Review Turnitin's accepted file types
Please note that Zip files are not accepted by Turnitin. If you want students to submit more than one file you will need to set up a multipart assignment.
A Lecturer can upload a paper to Turnitin for checking if they own the copyright. To quickly check a paper, use the Quick Submit feature. Please note that this will save your paper in Turnitin’s Standard Repository and will be stored by Turnitin to check similarity to other papers. To use Quick Submit or to set up a Class and Assignment on Turnitin you will need an account on Turnitin.
If you have used Turnitin via Moodle, you will already have an account. To reset your password for the web version.
If you have not previously used Turnitin via Moodle, you can request an account via IT Self Service Portal. You will then receive an email directing you to access the Turnitin website and set your password.
If you would rather not save your research paper to the Standard Repository, set up a class and an assignment via TurnitinUK.com and select No repository under More options in the assignment settings. Please refer to the guide on setting up classes and assignments via TurnitinUK.com .
To activate the Quick Submit feature:
To submit a paper to your Quick Submit inbox, please do the following:
Please note that Quick Submit will save your paper to the Standard Repository and will be stored by Turnitin to check similarity to other papers.
A class within Turnitin is equivalent to a Moodle module and has a natural shelf life of 5 years. So if you set up a new module today, it will be 'active' until 2026. Within that 5 year period, when the class is initially set up, Turnitin automatically allocates a class end date for 12 months' time. If you set up a class today, it can last a total of 5 years, but the class will have an end date after 12 months. When you add a new assignment to that class, the end date will automatically extend 12 months into the future until the natural shelf-life date is reached. Once this date is reached, no further assignments can be added. The time before expiration was changed in February 2023. The change has not been applied retrospectively and will only apply to modules created after February 7th 2023. Modules created previously will still be subject to the 6 month expiration and will need manually extending by the Digital Education Team.
The Digital Education Team can make your class active again as long as the class was not created more than five years ago. Log a ticket on IT Self Service Portal and we can help extend your class.
Plain text formulas work best when submitting via a word document or a PDF. Please note that images of text are not supported and may not work/get picked up when Turnitin scans the document. Generally, Turnitin will try to extract text within a document. Also avoid using irregular spacing between letters (l i k e t h i s).
Log a request on IT Self Service Portal including the following information:
Our Turnitin Administrator will request that the paper is deleted from the Turnitin repository.
If you have access and are confident in using TurnitinUK, the web version of Turnitin, you can request a paper deletion from within the assignment.
The file submitted to Turnitin must have at least 20 words of text to generate a similarity report and most be a file type that can generate a similarity report. If the file submitted is, for example, a PowerPoint file with little text, there may not be enough text to generate the report. If the file has more than 20 words of text and is a type of file that should generate a similarity report, please log a ticket on the IT Self Service Portal and the Digital Education Team will advise.
City encourages the use of similarity reports being displayed to students as a way to improve academic writing skills. You can switch on the setting for students to view their similarity report when setting up an assignment. Just switching on the option to view the similarity report is not very helpful, think about the support you can make available to help students to interpret their reports. If you are planning on allowing students to view their similarity reports, get in touch with the Digital Education Team and we can share guidance to help students to interpret their similarity reports.
There is a known issue where any highlights added to text in Word for Windows will disappear when submitted. This is due to a bug in Word for Windows. Word for Mac is not affected by this bug. As a workaround, ask students to convert their file to a PDF before attempting to upload it to Turnitin. This ensures it is in a format Turnitin can process without any problems.
