A similarity report is a tool that helps editors identify potential scholarly misconduct in author manuscripts. The Similarity Report identifies and highlights every section of text within the manuscript that was found to match the iThenticate content repositories and produces an overall similarity percentage. The similarity percentage does not indicate whether the manuscript contains plagiarism but instead refers to the amount of similar content found to match the content repositories.
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What does the Similarity Percentage mean?
The Similarity Percentage is the total number of matching words found in a manuscript divided by the total word count. Please note that iThenticate does not determine whether a manuscript contains plagiarism.
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How do I interpret a Similarity Report?
Reports are organized in two main columns: the manuscript text and the matching source list. The manuscript text column contains the manuscripts text and any match found to that text is highlighted. The highlighted color and the number listed at the beginning of the highlighted text corresponds to the matching source list. The source list column by default displays what our system deems to be the best matching sources in order to highlight every match found within the manuscript text column.
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What level of similarity indicates a problem?
It depends. Some publishers have performed studies analyzing when misconduct was found within the various similarity percentage tiers for journal submissions. With this information they require all reports for above a set threshold to be reviewed by editors of specific journals. Other organizations require a review for every article submission. Guidelines for when editors should investigate reports varies across journals and organizations. Please check to see if your organization has a guideline for when reports require investigation.
How do I know if a manuscript contains plagiarism?
The decision to deem any work plagiarized must be made carefully, and only after an in depth examination of both the submitted manuscript and suspect sources. We recommend the use of the available exclusion options in order to remove matches to the bibliography, quoted text, abstract and methods sections, and small matches in order to display more relevant matches and display a more accurate similarity percentage. The biblliography exclusion excludes all text after the Bibliography keyword heading. Editors should contact their publishers if further clarification is needed on how to proceed with a manuscript determined to be plagiarized.
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How do I access the side by side comparison mode so that I can compare the manuscript with the original source text?
The side by side comparison mode allows editors to view the full source text alongside the manuscript text. To enter into this mode click on a match highlight within the manuscript, a window will appear providing a glimpse of the matching text contained in the source. Click on the Full Source Text link within this window to enter into side by side comparison mode.
What are the differences between the Match Overview and All Sources Similarity Report views?
A good way to understand the difference between these report views is to think of the Match Overview mode as the All Matches mode. This means that the iThenticate system highlights every section of matching text within a manuscript in the Match Overview report view. In this report view the system looks for the best matches of text from every matching source found for the manuscript.
In the All sources mode iThenticate lists every matching source by order of the matching source percentages from highest to lowest and will only highlight matches for a single source at a time.
How do I use the Similarity Report filters from within a report?
The Similarity Report filters can be set at the folder level or within individual reports. Editors can adjust the Similarity Report filters within the Document Viewer by clicking on the filters icon at the bottom of the Source list side panel 
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The following exclusion/filter options are available Exclude Quotes, Exclude Bibliography, Exclude small sources, Excludes small matches, and Exclude Sections (Abstract, Methods and Materials). If any of these options are adjusted you must click on the Apply Changes buttons to save the changes. The filters will only be updated for the report currently being viewed.
What content repositories does iThenticate search against?
For detailed information on what content is contained in the iThenticate repositories please view this page: http://www.ithenticate.com/content
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Why was a match not found to a webpage?
Some websites do not allow our crawler to crawl their entire site or specific pages on their site. These restrictions are located within the robots.txt file of the domain. For example: http://www.nytimes.com/robots.txt.
If pages are hidden behind a search our crawler is unable to crawl those pages since is has no way to perform the search function.
If a webpage you believe should match to an uploaded manuscript but is not found as a matching source within the Similarity Report, please fill out this form to inform us of the missing page and we will add it directly to our crawler: Submit a URL you would like us to crawl
Why was a match not found to a published article?
The iThenticate database does not contain every published article we only have content from publishers who have joined Crossref Similarity Check. Here is a list of all of the Crossref Similarity Check members whose content is contained in the iThenticate database.
If a match is not found to a Crossref Similarity Check member's published article there are a couple of possible reasons why the article was not matched:
