Students' Guide to Turnitin

Color of Report: Indicates the percentage range of matching or very similar text. 

Similarity Score: Percentage of content that matches Turnitin's database.

The Similarity Score is NOT a percentage of plagiarized material.

 The guidelines for interpreting Similarity Scores are only recommendations.

• Blue means no matching text. The paper is likely all original writing. This is good, but are claims backed up sufficiently with research?

• Green means less than 24% of the paper matched an outside source. This is ideal if sources are integrated well and cited correctly.

• Yellow means 25% - 49% of the paper matched an outside source. If there is no plagiarism, this paper would likely benefit from more paraphrasing and analysis.

• Orange means 50% - 74% of the paper matched an outside source. This is not good and needs significant revision whether or not plagiarism has taken place.

• Red means 75% - 100% of the paper matched an outside source. If you see this, first make sure the paper is not matching up with an earlier version of the same paper that got added to the Turnitin repository. Then check to see if the paper came from just one or two sources. Are they cited correctly or is it plagiarized? When there are many sources, these papers can look like a string of quotes with little to no original analysis. This is not acceptable student work at any level.

Source: https://guides.highpoint.edu/turnitin