Turnitin: About
Welcome to Turnitin! SIUC has contracted with iParadigms for access by our faculty and teaching asistants to Turnitin's basic product - the Plagiarism Protection Service.
What is Turnitin.com?
Turnitin.com is a Web-based plagiarism detection service available to SIUC faculty who are currently teaching or support teaching activities at SIUC. The service will be especially useful to instructors who suspect a paper submitted to them contains plagiarized text.
Turnitin.com has a database of over a million papers, a digitized version of the Gutenberg Collection of Literary Classics, and papers pulled from the Internet and various "paper mills," (i.e., services that sell term papers).
The parent organization of Turnitin.com is Plagiarism.org.
Turnitin.com is a collaborative learning tool that was created in 1996 by a group of professors from the University of California Berkeley who were concerned with the rise of Internet plagiarism. Turnitin.com lets the instructor upload a paper into its database, where software uses algorithms to create "digital fingerprints" that can identify similar patterns in text. Then the paper is matched to billions of web pages, paper mill essays, and student papers submitted online. In an hour or less, Turnitin.com creates an "originality report" that highlights any passages from the paper that might not be authentic, and lists web sites and other resources with content that matches that in the paper.