Turnitin Plagiarism Detection

Turnitin is Northwestern's anti-plagiarism software. When a paper is submitted through Turnitin, it is compared against three vast databases. A Similarity Report Links to an external site. is generated that will show which elements of a student's paper match content from Turnitin's databases.

Note to Undergraduate Students: If an instructor has asked you to use Turnitin for your paper, they are referring to an assignment in your Canvas course that has Turnitin enabled, not to create a stand-alone Turnitin account as described below. Those accounts are only available to instructors and graduate students, not undergraduate students. 

How to Create & Evaluate a Turnitin Assignment in Canvas

  1. Creating a Turnitin Assignment in Canvas
  2. Adjusting Your Turnitin Assignment Settings
  3. Evaluating a Turnitin Assignment

For information on accessibility and Turnitin, visit Turnitin Accessibility Information.

If you are experiencing slowness or access issues, check the status of Turnitin on their website Links to an external site.. 

UPDATE: If you used a previous version of Turnitin and are receiving an error message on your assignments, follow these video instructions for updating the assignment using the Canvas Plagiarism Framework version of Turnitin.

The primary sources for the databases are:

  • The Current and Archived Web: Similar to Google and Bing, Turnitin has a web crawler that indexes content into a searchable form. Turnitin currently contains over 45 billion webpages from the current web as well as archived webpages.
  • Student Papers: Over 50 percent of plagiarism comes from other students' work. Turnitin compares submitted papers to a database of over 337 million papers in the Turnitin paper database. Each day, the Turnitin student database grows by 190,000 papers.
  • Content Partnerships: Turnitin has partnered with leading content publishers, including library databases, textbook publishers, digital reference collections, subscription-based publications, homework helper sites, and books. These partnerships have contributed over 130 million additional articles to its databases.

Turnitin Quick Submit

Quick Submit is used when instructors choose to only use Turnitin for specific submissions or to add past submissions to the Turnitin database to make it a more robust tool. 

To do this, email canvas@northwestern.edu and ask for a Turnitin account.  

Then, activate the Quick Submit feature by following these steps:

  1. Sign into your instructor account
  2. Click on the “User Info” tab at the top of the screen
  3. From the “Activate quick submit:” menu, select “Yes”
  4. Click “Submit”

Instructors can request a Turnitin account and submit student papers.

To submit a paper to your Quick Submit inbox, please do the following:

  1. Sign in to your account
  2. Click on the “Quick Submit” tab located towards the top of the screen
  3. Click the “Submit Paper” button to the upper left corner of the inbox
  4. Select the databases you wish to have your submission checked against (we suggest you check all the boxes)
  5. Click “Submit”
  6. Fill in the name of the student for whom you wish to submit the paper
  7. Fill in the title of the submission
  8. Select an upload option
  9. Click "Upload"
  10. A new page will load with a preview window. Click "Confirm" to confirm your submission

Allowed File Formats

The file must be in one of these file formats: Microsoft Word, PowerPoint, WordPerfect, PostScript, PDF, HTML, RTF, OpenOffice (ODT), Hangul (HWP), Google Docs (submitted via the Google Drive submission option), plain text files (modified from Turnitin).