S19-02-Turnitin

Software Profile

Number	S19-02
Product	Turnitin
Company	Address: 2101 Webster St, Suite 1800 Oakland, California 94612 United States Email: Phone: 866 816 5046 (US) +31 (0)30 227 02 00 (Europe) +44 (0)191 681 0200 (UK) +82 (0) 2 6020 6800 (Korea) +61 (0) 3 8657 4500 (Australia) +52 55 4169 6619 (Latin America)
Web-Site	https://www.turnitin.com/
Software-Type	Online, can be integrated into Blackboard, LTI, Canvas and Moodle learning management systems
Costs (04.05.2020.)	There are different license models, a campus License or a departmental license. The costs depend on the number of students. For more information the company has to be contacted.
Test Date	November 2018 – November 2019

Description

Turnitin was founded in 1999 by four students and grew to be an internationally known company. In 2014, they acquired the Dutch system Ephorus and “joined forces” (Ephorus, 2015). In 2019 they themselves were taken over by a US investment company, Advance (Turnitin, 2019). With a focus on institutional users only, they are used by 15,000 institutions in 150 countries. Turnitin uses its own crawler to search the web including also an archive of all previously indexed web pages (Turnitin, n.d.). Turnitin further compares the texts against published academic articles, as well as their own database of all assignments which have ever been submitted to the system, and optionally institutional databases. They are also developing many additional software tools for educators to use in teaching and giving feedback.

Pros & Cons

Turnitin system has high results for single source coverage result for English, German, Italian and Spanish languages.
This system successfully found similar texts from Wikipedia articles for all languages.
Easy to switch between the tested documents while viewing online reports.
It has low results for finding similarities in translations, manually paraphrased texts and online articles in Czech, Slovak, Latvian and Turkish languages.
This system is rather complicated to use, it is suggested to use „Help“ section to understand how to test documents.

Coverage results

Single source

Multi source

Usability results

Workflow process usability

Can upload and test multiple documents together
Auto-fill metadata for documents
The system uses original file names for report
There are no word limit for the testing document
The system display text in the chosen language only
The system can process large documents (for example, a bachelor thesis)

Result presentation usability

Reports are downloadable
Results are saved in the user’s account and can be reviewed afterwards
Matched passages are highlighted in the online report
Matched passages are highlighted in the downloaded report (offline)
Evidence of similarity is demonstrated side-by-side with the source in the online report
Evidence of similarity is demonstrated side-by-side with the source in the downloaded report
Document formatting is not changed in the report
Document page numbers are shown in the report
The report is not spoiled by false positives

Other usability aspects

System costs are clearly stated in the system homepage
Information about a free system trial version is advertised on the web-page
The system can be integrated as an API to a learning management system
The system can be integrated with the Moodle platform
The system provides call support
The call support is provided in English
English is properly used on the website and reports
There are no external advertisements

Screenshots

References

Ephorus. (2015). Ephorus and Turnitin are joining forces! Retrieved from https://www.ephorus.com/

Turnitin. (2019, March 6). Advance to Acquire Turnitin, Leading Provider of Academic Integrity, Grading, and Feedback Solutions. Retrieved from https://www.turnitin.com/press/advance-to-acquire-turnitin

Turnitin. (n.d.). The Turnitin Difference: Our Web Crawler. Retrieved from https://go.turnitin.com/l/45292/2019-05-09/bj81hq/45292/180815/Turnitin___Our_Web_Crawler.pdf

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Similarity Texter

Publications

Additional Information