Are you also wondering if Turnitin detects previously submitted work?
The answer is yes, Turnitin does detect previously submitted work.
Turnitin is a widely trusted software tool used by educational and academic institutions worldwide, helping them determine the authenticity and academic integrity of their students’ works.
Many are now wondering if Turnitin detects previously submitted work, and how it does this.
Well, no need to keep wondering, as we are here with all the answers!
How Does Turnitin Detect Previously Submitted Work?
Turnitin detects previously submitted work by comparing new submissions to its comprehensive database, which contains academic papers, internet content, and previous submissions.
Once a work is submitted to Turnitin, it is permanently stored in the database. If a new submission has parts borrowed from previous work, it will be detected as self-plagiarism.
This is why students are advised not to submit drafts to Turnitin, as it could significantly inflate the similarity report of their final submission.
This means that if you submit an assignment that is similar to one you have already done in the past, it may detect that similarity while running an evaluation on your new submission.
This is because of how Turnitin collects data and stores it for its functions.
Turnitin uses a variety of sources to collect information –– this includes academic journals and databases, the internet, and even the databases of educational institutions.
For the very last one, Turnitin stores every paper and work that has been submitted to it from every academic or educational institution that uses its software and then compares it to the newly submitted work.
As such, once you have submitted something to Turnitin, it will always be stored in its database.
This allows the software to expand its database and provide better and more accurate similarity reports for users in the future.
This is why most educational institutions, teachers, and professors advise their students against submitting a draft of their work to Turnitin to check for accidental plagiarism and other issues.
This is because even if you take back your submission after checking the report, the submitted file will be stored in the database as Turnitin will not differentiate between a draft and the final submission.
This would then have a great negative effect on the similarity report for your final submission, as it could skew the similarity percentage and shoot it up way higher than it should be.
While this is a common misunderstanding that is usually clarified and resolved with instructors, the penalty for such actions depends on the educational institution.
If you are a student and wish to check the originality of your work but want to avoid such an issue, you can always try out some alternative methods:
- Turnitin Draft Coach is a tool by Turnitin for students which helps them with refining their draft by providing different features, like a Similarity Check, a Grammar Guide, and a Citations Check.
- Grammarly Premium has a plagiarism checker which constantly compares your work to content on the internet, allowing you to make edits to your document in real time instead of waiting until the end to do so.
- PlagScan offers an affordable pre-paid package based payment model that allows students the freedom to choose how much to pay for a thorough plagiarism check that rivals Turnitin’s similarity report.
On the other hand, if you submit a work that borrows some parts from a previously submitted work of your own, this will also be detected by Turnitin as a similarity.
Educational and academic institutions often take this much more seriously than an accidental draft upload, since this would likely be a case of plagiarism.
In specific, it is considered a case of self-plagiarism, which is a serious offense in many institutions.
As such, you are advised to be highly attentive to the work you submit to Turnitin, as it can detect previously submitted work via its stored database.
