How to interpret Turnitin Report

Turnitin compares your submitted work against a vast database of sources. It then highlights any sections that match existing text, giving you a “Similarity Score” as a percentage. Turnitin similarity percentage score ranges from 0% to 100%. A score of 0% indicates that the software did not detect any similar content, while 100% signifies that all of your text was flagged as potentially copied.

Turnitin Report Color codes

Blue: No matching text – Congratulations! This is ideal, but it might also suggest a lack of citations. This is a good score if you did not try to fool the detector.
Green (1-24%): Low similarity – This is common for quotes and properly referenced sources.
Yellow (25-49%): Medium similarity – This might require checking your citations and paraphrasing some sections.
Orange (50-74%): High similarity – Significant portions of your work may need revision to avoid plagiarism.
Red (75-100%): Very high similarity – This is a cause for concern and may require rewriting your paper.

Remember: The score itself isn’t everything. It’s crucial to analyze where the matches occur and understand the context.

Analyzing highlighted text

Once you view your report, you will notice that Turnitin highlights similar content using different colors. These colors do not have a specific pattern, but they serve as useful indicators for identifying the source that corresponds to the highlighted text or, in other words, the source with similar content as the one that has been flagged. Turnitin generates a list of sources containing text that matches the flagged content, which is included at the end of your report.

To illustrate this, we copied texts from three sources and submitted the paper to Turnitin. These are the results:

As you notice, although every word has been highlighted, there are three different color highlights (1, 2, 3), each representing each source that the particular text matches. In the sources section, you will notice that the sources of the highlighted text have been listed using the same color used to highlight the matching text.