Turnitin

A few weeks ago, I was sent a letter from my university about a website, Turnitin, which provides a 'plagiarism prevention service'; yesterday I finally got around to using this site. One uploads scholastic work (i.e. turns it in) to the website which analyses the work, showing what percentage is found elsewhere. At the end, one receives a report.

I tried to upload the entire intermediate submission, but that must have been too large as the site timed out. Instead, I uploaded the rewritten chapter four, which introduces my proposed framework for managing enhancements. At first, my work received a 20% mark, although this was reduced to 16% after I defined the 'ignore direct quotes' flag. 16%?? How come? This is all my own work!

The report also provides data as to the sources of the plagiarism - it turns out that 12% (that's 72% of all the report) comes from my blog! Specifically, the material which I wrote just under a year ago when I first developed the framework. That's not plagiarism, but the site doesn't have an option (that I could see) for ignoring specific sites. This means that from now on, I will refrain from including material here which I also include in my thesis. 

The first chapter showed about 40% copied material, which was reduced slightly when I marked the 'ignore direct quotes' option. Here, there was very little material from my blog, but many quotes and paraphrases which come from multiple papers. At the moment I'm going to ignore Turnitin.

That's a shame, because yesterday I came across a paper which provided a very useful paragraph. Perhaps Turnitin will ignore it if I enclose it in quotation marks:

"Rescher (1977) divides human knowledge into two types:
(a) Theses, or "knowledge that", defining statements or assertions about the world
(b) Methods, or "knowledge how", defining ways of doing things.

Moody and Shanks (2003) argue that the major focus of scientific research has been aimed at theses, which are proved by hypotheses, whereas a different approach is required to validate methods. A hypothesis is either proven or not, whereas a method can be effective or ineffective. "Factual theses can either be established deductively from other theses or inductively from observations. The validity of a method can only be established by applicative success in practice" (Moody and Shanks, 2003, p. 624)."

This is the kind of material that I require which gives my research approach - developing a framework, comparing this to what actually happens in the real world and then verifying it by using it (as I am trying to do at work) - the academic credentials that it needs.