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 original questions to that person, who responded:

I’m ccing your supervisors so you can discuss my response with them.

It is becoming increasingly common for phd examiners to precheck theses using turnitin and refuse to examine them if the level of matches found is too high.

It is a distressing experience for students and supervisors when this occurs. Its also time consuming for the student to defend a research misconduct charge, correct the thesis, have new examiners chosen etc etc.

This whole process can take 3 months

So its a simple form of assurance for HDR students and supervisors.

Essentially, it’s for my own good and I should speak to my supervisors to find out why. For the record, they both essentially agreed with my objections.

Although I think it’s unlikely my university will really take me on over this…