Graduate School Use of Turnitin.com

The Graduate School of Texas Tech University is pleased to announce that Turnitin.com has been added to the ETD (Electronic Thesis and Dissertation) process. By submitting drafts of theses and dissertations to Turnitin.com during the formatting review and well before the documents are placed in the public ETD database, the Graduate School and Graduate Faculty can assist students with proper citation methods -- a leading cause of plagiarism -- and with maintaining the academic integrity of the student, department, and university.

Turnitin.com encourages proper citation methods and academic integrity by supplying originality reports on submitted documents. These reports provide a percentage number denoting the amount of possibly plagiarized material and highlights areas in the submitted ETD illustrating sections that could be considered unoriginal. Most of the material indicated proves to be direct quotes, which helps ascertain whether or not citations have been properly used by the author. High-percentage originality reports will be shared with the student and the student's chairperson. The reports are generated by comparing submitted documents to over 12 billion web pages (current and archived), over 40 million student papers, over 10,000 major newspapers, magazines, and scholarly journals and thousands of books including literary classics.

ETDs submitted by the Graduate School to Turnitin.com are placed in the Turnitin.com database. However, the documents cannot be accessed by other institutions without permission of the TTU Graduate School. Another document submitted by another institution may match the digital fingerprint of a TTU ETD, thus signifying that someone else could have plagiarized a TTU ETD. In that instance, the other institution may contact the TTU Graduate School for information about that specific document. We then have the option to release the entire document for comparison, only a portion of the document, or none of the document at all. Students' names are never released to other institutions during this process.

Print version of this information (PDF)

More Information

For more information please contact Dissertation Supervisor: Allison Belisle (etd.gradschool@ttu.edu) 806.834.5163