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.