Turnitin and iThenticate

If your instructor is using Turnitin®, they must include the following statement on your course outline: 

Turnitin.com: Text matching software may be used to screen assignments in this course. Turnitin® is used to verify that all materials and sources in assignments are documented. Students’ submissions are stored on a U.S. server, therefore students must be given an alternative (e.g., scaffolded assignment or annotated bibliography), if they are concerned about their privacy and/or security. Students will be given due notice, in the first week of the term and/or at the time assignment details are provided, about arrangements and alternatives for the use of Turnitin in this course.

Submitted files are housed on the Turnitin® server based in California, and these files are subject to the USA PATRIOT ACT, 2001. Therefore, if you have concerns about your privacy and or security, you may opt out of using this software and choose another alternative with your instructor. If you do not wish to use this software, please contact your instructor as soon as possible, and discuss an alternative within the first week of the term. 

In addition to residing on the U.S. server, files are kept on a local D2L server, and your submissions are added to a private pool of UWaterloo documents, but they are not accessible to others as part the general Turnitin database.

Once your submission has been scanned and compared to the Turnitin® databases, a similarity report will appear in the dropbox. Click on the coloured square beside the percentage to access the report.

The similarity report is a measure of the similarity between your work and work found on websites, electronic journals and others’ work that has been stored on the UWaterloo’s Turnitin® database. In other words, the percentage displayed shows how much of the submission was not original. The percentage represents the number of phrases that the program finds in common with database content and divides that number by the total number of words in the file. If, for example, the overall percentage for a submission is 10%, then 10% of the document can be matched to sequences of phrases in the database. These words may be in one passage or may be in several, separate passages.

A lower percentage rating indicates that most of the content is original and a higher percentage rating indicates that much or all of the content matches content found in other sources and requires further investigation. The percentage ranges are associated with colours, as follows:

Light Blue = 0% (no matching text)
Green = 1% to 24% (one word or more matching)
Yellow = 25% to 49%
Orange = 50% to 74%
Red = 75% to 100%

*Note that there is no “safe” colour or percentage. No percentage or colour in the report can fully evaluate whether text has been plagiarized.

The following guides will help you use and understand Turnitin®:

• Turnitin Guidelines for Students (PDF)
• Turnitin Quickguide for Students (PDF)

The following guides will help you use and understand Turnitin®:

• Turnitin Guidelines for Students (PDF)
• Turnitin Quickguide for Students (PDF)

Update: Effective September 2025, AI detection functionality in Turnitin will no longer be available. 

"Turnitin has added an AI writing indicator to the Similarity Report which shows an overall percentage of the document that AI writing tools, such as ChatGPT, may have generated. The indicator also links to a report which highlights the text segments that the model predicts were written by AI. Please note, only instructors and administrators are able to see the indicator" (Source: AI Writing Detection Frequently Asked Questions | Turnitin).

While the indicator may be able to highlight some text that might have been generated by AI tools, it is not foolproof. In fact, there is plenty of evidence that this indicator tool is not reliable (Inside Higher Ed.; Scientific American; The Washington Post; Vanderbilt University) and should not be the only source of evidence used to determine if text was generated by AI.

It is important that students are informed about the use of the AI Writing Detection tool. We encourage instructors and students to have open conversations about generative artificial intelligence. Instructors should clearly communicate what is/is not permitted in a specific course or assignment. Visit our page on Artificial intelligence and ChatGPT for more information. 

Visiting scholars may request an iThenticate® account if they are submitting a publication for review that they prepared while they were visiting at the University of Waterloo 

Undergraduate students can request an iThenticate® account to check an undergraduate thesis, essay or manuscript that they intend to submit for publication. The software cannot be used to check papers or essays to be submitted to instructors as part of a course assessment. 

Graduate students are encouraged to use iThenticate® to advance their understanding of good academic integrity practices. Graduate students are particularly encouraged to use iThenticate® to review their research milestones, including theses and research proposals and discuss the results with their supervisors before formally submitting these works. PhD students are normally required to employ iThenticate to review their comprehensive exams. Further information can be found in the Graduate Studies Academic Calendar section on Comprehensive Exams. 

iThenticate® checks submitted work against several databases, including: 

CrossCheck 
An initiative of the publisher association CrossRef, CrossCheck is a database populated with content (journal articles, conference proceedings and books) provided by publishers (365+ leading scientific, technical and medical (STM) publishers).  As of 2025, Crossref contained more than 175 million DOI records, and CrossRef publishers participate in CrossCheck, representing most large scholarly publishers.  An increasing percentage of scholarly journals using iThenticate to check manuscripts submitted for publication. 

Internet archive 
The vendor’s proprietary Internet crawler archives data that goes back to 1996. 

Aggregators, databases, content providers 
Over 90 million online and offline subscription content and research titles from leading aggregators, databases and content providers, including: ABC-CLIO, Cengage Learning, EBSCOhost, Emerald Journals, Gale InfoTrac, One File, Pearson, McGraw-Hill, Wiley, PubMed/Medline, SAGE Reference. 

PQDT 
ProQuest Dissertations and Theses (PQDT) is a research database that includes theses and dissertations from more than 1,000 North American and European graduate schools.

Additional features of this software include the following: 

Fees 

There are no fees for users to check documents in iThenticate®.  The University has purchased a site license for use by members of the uWaterloo community.  

Retention of your work 

iThenticate® does not retain your submission for its own comparison database or add your manuscript to any other databases. However, your submissions are archived privately until you delete them. 

Submitting multiple versions 

Various versions of the same document may be submitted to the software over time. A revision of a previously uploaded manuscript can be uploaded and checked again, but users should limit resubmissions to no more than 5 versions of the same document. You may choose to submit a substantially revised manuscript as a new submission. 

File types accepted  

Several file types are recognized by iThenticate®. This includes MS Word, Word XML, Plain Text (TXT), Adobe PostScript, PDF, HTML, and RTF. 

Access to your account and reports 

Your iThenticate® account and reports are accessible only to you.  You may share your reports via email, printout, or download, or by giving another iThenticate user access to your folder. 

Differences between iThenticate® and Turnitin® 

iThenticate® and Turnitin® are both provided by the same vendor, but they are designed for different categories of users, and at Waterloo they are both accessed in different ways. Turnitin is course-based in our learning management system (LMS) LEARN, and requires instructors to set up courses and assignments. The instructors control the parameters of dropbox and submissions for each course.  iThenticate® is accessed through a front-end website by individual account holders and the individual controls what they upload and run through the system — they also have the ability to delete their files from the system.