Scientific and Scholarly Writing

Plagiarism is a form of academic dishonesty that occurs when someone uses the words, expressions, ideas, opinions or findings of another without giving credit to the original source.

All of the following are considered plagiarism:

• turning in someone else's work as your own
• copying words or ideas from someone else without giving credit
• failing to put a quotation in quotation marks
• giving incorrect information about the source of a quotation
• changing words but copying the sentence structure of a source without giving credit
• copying so many words or ideas from a source that it makes up the majority of your work, whether you give credit or no

Source: What Is Plagiarism? (n.d.) Retrieved February 20, 2024, from <https://plagiarism.org/article/what-is-plagiarism>

Turnitin

All three school at UMass Chan use Turnitin (the anti-plagiarism tool) to help assess the originality of student work.

Sign in to Turnitin, or create your Student account. Once you have entered Turnitin:

• Click on the "Enroll in a Class" tab at the top left of the page
• Enter the class ID and enrollment password (these will be provided to you by your instructor or TA)
• Select the assignment and submit your work 
• Receive a similarity report 

The similarity report will identify areas where your work is similar text to other works in the Turnitin databases. Depending on the settings selected, similarity reports may not take citation or quotation into account, so each similarity report should be reviewed and interpreted by an instructor. 

If you would like to get a similarity report for work not associated with a class, T.H. Chan School of Medicine and Tan Chingfen Graduate School of Nursing students and faculty may contact Tori Rossetti (tori.rossetti@umassmed.edu) and Morningside Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences students and faculty may contact Tess Grynoch (tess.grynoch@umassmed.edu) to be included in the library's Turnitin class.

If you need any help in interpreting your report or using Turnitin, please contact Tori Rossetti (tori.rossetti@umassmed.edu) or Tess Grynoch (tess.grynoch@umassmed.edu).

iThenticate

If you are a journal editor or find yourself needing similarity reports for a number of documents at once in a non-class setting, T.H. Chan School of Medicine and Tan Chingfen Graduate School of Nursing students and faculty may contact Tori Rossetti (tori.rossetti@umassmed.edu) and Morningside Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences students and faculty may contact Tess Grynoch (tess.grynoch@umassmed.edu) to receive an account for iThenticate which uses the same corpus as Turnitin but has an interface better designed for non-class uses.

Due to the limited number of users available for iThenticate, new iThenticate users agree to a limited 3 month term with possibility of extension if there is no waitlist. 

For more information on Turnitin and iThenticate, please visit the library's Turnitin and iThenticate service page.