
Turnitin Student Support
A Tool to Improve Academic Writing
Good academic writing is a skill that comes with practice and experience. It is a critical lifelong skill that will take students through academic study and into their professional careers.
Turnitin is a tool that helps students improve their writing and citation skills.
What is Turnitin?
Turnitin is a web-based text-matching software that identifies and reports on similarities between documents. It is widely used as a tool to improve academic writing skills.
How does Turnitin work?
- Students submit assessment papers to Turnitin via their vUWS Subject site.
- Turnitin compares electronically submitted papers against the following:
- Student papers worldwide: 1.4 billion with up to 1 million papers submitted daily, including Western Sydney University student submissions since 2007
- Scholarly literature: compared against 82 million+ journal articles in dozens of languages, including open access repositories
- Internet archive: 91 billion current and archived web pages with 22 million pages added daily
- Your original submission is returned with a Similarity Report that highlights text from your paper and links to the original sources.
- Academics find the Similarity Reports useful as a tool to guide students in correct citation practices and highlight potential need for greater originality in student work. While this type of software can be used as a detection tool, it can also, more importantly, be used as an educative tool.
Note: Turnitin is not used in all units at Western Sydney University and may not be utilised for all assignments within a particular unit.
Read more about:
- The Assignment Dashboard
- Submitting a paper
- The Similarity Report
- The feedback paper
- Grading forms
- Peer review
See also Turnitin FAQs
For additional student assistance, please contact the Library
For staff assistance, please login to the WesternNow Staff Portal and search for ‘Turnitin’ knowledge articles