User Awareness survey on Turnitin: An Electronic Plagiarism Detection Tool

Plagiarism, the method of taking credits for somebody else's words or ideas (knowingly or unknowingly) is a threat to the research. To deal with this, institutions have to apply certain measures to detect the plagiarised material, and to create awareness among the users on the use of those measures to detect/identify the plagiarised data. One such way is purchasing anti-plagiarism software. Manipal University (MU) has purchased Turnitin.com, commercial software available for this purpose. The study was conducted to analyse the awareness and to evaluate the aspects of Turnitin-its document checking procedure, password requirement, and method of document checking preference by the faculty/researcher/students of Manipal Institute of Technology (MIT) and Manipal Centre for Natural Sciences (MCNS), Manipal University-Manipal. The data were collected using questionnaire given to faculty/researcher/students of MIT and MCNS. The results of the data analysis, major finding and recommendations for the increased awareness about the software are presented. The outcome of the study identified that there is a need to create awareness about the software among the users of both the libraries. The article makes an attempt to describe the plagiarism and Turnitin software.