As covered in previous articles
and videos, there is a comprehensive guide
on how to access Turnitin's Self-Check
Facility and how to use it. The aim of
using this facility is to access a
similarity score.
A similarity score represents the percentage proportion
of matched text to total text
submitted in your document. Matched
text can consist of cited or quoted
text from other articles in Turnitin's
database and bases a score on whether
proper citation or quotation
requirements have been inserted.
Your similarity score threshold
is very context specific to the particular
assignment or module being completed. The
requirements of source materials and
references quota depends on assignment and
this influences your overall similarity
score.
A lower similarity score
generally represents higher originality in
work completed and a high score may
require reworking of content.
However, requiring heavy
citations and sources within an assignment
as instructed may be a prerequisite to a
higher similarity score, which will be
taken into account when marking submission
within Turnitin.
A similarity report is a
version of your submission that has been
overlaid with the
details of text matches identified by
Turnitin when it compared your work
against
its reference sources and databases.
Each of the matches can be interrogated to
see details of the identified sources
that have been matched.
You can see the similarity
report when you open your similarity check
submission.
You can step through each of the
identified matches. This allows you,
firstly, to
see what parts of your work are
contributing to the similarity score
dismayed, then
to confirm that you have used proper
referencing and citations for matching
materials and finally, to investigate if
you need to revise your writing to address
missing citations or better paraphrase.
Keep in mind that there
will normally be some degree of similarity
in all your
work.
When you review the similarities, you have
the opportunity to check that you have
correctly quoted and referenced these
matches so that you are demonstrating your
awareness and ability to apply good
academic practices.
Viewing your similarity
report:
- Access your Turnitin submission that you wish to review similarity on.
- Click on the blue title link to open the similarity report menu.
- It may take a few moments to open and generate the similarity report as Turnitin is a plug-in extension of Moodle. By default the report may open on the Feedback tab. This is not relevant as of now so open the Similarity tab.
- In the Similarity tab, the content within your submission has text highlighted.
- The panel that appears on the right displays the overall similarity score.
- The right-hand panel demonstrates two options: Match Groups and Sources tabs. Match Groups tab provides similarity percentage divided into four self-explanatory headings. Each heading has an associated similarity score.
- Clicking on each of these headings expands further detail at lower section of the panel. In this lower section, each item again indicates its similarity contribution and also gives the details of the matched source by pressing the expand button.
- An alternative way to investigating matches is by clicking on highlighted text to display match quantity and detail in the left panel.
- It is possible to exclude matches if text displays from an unassociated source. This can be completed by expanding the match in the left panel and pressing the exclude match button.
- This exclusion will be noted under overall similarity score and you can now see your refreshed lower similarity score.
Click the below link to view a step-by-step video of the full process of
obtaining a similarity
report view: