The Turnitin Similarity Report is a flexible document that provides a summary of matching or similar text in submitted work compared against our database and highlights where writing is similar to one of our sources. Our database includes billions of web pages: both current and archived content from the internet, a repository of works other students have submitted to Turnitin in the past, and a collection of documents, which comprises thousands of periodicals, journals and, publications.
Turnitin does not check for plagiarism or define whether a student's submitted work is plagiarized. The instructor responsible for the course - as a subject-matter expert - has a duty to exercise academic judgment on the work that is submitted to Turnitin for their classes.
The percentage that is returned on a student's submission (similarity score) defines how much of that material matches other material in the database, it is not a marker as to whether a student has or has not plagiarized.
Matches will be displayed to material that has been correctly cited and used, which is where the instructor's academic judgment must come into play.
Guidance on how to interpret the Turnitin Similarity Report and its similarity score is available in our Help Guides.