How to Remove Plagiarism with Turnitin
Plagiarism is a serious academic offense that can jeopardize your academic integrity and credibility. Understanding how to effectively remove plagiarism is crucial for students across all disciplines. Turnitin is a leading tool that helps detect and remove plagiarism, ensuring your work is original before submission.
Understanding Plagiarism
Before diving into how Turnitin can help, it's important to understand what constitutes plagiarism. Plagiarism involves copying someone else's work or ideas without proper attribution, whether intentionally or accidentally. It can include everything from verbatim copying to paraphrasing without crediting the original author.
How Turnitin Works
Turnitin is a software that compares your written work against a vast database of academic papers, websites, books, and more, to identify areas that might be plagiarized. Here’s how you can use Turnitin to remove plagiarism from your documents:
Initial Submission:
Submit your draft to Turnitin to receive an initial similarity report.
The report will highlight text in your document that matches sources in Turnitin’s database.
Reviewing the Report:
Carefully review the similarity report to identify which parts of your document are flagged.
Look for both direct matches and paraphrased content.
Making Revisions:
For each highlighted section, either paraphrase the content significantly or quote it directly with proper attribution.
Ensure that your rewritten text adds your own insight and analysis, beyond just altering a few words.
Resubmission:
After making revisions, resubmit your document to see the updated similarity score.
Repeat the process until the similarity index is significantly reduced and within acceptable limits.
Tips for Using Turnitin Effectively
Start Early: Give yourself plenty of time to revise your work based on the Turnitin report.
Understand the Feedback: Not all highlighted areas are plagiarized. Sometimes, common knowledge and specific terms may not require citation.
Use Quotes and Citations: When using direct quotes, use quotation marks and cite the source correctly according to the required citation style.
Paraphrase Properly: Simply changing words is not enough. You must completely rewrite the ideas in your own words and style.