Plagiarism & Cheating | News

Turnitin Adds ProQuest Dissertations

• By Dian Schaffhauser
• 03/12/12

A company that provides a service for plagiarism checking will shortly be offering an add-on service that checks submissions against dissertations. Turnitin will be adding 300,000 dissertations and theses published from 2008 to the present into its plagiarism comparison database. The new material comes from the Dissertations & Theses Database, a Web-based information reference from ProQuest.

Turnitin said its library now includes 20 billion current and archived Web pages, 200 million student papers, and 110 million articles from scholarly journals. Turnitin has several products. The primary one is a suite of programs: one that checks student work against the database for originality; another that provides a mechanism for letting students provide anonymous feedback to their peers' work; and a digital grader that allows the instructor to apply standard and custom grading marks and add feedback on assignments. The company also sells an admissions product that helps admissions staff verify the authenticity of application materials, such as essays.

The latest addition will be added as a premium service to iThenticate, Turnitin's plagiarism checker designed specifically for scholarly publishers. It will have a separate fee attached to it, according to Turnitin, and is expected to be available this spring.

The ProQuest Dissertation and Thesis Database was chosen by the United States Library of Congress as the official archive of American dissertations.