iThenticate is a leading provider of professional plagiarism detection and prevention technology used worldwide by scholarly publishers and research institutions to help scholars and researchers to verify the originality of their own academic writing and to mitigate the risk of plagiarism. For more information, visit the iThenticate guide. (Note: Please ignore the user setup instructions in the guide. To login to iThenticate, please use Princeton’s direct single sign-on page.)

iThenticate is available to all faculty and academic professionals appointed by the Office of the Dean of the Faculty, excluding visitors; and to all graduate students.

iThenticate is available only for the individual use of authors, or co-authors, to check their own work for similar or duplicate content published elsewhere.

The University has licensed iThenticate to enable approved users to check their own academic writings. University-provided access to iThenticate is not to be used to check the documents drafted or published by others. Any use of University-provided access to iThenticate inconsistent with these guidelines will result in termination of the user’s access and may result in disciplinary action.

To access iThenticate, please use Princeton’s single sign-on page. If you receive an error message or are unable to log in, please open a ticket in Service Now, choosing iThenticate from the drop-down menu of business applications.

The first time you log in to iThenticate, you will see the Terms and Conditions Turnitin End-User License Agreement (EULA). The EULA is a mandatory part of the login process and cannot be bypassed. You are required to agree to it before proceeding.

For more information about how to use the system, please visit iThenticate Guides > User. [Note: Please ignore the user setup instructions in the guide. To login to iThenticate, please use Princeton’s direct single sign-on page.]

After you run a manuscript through the program, you will receive a “similarity report.” Instructions on how to view the similarity report are located in the Accessing the Similarity Report guide.

An overview of how to interpret the similarity report is available in the Similarity Report guide. You should expect that the similarity report will contain potential matches for your work. The presence of potential matches in a similarity report does not necessarily mean that the work was plagiarized, only that the algorithm has detected matched textual elements in the iThenticate database. You must examine each match to determine whether there is an unattributed duplication of text that could constitute plagiarism.

For more detailed information about the manual analysis you may be required to conduct, please visit the Similarity Report guide.

The benefit of iThenticate is to help verify that the academic writing you are considering publishing in the future is free of plagiarism. It is not intended for reviews of already published manuscripts. However, if you do proceed to run your own past publications through the technology, keep in mind that the process will likely be time-consuming, since it also requires substantial manual work to review the similarity reports.

Instructions on how to upload a file containing a manuscript are located in the Uploading a File guide.

For technical questions on how to use iThenticate, please open a ticket in Service Now, choosing iThenticate from the drop-down menu of business applications.

The University is currently covering the cost for all faculty, academic professionals, and graduate students to use iThenticate.

The answer depends, first, on whether your manuscript remains in draft form or has already been published; and second, on whether this manuscript (if published) has appeared before or after the publication to which it is being compared.

You should seek guidance on how to identify and avoid plagiarism. You should consult any available guidelines provided by the principal professional associations or societies in your academic field(s).

If you discover textual overlap between your unpublished draft and an earlier publication by another author (or group of co-authors), you must take steps to mitigate the risk of plagiarism from your draft prior to submitting it for publication by, for example, ensuring appropriate attribution consistent with the conventions of your academic field(s).

If you discover unattributed textual overlap between your published work and an earlier publication by another author (or group of co-authors), you may be at risk of having committed plagiarism. At this point, you should take the following helpful steps:

• Review authoritative plagiarism guidelines to determine whether instance(s) of textual overlap constitutes plagiarism.  
• Contact, as soon as possible, the publisher of your own manuscript to address the issue.  
• Given that provision V.G of Rules and Procedures of the Faculty states that “[m]embers of the Princeton community…have a responsibility to report if ever they encounter serious indications of misconduct in research,” you have a responsibility to report the issue to the Office of the Dean of the Faculty. During this review process, the dean of the faculty would welcome forthcoming documentation that you have made a good-faith effort to take the above steps to address the instance(s) of plagiarism.

If you discover unattributed textual overlap between your published work and a later publication by another author (or group of co-authors), you may have identified the plagiarism of your work. You should review authoritative plagiarism guidelines and consider contacting the publisher of the potentially plagiarizing text as appropriate.

You should confer with your co-authors if iThenticate reveals overlap between the text in your co-authored publication and the text of another publication.

Materials submitted to iThenticate are owned and controlled by the authors who submit them.  Materials are stored in a private Princeton database hosted by the vendor, and authors can remove these materials at any time. For questions on how to remove your materials, please open a ticket in Service Now, choosing iThenticate from the drop-down menu of business applications.

The vendor is contractually obligated to keep Princeton materials confidential, and all documents are encrypted when uploaded to iThenticate. The University cannot guarantee that documents you choose to submit will never be accessed or used inappropriately by a third party. Users upload documents at their own risk.

According to iThenticate, generative AI tools do not use the unpublished documents housed only in the private Princeton database hosted by the vendor.

Yes, usage records are logged within iThenticate, including the user’s email address and other information about the material reviewed. Accordingly, iThenticate cannot be used anonymously.

You should report the issue to the Office of the Dean of the Faculty, which will be addressed by this office or routed to the appropriate University office.