Using Filters and Exclusions will help you refine a Similarity Report to only include matches that are irrelevant to you.
Applying filters and exclusions may or may not change the overall similarity percentage depending on several factors, such as overlapping sources for one match.
In this guide:
Changing your settings will only change the setting for future uploads. If required, previously uploaded documents will need to be individually adjusted.
Search repositories
You are able to exclude entire repositories from appearing in a Similarity Report. The repositories you have available to you are determined by the administrator for your organization.
- Select Settings from the sidebar.
- Using the checkboxes, choose the repositories that you'd like your submitted documents to not match against.
- Changes should automatically apply, but select the Done button to confirm and close the side-bar.
Turnitin's repository options include:
- Internet: Turnitin's 'web crawler' actively archives websites and holds over 70 billion current and removed pages in our database.
- Publications: Turnitin partners with leading content publishers to create a robust collection of over 170 million articles from library databases, textbook publishers, digital reference collections, subscription-based publications, homework helper sites, and books.
- Crossref & Crossref Posted Content: The Crossref repository is a collection of published scholarly works and the Crossref Posted Content collection of scholarly works that have been submitted but not yet published. Both available to search submissions against through our exclusive partnership with Crossref.
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Submitted Works: This is an umbrella term for all items previously submitted to any of the repositories that an account has been set up with. The following repositories are potentially available for Turnitin accounts:
- Private institutional repository
- Private group repository (e.g. country, consortium, or a specifically requested group)
- Global repository
Highlighted matches
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Exclude text directly from the paper text by selecting the highlighted text and then the Exclude text option that appears by the start of the passage.
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This will open a menu that will allow you to select the reason for this text exclusion. Your feedback will help us make similarity matches more accurate.
Choose from the available options:- Instructions or template material: Has the similarity check picked up a template used by your institution? Or has the student inadvertently left in instructions at the beginning of the essay. Use this option to exclude this text. This will help Turnitin identify these sorts of matches in the future.
- Cited or quoted material: Has the student attempted to use quotes but the content has been picked by the similarity check? Perhaps they have used incorrect quotation marks? Use this option to exclude any content you feel should have been excluded due to citations or quotes. This is a good exercise to help teach students about correct citation style.
- Valid collaboration: If the similarity check has picked up valid collaboration between students or researchers, use this option to exclude this text.
- Common wording: Depending on the size of matches the Similarity Report has been set to ignore, the report could pick up short strings of words that are commonly used in academic writing. Exclude this text using this option.
- Other: If you would like to exclude text for a reason other than the available options, select ‘Other’ to open a text box. Here you will be able to enter your reason for the text exclusion. This information will help Turnitin improve our similarity matching in the future.
- Exclude without reason
- Alternatively, select a source to expand it and view the matching text side-by-side with the paper.
- Scroll to the bottom of the source text and select Exclude this Text.
- You will be presented with the same exclusions options as described above. Select a response to exclude the text. The similarity score will be updated to reflect the exclusion you have just made.
Quotes, bibliography, citations, small matches
Content exclusions can include removing any matches to the bibliography or any places within a document where the author has used quotes.
- Select Settings from the sidebar.
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Using the checkboxes, select the content types you would like to exclude from all future documents:
- Bibliography: For papers written in English, Turnitin's machine learning algorithm is able to understand what elements of the paper should be excluded and dynamically remove them from the Similarity Report without the need for the uploader to specify a specific bibliography section of their paper. For papers written in a non-English language, Turnitin looks for a beginning and terminating phrase to work out where the bibliography is.
- Quotes: Turnitin looks for all content between quotation marks and excludes this text from the report. For the list of supported quotation marks, check out our guide about how exclusions and filters refine the report.
- Citations: Turnitin uses machine learning to check every line in a document. If we find something we can tell is an in-line citation, it won't be included in the Similarity Report. The quoted part of the citation can be removed using Exclude Quotes.
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Small Matches: Turnitin will filter all matches that are less than or equal to the length of the number of words supplied.
- Changes should automatically apply, but select the Done button to confirm and close the side-bar.
Sources
Sometimes, you may notice that a source is included in the Similarity Report that you didn't intend, or there may be a source you think was permissible, and don't want it to contribute to the overall similarity score.
- Select My Files from the sidebar.
- Find the file containing the document you'd like to view and select its title.
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From the sources sidebar, choose a source view:
- Sources Overview: A list of the top sources found in the document.
- All Sources: A list of all sources that have matched in the document.
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Hover over or focus on the source you would like to exclude. Select the eye icon with a strike to exclude this source.
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You will be presented with options to state why you are excluding this particular source.
- After making a selection, the similarity score will update to reflect the exclusion you have just made.
If there are multiple sources from different parts of a single domain or URL, each will be treated differently. Excluding a specific page of a website or subdomain will only remove the match from that level of the domain. For example, a submission may match to several articles from a single website (such as britannica.com or reuters.com).