What is Plagiarism Detection and How does it Work?
Plagiarism Detection is the process of checking papers against external sources and identifying sections of papers that may have been plagiarized. The University of Iowa has licensed Turnitin (http://turnitin.com), an online, automatic plagiarism detection service, for campus wide use, and we invite all interested instructors to utilize this tool. It is important to note that the final decision about the presence of a plagiarism lies with the instructor. When Plagiarism Detection is turned on for a dropbox in ICON, papers that students upload to the dropbox will be checked against Turnitin’s plagiarism detection service, and an originality report will be generated. Turnitin compares the papers that students have uploaded against web sites such as Wikipedia, online journals, and against other papers that have been uploaded to the Turnitin system. Instructors who wish to access the Turnitin web interface at http://turnitin.com/ may still do so, and should send an email to turnitin@uiowa.
