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iThenticate Pilot with the Faculty of Graduate Studies

iThenticate is a web-based service that checks for similarity in the text between a submitted document and a corpus of published text (including published journal articles and the public internet). In partnership with York University Libraries (YUL), the Faculty of Graduate Studies (FGS) is piloting the voluntary use of this software to a select number of interested graduate students and their supervisors to strengthen the integrity of one’s thesis or dissertation (or other major publication being finalized). The goal is to provide graduate students and their supervisors with a way to engage in constructive and informed conversations about citation practices, paraphrasing, and appropriate reuse of material, including self-citation. This initiative is designed to support learning and promote shared understandings between supervisors and students, rather than serve as a punitive measure.

Graduate students interested in participating must discuss the initiative with their graduate supervisor and complete the iThenticate Pilot with the Faculty of Graduate Studies (FGS) form.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

iThenticate is a web-based service that checks for similarity in the text between a submitted document and a corpus of published text (including published journal articles and the public internet).

iThenticate’s flexible system and comprehensive reporting provides peace of mind in high stakes scenarios such as preparing and submitting grant proposals, preparing a thesis or dissertation, or publishing a research article. Attributes include:

  • Designed for speed and ease-of-use so that academic researchers can quickly upload, check, and examine documents in just a few minutes.
  • Accessed through a web-based interface and requires little to no training.
  • In-depth analytics provides visibility into content submissions and levels of originality over time.
  • You can read more about iThenticate at iThenticate for Academic Institutions.

York University Libraries (YUL) initially subscribed to iThenticate to support editors of journals hosted by the York Digital Journals (YDJ) program and is now making it available to the Faculty of Graduate Studies (FGS) for this pilot project. YUL chose iThenticate because its partnership with major commercial publishers means that the corpus of text against which it checks includes publications to which we do not subscribe.

iThenticate and Turnitin (the product) are similar but distinct services from Turnitin (the company). Some confusion may arise from the fact that Turnitin is both the name of the company and their flagship product.

IThenticate is a cloud-based service hosted by Turnitin; files are not stored locally at York.

Turnitin’s privacy policy states, “If you are located outside of the United States, please be aware that your Personal information will be transferred to and processed in the United States, and may also be processed for support purposes where we have employees who work on the Services who may be in the UK, the EU (Netherlands, Germany, Poland, Sweden), Ukraine, the Philippines, Australia or India.”

FGS will assess the level of interest from the graduate community and allocate a specific amount of pilot participants accordingly. Interested students must complete the iThenticate Pilot with the Faculty of Graduate Studies (FGS) form.

As the primary purpose of the pilot is to offer an educational tool to students and their supervisors regarding citations in their thesis or dissertation (or other major publication), the expectation is that each pilot participant will only upload a single document to the platform.

Prior to subscribing to iThenticate, YUL sought and received clarity around iThenticate’s handling of submitted documents.

According to iThenticate’s response, “iThenticate account files are isolated (private) from any other account and are not indexed for comparison by other iThenticate (or any other Turnitin service), and aren't shared with any third party.”

This differs from the Turnitin product, which stores student papers in a database for future comparison.

Prior to subscribing to iThenticate, YUL sought and received clarity around iThenticate’s handling of submitted documents.

According to iThenticate’s response, “Manuscripts that are uploaded to iThenticate remain on our servers until you delete those files (i.e.move to trash and empty Trash). As a limit, the actual purge of the file occurs within 90 days of deletion. This is a safeguard in the event that you may have deleted a file in error (we can restore the deletion in that 90 day frame).”

FGS will set up an access group for each student/supervisor pair, as well as a shared folder which only that student/supervisor pair can access through their access group.

FGS and YUL employees who administer the iThenticate platform for York will be able to see the title of any documents uploaded to your shared folder but cannot download or access the document contents.

Not necessarily. iThenticate bills itself as a “plagiarism checker” but it’s really a glorified search engine that detects and flags similarity with published text. There are many reasons that text might be flagged as similar which is not plagiarism. Therefore, you must use your judgment when interpreting the output of the Similarity Report.

While using iThenticate with YDJ journals, YUL has found several common reasons for non-plagiarized text to be flagged:

  • Incorrect citation, including self-citation. Properly cited quotations (using quotation marks and some kind of citation indicator) should not be flagged for similarity but may still be flagged on occasion.
  • Thesis and dissertation chapters that were published as articles.
  • Generic sentences and boilerplate language, such as declarations of conflict of interest or references to research ethics board clearance, that may plausibly recur across publications without indicating a lack of originality.

Consult iThenticate’s User Guides.

Note that we are using the current version of iThenticate, which is 2.0. Most user guide pages refer to this version by default. The other version is referred to as version 1.0 or the Classic version.

You can consult Turnitin’s Privacy Policy through their website.

You can contact iThenticate through their website.

You can contact Turnitin’s Data Protection Officer at DPO@turnitin.com.