An Originality Report will be generated within 10 minutes of an initial submission to an assignment and up to 2 resubmissions (if allowed). Once 3 submissions have been made to an assignment originality reports for subsequent re-submission to an assignment will take up to 24 hours to generate. If you make 4 or more submissions to an assignment it is recommended that you submit your final revised draft at least 24 hours before the coursework deadline if you want to see an originality report before you submit your final version, or if you're required to submit an originality report with your assignment.
While an Originality Report is being generated, in the Turnitin assignment's page the relevant icon in the Originality Report column will display greyed out. It will remain greyed out if your instructor has decided not to allow students to view the reports.
Citations and references
Turnitin picks up even correctly cited quotations and bibliography items and reports them as matched with other documents in the Turnitin database. This is because:
- the journals, articles and texts you quoted or referred to may be in the database, and/or
- assignments submitted by other students may have quoted from, or cited, the same reference works as you did.
These parts of your assignment will generate match percentages, which increases your assignment's overall similarity rating.
Don't be alarmed by this. Your teachers don't just accept the percentage Turnitin gives to an assignment. They check the reports and interpret the results.
Filter them out
If you want to, you can ask OriginalityCheck to ignore quotations, references and bibliography items in your assignment when reporting on its originality. You can find the instructions for doing so on this Turnitin support page (scroll down to Changing filters and settings).
You'll have to switch the filter on every time you run a report—you can't set it to stay on and be applied automatically to each assignment.
Even with the filter turned on, Turnitin will still find some matches. When your teachers review the originality report, they will see that the matches are only for legitimate quotations and references.
Sample Originality Report
The following graphic shows an annotated sample Originality Report that Turnitin generates from a submission.

 | Similarity Index: This shows how much of the submission matches existing catalogued sources. |
 | Matching Sections: Highlighted section of the submission indicate that there are matching sources in the Turnitin database. - Clicking on a matching section shows the existing source in a pop-up view.
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 | Match Overview: This shows all matches in the submission.- Click on a match in the overview to jump to the corresponding section of the submission.
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 | Filter Settings: Click the filter button to show the filter settings window, which allows you to change similarity estimate options. - Exclude Quotes: Enabling this setting excludes all material in quotations from the similarity report.
- Exclude Bibliography: Enabling this setting excludes the bibliography from the similarity report.
- Exclude Matches Under Amount: Enabling this setting allows you to set a criteria (in words or percentage) for matches to be included in the similarity report
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