There are a couple of reasons why a high proportion of content may be excluded from match detection. Please refer to the following two scenarios:
This may indicate that a bibliography exclusion keyword has been added only once to the paper, and possibly within a content table, which means that any text beyond that point will not be checked by the Turnitin service for Similarity.
It is important to ensure that the bibliography exclusion keyword used in a content table is also used as a header for the bibliography section of the paper, as Turnitin looks to exclude text being checked for Similarity from the last instance of the exclusion keyword occurring.
Keywords found as standalone words in a row may trigger the start of the match exclusion. A list of keywords can be found in this guide.
This can also occur if quote exclusion is enabled and a mismatched number of opening and closing quotation marks have been used in the paper. A mismatch in the number of quotation marks prevents our system from correctly identifying and excluding quoted text, which can result in large sections of the paper being unexpectedly excluded from Similarity checking, resulting in the report appearing to stop mid-way through the paper.
To check for mismatched quotes, please use the steps below:
- In Word, copy the opening quote from the document and use Find and Replace from Find in the Edit menu.
- Don't click Replace, just take note of the number.
- Repeat for the closing quote and compare the two numbers. If the numbers are different, this will cause the issue you are seeing.
You will need to check through the document to find out where the mismatched quotation marks are, and remove or add as necessary.