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.

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 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:

• 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.