All DUSON faculty, students and staff assistants have access to iThenticate free of charge. Here's all you need to know, plus an example.

For our new DUSON students, an introduction...

iThenticate is an application that helps you ensure that you have sufficiently cited your sources and that you are presenting your highest quality written work. While it is normally used by instructors, DUSON is providing access to iThenticate to you at no cost and can be accessed here using your Duke NetID and password..

Let's start by looking at an example iThenticate report

iThenticate was used to check this edition of Tech Tuesday. It's easy to use and the report was available within 2 minutes. The iThenticate report can be found here.

This edition of Tech Tuesday has a similarity index of 12 percent. There was 11 percent of it flagged as identical to text found on teh iThenticate website and 2 percent as text from other sources. If this was being turned in as an assignment, you would ignore 2 percent of the similarity as false positives. The 11 percent flagged as identical to the iThenticate website? Take a closer look at these sections and make sure the text is cited correctly before turning in the assignment.

If you have any questions about what an acceptable similarity index would be or when/how to cite sources, speak with your instructor for guidance.

How does it work?

First, you'll upload your completed document - a research paper or some other academic work - to iThenticate.

One to ten minutes after you have uploaded a document, iThenticate creates a Similarity Report for you. This report identifies material that matches text from documents found in their database or on the web, such as the following direct quote from the iThenticate website.

iThenticate has two primary benefits. First, authors can ensure they have sufficiently cited their sources and presented the highest quality written work. Second, this preliminary editorial review will allow editors to view and move submitted documents through the peer-review or referee process to publication, confident that content is original.

Highlighted text will include all matching text, including that which has been properly quoted and cited. You will then confirm that each of the highlighted sections has been properly quoted, summarized or paraphrased. You will also receive a Similarity Index, indicating how much of the document matches other sources.

This gives you an easy way to identify and attribute any material that may contain unintentional plagiarism before you submit your assignment.

Getting Started

Start by reading this quick start guide, which will provide instructions for using the product. Login to iThenticate here. Please note that the Quick Start Guide shows a different login screen than you will see. You will see the familiar Duke login screen.

All students have access to iThenticate training resources located here. This webpage includes self-paced videos for individual instruction.

Duke does not offer any addtional instruction in using iThenticate. The app has provided an easy-to-use product with good training resources. Technical support for this product can be accessed directly through iThenticate. Of course, you can call your IT Service Desk if you have any questions.

Here’s our Tech Tip of the Week –

Need an idea for email organization? This tip is for you.

Why not keep all of your email messages in an archive and use tagging to organize them? You can put as many tags on an email as you'd like, so you're not forced to pigeonhole an email into a single folder. Plus, you can tag in bulk, which is a helpful way to quickly add meaning to your archive.

Here's how to do it in MS Outlook (it's called categorizing in Outlook, but it's the same thing):

• Create some categories

  • Select the Categorize option on the Tags folder

  • Select All Categories

    • Here is a list of all categories with an assigned color

  • Select New

    • Enter a tag name - this can be anything

    • Select a color for the tag

      • Use colors to aggregate similar tags, for example:

        • A separate category for each project with all projects tagged with Duke Blue

        • A separate category for all problems and bad things, which would be tagged in Carolina Blue

  • You geet the idea...

• Now, start using the tags.

  • Open an email

  • Select the Categorize option on teh Tags tab

  • Assign one or more categories to the email

• When you're ready to search for all emails in a certain category:

  • Select Search

  • Select the Categorized option in the Refine tab

  • Select the category on which you would like to base your search.

Try it out and see if it works for you!

Have any questions about this or other tech used at DUSON?

As always, if you have any technical questions or problems, please contact your IT Service Desk at 919-684-9200, or email to citdl@mc.duke.edu.