Dear Users,

Regarding Turnitin and iThenticate, it would be useful to give some reminders and warnings to avoid problems in 20201.

Regarding the use of iThenticate; As you know, the iThenticate program is offered at universities by Dr. Persons with a title or higher can only use it for the analysis of their personal articles. In addition, journal editors can also use the program in question, however; the journal must be a university-published journal and the editor must be university staff.

Each institution has a document (article) submit quota for iThenticate. Due to the quota ending towards the end of 2019, many of our academics have suffered. According to 2019 usage data, if the same usage habits are continued, we can say that iThenticate quotas will not be enough for institutions to use in 2020. The total EKUAL quota in 2019 did not meet the use of existing institutions and a quota increase was requested from Turnitin officials. For once, our request was not turned down and your requests were met. However, we would like to remind you that we do not have an unlimited or increasing usage quota every year, and unfortunately the total quota of EKUAL does not change during the license period. However, it is necessary to allocate a certain amount of quota to the universities newly added to the scope of EKUAL in 2019. To draw your attention once again, iThenticate is a program used for similarity analysis of articles, but the usage examples in 2019 showed that some users should use the Turnitin program, whereas in the iThenticate program, they analyze documents of thesis, homework, report type, and analyze the same article many times. It has been observed that such misuses have been made. This situation causes the quota of the relevant institution to run out quickly and the rights of other users to be defeated.

As a result, in order to protect the rights of our other users and to prevent our users from being victimized in 2019, the accounts of those who make misuse will be inactive for a certain period of time. It is anticipated that the flexibility to add additional quotas made in 2019 will unfortunately not be available in 2020.

Regarding the use of Turnitin; As you know, similarity analysis of thesis, homework and report type documents can be made and only teacher (teaching personnel) accounts can be opened. If the teacher wants, he/she can create a class for his/her students and enable them to upload thesis/homework/reports.

The biggest problem experienced in the use of Turnitin is the grievances experienced by the users due to their ignoring and disregarding the "settings" issue and not setting the "no storage" setting. There are problems in using Turnitin because the uploaded documents are accidentally sent to the repository (because the no repository option is not selected) and the user deletes the relevant work from his own account. (Like 100% similarity.) Even if the document is deleted from the account by the user, it is not deleted from the pool. For this reason, users should not delete documents uploaded to their own accounts and sent to the pool without notifying the institution's Turnitin administrator. Unfortunately, it is not possible to determine the ID of the deleted documents from the accounts by TechKnowledge or TÜBİTAK ULAKBİM. For the deletion process, the ID (homework number) written next to the document uploaded by the user must be reported to the Turnitin Administrator.

Regards,

Library and Documentation Directorate