iThenticate

Access to iThenticate varies by role and school.  If you are unable to access iThenticate using the Duke login button above, you may still be able to gain access.  Email ASIST@duke.edu so we can help you access iThenticate or connect you to the appropriate administrator if you are a student.

• All Duke Faculty and Staff are eligible to use one of Duke's iThenticate licenses through the Duke login button above.
• The School of Nursing and the Nicholas School of Environment have each purchased additional student licenses for graduate students through Duke's license.

If you are Faculty or a Researcher: iThenticate helps you detect un-cited or improperly cited material in manuscripts, grant proposals or other written documents so that you can correct the text before it is submitted. This is particularly useful because publishers and funding agencies, such as NSF and NIH, use plagiarism detection tools to screen manuscripts or grants upon submission.

You can use iThenticate to screen student dissertations, theses and final papers before submission or committee review. If you do so, you must be transparent and inform students in advance.

If you are Program Staff: iTheticate helps you identify improperly cited material so that you can revise the text before final submission for peer review, editorial decisions, committee examination, archiving, etc. You can use iThenticate to screen student dissertations, theses and final papers before submission or committee review.

If you do so, you must be transparent and inform students in advance. Advise students and mentees that instructors, publishers, funding agencies, the Graduate School, et al may screen their submissions through similar plagiarism detection software.

If you are a Student: iThenticate can serve as a learning tool, to help you identify sections of your writing that may need additional editing or re-writing when the tool detects text matches to other published texts.

Ask your faculty advisor or departmental staff to screen your papers, theses or other written documents before you submit them.

The process for using iThenticate is simple and relatively fast, taking only about 5-15 min to scan each document. 

1. iThenticate users upload a document into their private cloud-based iThenticate accounts.
2. iThenticate compares all text in that document to the text from an extensive and continually updated library of published materials and websites.
3. iThenticate generates an interactive report to highlight the text from the user’s document that match text from outside published texts.

This report can be exported and provides an overall similarity score, the percentage of the user’s document that matches text from the library of published materials. Once iThenicate creates the report, the user can evaluate whether any matching similarities found in the text will require further discussion and re-writing.

Access our "iThenticate Quick Start Guide"

iThenticate offers Live Training Webcasts and a user guide through their website. iThenticate offers video training guides and start-up guides and a comprehensive list of FAQs. 

• Office of Research Integrity’s guidelines on plagiarism and writing advice
• Duke Library’s information on plagiarism.

• For a concern about potential plagiarism, contact the department chair or division chief, Dean, other appropriate institutional official or the misconduct review officer.
• For a concern about authorship that cannot be resolved within the school, department or unit, contact the chair of the Authorship Dispute Board.
• Any integrity concerns can be reported to the Duke Office of Scientific Integrity (DOSI) or the Office of Audit, Risk, and Compliance (OARC).
• To report an integrity concern anonymously, call the integrity line at 1-800-826-8109. The call will not be traced. You do not need to provide your name.

Can anyone access the unpublished documents I upload to my iThenticate account?
No.  The unpublished documents you upload into iThenticate are only accessible to your account and are NOT accessible to iThenticate or Duke administrators.  Uploaded documents are not stored in a database and deletions are final, no copies are kept on file.

Can I compare two unpublished documents that I upload into my iThenticate account?
Yes. iThenticate now allows “Doc-to-Doc comparisons” (a user can compare 1 uploaded document with up to 5 documents that the user uploads).  Visit iThenticate’s doc-to-doc support link for more information on how to use iThenticate’s “doc-to-doc comparison” feature.

What happens to my uploaded documents if the Duke iThenticate license is not renewed?
You will be notified and will have the option to download your PDF reports.   Any remaining uploaded documents in your account will be deleted at the time the Duke iThenticate license is terminated.

Does iThenticate search in any languages besides English?
From iThenticate website:  “iThenticate interface currently supports the following languages: English, Korean, Japanese, German, Spanish Latin American, Brazilian Portuguese, Dutch, Italian, French, Simplified and Traditional Chinese, and Arabic.”
However- "iThenticate will match text between text of the same language.” -Which means that if you upload an unpublished document in English, iThenticate will only search through English documents, it will not compare that English document against materials written in other languages.

Is there a maximum size for uploaded documents?
Maximum size for a single document is 400 pages, 100MB total, or 2MB text only.

What types of file formats will iThenticate accept for scanning?
From iThenticate website: “MS Word, Word XML, WordPerfect, PostScript, PowerPoint (.PPT, .PPTX), PDF, HTML, RTF, HWP, OpenOffice (ODT) and plain text."

To which materials is iThenticate comparing my uploaded document?
From iThenticate website: “In addition to the Internet, uploaded files are compared to more than 40 million published research articles from 590+ global scientific, technical and medical publishers. […] iThenticate's comparison database includes more than one million abstracts and citations from PubMed, and more than 20,000 research titles from EBSCOhost and the Gale InfoTrac OneFile. iThenticate also maintains its own web crawler, indexing over 10 million web pages daily and totalling over 50 billion web pages.”