A tool to improve academic writing

Good academic writing, like other skills, comes with practice and experience. It is a critical skill. Turnitin is a tool that can help 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.

While this type of software can be used as a detection tool, it can also, more importantly, be used as an educative tool.

It was started over 25 years ago by four University of California students.

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: 1.9+ billion with up to 1 million papers submitted daily, including Western Sydney University student submissions since 2007
  • Scholarly literature: compared against 190 million+ journal articles in dozens of languages, including open access repositories
  • Internet archive: 91+ billion web pages

• Your original Turnitin 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 following the correct citation practices and to highlight the potential need for greater originality in student work.

Note: Turnitin is not used in all subjects at Western Sydney University and may not be utilised for all assignments within a particular subject.

Read more about:

• Submitting a paper
• The Assignment Dashboard
• Understanding your Similarity Report
• Reviewing your grade and instructor feedback

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.