Turnitin Adding Textbooks from W. W. Norton to Database Giving College Faculty a Way to Compare for Content Matches

Turnitin and W. W. Norton & Company have signed an agreement to supply academic textbook content that has been published by W. W. Norton & Company to the Turnitin database. Turnitin writing resources are used by educators in K-12 and higher education to support writing instruction, receive and grade student papers, and check for original content.

The agreement means that textbooks published by W.W. Norton & Company will be added into the Turnitin database so that if any textbook content is improperly cited, it will be flagged when a student or faculty members calls for an similarity report. Students can then correct their papers before submission. Faculty and teachers can give feedback and direct students to resources that will help them produce their own original content rather than copying someone else’s.

Turnitin supplies a suite of instructional writing tools to support faculty and help students learn how to write well and to develop original thought. With Turnitin Feedback Studio instructors can receive student papers and give them feedback using QuickMarks, or in written or audio comments. Feedback Studio also generates similarity reports to compare original content against other content in its database of 62 billion indexed web pages, 734 million student papers and 160 million articles.

“With this agreement to supply our content to Turnitin, we provide another layer of protection for our author’s work and provide a helpful resource for instructors,” said Karl Bakeman, vice president and editorial director for digital media at W. W. Norton & Company. “Through Turnitin, this protection is proactive because it gives students a learning opportunity to fix their papers before submission, thus avoiding having plagiarized content in their papers.”

“Educational institutions including K12 schools, colleges, and universities can be confident that Turnitin provides the most comprehensive database in the world to compare writing and surface potential content matches,” said Meredith May, director of marketing for Turnitin. “When matches are discovered, these become learning opportunities for students giving instructors and teachers a chance to guide them in the right way to acknowledge and build upon another person’s ideas.”