iThenticate

What is iThenticate?

iThenticate is a service for researchers that allows you to scan your own research and grant proposals for missed citations and other mistakes that could be characterized as plagiarism. This protects the integrity of your scholarship and your professional reputation.

 

iThenticate is now available to OSU faculty members.

 

A writing tool: We recommend using iThenticate as a writing tool to help ensure that scholarly and research documents such as manuscripts, theses, dissertations, and grant applications follow proper citation practices. Documents should be evaluated prior to submission to journals, funding agencies, and/or academic repositories.

 

Originality checker: iThenticate allows researchers to examine their written work for originality. The service scans against a massive database of documents and files drawn from the internet, as well as from more than 80 million published research articles from library databases, textbook publishers, digital reference collections, subscription-based publications, and books.

 

How iThenticate Can Help You

iThenticate helps researchers detect un-cited or improperly cited material in manuscripts, grant proposals, and/or other written documents so that you can correct the text before it is submitted. This is particularly useful because publishers and funding agencies (e.g., DoE, NSF, NIH) use plagiarism detection tools to screen manuscripts or grant applications upon submission. OSU researchers can now use the same tool that will be used by these and other agencies to help evaluate your work.

 

How iThenticate Works

The process for using iThenticate is simple and relatively fast, taking approximately 5-15 minutes to scan each document.

1. The iThenticate user uploads a document into their private cloud-based iThenticate account.
2. iThenticate compares all text in that document to the text from an extensive and continually updated library of published materials and websites.
3. iThenticate generates an interactive report to highlight the text from the user’s document that match text from outside published texts.

This report can be exported and provides an overall similarity score (i.e., the percentage of the user’s document that matches text from the library of published materials). Evaluation entails reviewing each of the identified similarities in the text and identified source document to determine which require correction. Once the text is corrected, you can upload a new version and scan again to determine if each of the true positive similarities have been resolved.

 

What about Graduate Students?

Faculty members can use their iThenticate account to screen their graduate students’ theses and dissertations before committee review and/or final submission. If you elect to do so, you must be transparent and inform your students in advance. Additionally, you should use the report as a learning tool for the graduate student to identify sections of their writing that may need additional editing or re-writing when the tool detects matches to other published texts.

 

Is iThenticate Similar to Turnitin?

iThenticate is a text-matching service for researchers, while Turnitin is designed to meet the needs of instructors and their courses. iThenticate cannot be used for student coursework.

 

Using iThenticate

Only materials authored or co-authored by Oklahoma State University faculty members for research purposes may be processed through iThenticate. (Materials produced by undergraduate students in registered University courses should be processed via Turnitin.)

 

iThenticate Account Request

OSU faculty members can request an iThenticate account by emailing vprprograms@okstate.edu from your @okstate.edu email account.

Once your request is processed, you will receive an e-mail with login instructions.

• The email message subject line will be, “Welcome to iThenticate!”
• Within the welcome email message, click “Activate your account”.
• You will be taken to a webpage to create an account.
  • For the username, use your okstate.edu email address
  • After creating your account password, select “Create account”

If you have any questions regarding iThenticate account creation, please contact us at vprprograms@okstate.edu.

 

Login for iThenticate

OSU User Login for iThenticate

 

Using iThenticate

1. Go to the iThenticate webpage and log in using your OSU email address as the username and the password you created.
2. From the Welcome/Home page, select Launch in the iThenticate area. This will take you to My Files.
3. From the left menu, click the tab for Settings.
4. In this area, you may select resources to check your documents against under “Compare submissions to the following content”. You can also select items to exclude (e.g., items in quotes, bibliographic items, etc.). Once you have chosen your desired settings, click Save.
5. To check your document, from the left menu, click the tab for My Files. Then click Upload. (Supported file types include Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint, PostScript, PDF, HTML, HWP, RTF, OpenOffice(ODT), WordPerfect, and plain text.)
6. You will be prompted to provide a 1) document title, 2) author first name, and 3) author last name. Then click Confirm.
7. The originality report may take a few minutes to generate. When it is complete, click % similarity to view the report. The report will highlight matches with links on the right of the corresponding content.

iThenticate Training Resources

iThenticate offers training videos, a user guide, and a comprehensive list of FAQs through their website.

Other documentation and resource materials are available on the iThenticate website.

Note: iThenticate requires users to agree to an external End User License Agreement. We recommend you carefully read this agreement in full before using iThenticate.

 

Getting Help

Please submit a request to vprprograms@okstate.edu for assistance with this tool.

 

Plagiarism Resources

• Literature Reviews: Why Citing is Important  (OSU Library)
• OSU Policy on Research Misconduct
• Report Ethics Concerns to Ethics Point
• Avoiding Plagiarism, Self-plagiarism, and Other Questionable Writing Practices: A Guide to Ethical Writing (HHS Office of Research Integrity)

Note: We utilized content from the University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill and the University of Pennsylvania for this webpage.