It is expected that at this stage in your education you know not to copy from other sources. However, there is more to plagiarism than to copy entire sections. Incorrect or insufficient quoting or referencing may also count as plagiarism. Please take some time to make yourself familiar with all the rules regarding plagiarism by looking at this website from the Faculty of TPM and taking some of the self-assessment tests it offers. Other interesting websites are the websites listed below:

1. Indiana University: https://www.indiana.edu/~tedfrick/plagiarism/item1.html

2. University of British Columbia: Academic integrity and Plagiarism

Draft Plagiarism Checker

On Brightspace you can find a tool for self-checking of any form of plagiarism in your thesis or papers that you might be writing. We have created this here since we have noticed a need for this check and such a check is not yet available TU wide. Feel free to upload any documents here that you would like to check. Please note that we will not be grading any of the documents uploaded here. This is only for self-checking. Make sure that your submission for Research Methodologies is uploaded in the TurnItIn section under ‘Project Plan’!

TurnItIn PDF Troubleshooting

If your pdf is not being read properly by TurnItIn it may be that your PDF is formatted incorrectly. Please note that TurnItIn does not accept image-based PDFs, Form Based Pdfs and Portfolio-based PDFs.

Also some third party PDF generators may inadvertently create PDF files which are not entirely compliant with the PDF standard. This can result in unexpected results when Turnitin attempts to process and render the document image in the Document Viewer — Turnitin may fail to render such files or they may be displayed with missing content.

If the file you are trying to upload or display is a PDF and you are encountering problems, please check the following settings using Adobe® Reader:

1. Open the PDF in Adobe Reader.
2. From the “File” menu, select “Properties.”
3. Select the following tabs and check to see what they contain:
   a.  Security tab – Check to see that both “Page Extraction” and “Copying” are set to allowed.  If they are not, then Turnitin cannot extract the text to allow the system to work.  (Solution is to ensure that a new PDF is created which allows copying and extraction.
   b.  Fonts tab –  If some of the fonts have (embedded subset) next to their names, then this may explain why the submission has failed.  Our system has not been able to extract the text associated with those fonts.  (This is often linked to a. above).
4. Verify that the PDF is text-based (image-based PDFs are not supported for Originality Check). Proceed to highlight the text of your document with your mouse. If you are not able to highlight any text, your PDF is an image and does not contain text. Another option is to try a “Save As” or “Save as Other” and save to a .txt file. If the resulting .txt file is empty, no text can be rendered from the document.
5. Verify that the PDF is not a “Portfolio” containing multiple files. If the “File” menu option shows “Portfolio Properties” rather than the “Properties” option, the file type is not supported.
6. Verify that the PDF is not a form. If you are prompted to “Please fill out the following form,” within Adobe Reader, the file type is not supported.