Turnitin
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Type of site
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Online SaaS editor |
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| Headquarters |
2101 Webster St. (Suite #1800) Oakland, California 94612, United States |
| Area served | Worldwide |
| Industry | Education |
| Website | turnitin.com |
| Registration | Yes |
| Users | 30M+ students (15,000 institutions) |
2101 Webster St. (Suite #1800)
Turnitin is an Internet-based plagiarism-prevention service created by iParadigms, LLC, first launched in 1997. Typically, universities and high schools buy licenses to submit essays to the Turnitin website, which checks the documents for unoriginal content. The results can be used to identify similarities to existing sources or can be used in formative assessment to help students learn how to avoid plagiarism and improve their writing.
Students may be required by schools to submit essays to Turnitin, as a deterrent to plagiarism. This has been a source of criticism, with some students refusing to do so in the belief that requiring it constitutes a presumption of guilt. Additionally, critics have alleged that use of the software violates educational privacy and intellectual property laws.
Parent company iParadigms LLC, also offers a similar plagiarism detection service for newspaper editors, book and magazine publishers called iThenticate, and runs the informational website Plagiarism.org. Other tools included with the Turnitin suite are GradeMark (online grading and feedback) and PeerMark (peer review) services. Turnitin released the WriteCycle Suite on February 3, 2009. WriteCycle bundles the Originality Checking service with its GradeMark online grading tools and PeerMark tools. Turnitin released Turnitin2 on September 4, 2010, dropping the "WriteCycle" nomenclature.
Turnitin checks for potential unoriginal content by comparing submitted papers to several databases using a proprietary algorithm. It scans its own databases, and also has licensing agreements with large academic proprietary databases.
The essays submitted by students are stored in a database used to check for plagiarism. This prevents one student from using another student's paper, by identifying matching text between papers.
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