If a large portion of a student's paper is unexpectedly excluded from Similarity checking—or if the matching text detection cuts off entirely mid-way through their document—this is typically triggered by formatting errors interacting with your automated exclusion filters.
Please review the two scenarios below to diagnose the issue in your student's file and learn how to resolve it:
When the "Exclude Bibliography" setting is active on an assignment, Turnitin scans the document for specific keywords (like "References" or "Bibliography") to determine where to stop checking for Similarity. Turnitin excludes text starting from the last instance of a recognized keyword.
If your student used a bibliography keyword prematurely in their paper—such as listing "References" inside a Table of Contents or a progress chart—the system may mistake this early instance as the start of their bibliography. As a result, the entire remainder of the student's paper will be excluded from the Similarity Report.
How to resolve this: Advise the student to modify the premature keyword in their document text (e.g., changing "References" to "Source List" or "Works Cited" in their Table of Contents so it doesn't conflict with their true final bibliography heading). Once edited, the student must resubmit the corrected file.
For a comprehensive list of words that trigger automated filters, please refer to our guide on how exclusions and filters refine the Similarity Report.
If the "Exclude Quotes" setting is enabled for your assignment and the student's document contains an uneven number of opening and closing quotation marks, the system cannot correctly identify where a quote ends. This formatting error breaks the tracking string, often causing Turnitin to unexpectedly exclude massive blocks of prose or drop text matching altogether after the error occurs.
If the student provides you with their original Microsoft Word source file, you can quickly diagnose a quote mismatch using these steps:
- Open the student's document in Microsoft Word.
- Copy the document's unique opening quotation mark.
- Open the Find and Replace menu (Navigate to Edit > Find > Advanced Find).
- Paste the opening quote into the search box and review the total count of matches found. (Do not click replace).
- Repeat this exact process for the document's closing quotation mark.
Compare the two totals. If the number of opening quotes does not exactly match the number of closing quotes, this discrepancy is causing the Similarity Report to break.
How to resolve this: The student will need to review their document text, locate the missing or extra quotation marks, and correct them. Once the formatting is balanced, they must resubmit the file to generate an accurate Similarity Report.