Why I Won’t Use TurnItIn to Check My PhD Thesis

‘A Belgian Politician’, by Flickr user Phillipe Put, illustrates a well-known Belgian plagiarism case

I’m in the latter stages of preparing my PhD thesis for submission, and I’ve been told I have to submit the whole thesis through plagiarism-detection software turnitin. But I’m not intending to do that, and here’s why.

Firstly, I received an email from a manager at my university stating:

There is now a requirement for you to put a draft of your research thesis through the turnitin text matching system before you submit it for examination.

I replied, stating I have objections to turnitin, and asked the following questions:

Could you please advise what is driving this requirement? Has the university completed any relevant research or risk assessments before engaging the services of turnitin for HDRs? Is there a specific policy that sets out this requirement? What is the process if a student were to refuse to submit their work through turnitin? Has the University negotiated any special conditions to protect its students?

The only question answered was the first — what is driving this requirement?

It is intended to be a checking measure to ensure compliance with the academic integrity policies of the university.

and I was fobbed off to the supposed instigator of the policy, the Dean of Research. So, I sent my…