turnitin in the past, and a collection of documents, which comprises thousands of periodicals, journals, and publications.
The color of the similarity score in My Files is based on the amount of matching text in a document.
The percentage range is 0% to 100% with the possible similarity indices being:
Green: 0% - 49% matching text | |
Red: 50-100% matching text |
A document's quotes and bibliography can be excluded from the similarity score.
A high similarity score does not always suggest that a piece of writing has been plagiarized, just as a low similarity score does not always indicate that no plagiarism has occurred. Consider the following scenarios: