Viewing the originality report

READING AN ORIGINALITY REPORT - SOME HINTS


To view the originality report, click on the percentage match under the "report" column.

There are three views possible, and everyone might have their favorite. The "cleanest" (and shortest) is the quickview, or classic, report. Here the sources are listed first, color-coded, and the paper is provided as straight text, with the text matching the color of the source.

The default view is tho show the highest matches together. Here there are two display planes. On the right is the list of sources, and on the left is the text, again color-coded to match the source as well as labeled to pick out the source. You can also exclude some of the sources by clicking on the small "x" to the right of the source. This might uncover material that can be attributed to other sources. You can restore excluded sources.

The third view is to show matches one at a time. Select the source listed on the right and the relevant text on the left is highlighted. Explore this option ... you might find it interesting to see what sources are copied at different points.

You have options for downloading and printing the originality reports. Keep in mind that the report will be in the form you've chosen to view it. So if you want a printed copy of the quickview, be sure to put the report into the quickview option before printing (or downloading). This may seem obvious, but...

You'll see that you can also exclude quoted material and the bibliography. This sort of material might easily be found and identified and thus artificially inflate the percentage of similarity. You can recover the excluded material.

You cannot rely on the percentage of similarity or on the identified material to automatically determine the paper is plagiarized. A paper with a very low similarity percentage may have "borrowed" a paragraph from a website, thus be plagiarized while another with a larger percentage of similarity might be so because of quoted or cited material. You will have to examine the report and each match in order to determine whether the material was appropriately or inappropriately used.