Turnitin

thumb|Location of Turnitin's Oakland office Turnitin (stylized as turnitin) is an Internet-based similarity detection service run by the American company Turnitin, LLC, a subsidiary of Advance Publications. The software as a service (SaaS) website sells automated checks of submitted documents against its database of prior submitted documents and the content of other websites to identify plagiarism. As of 2025, the company licenses access to its services to over 16,000 universities and high schools worldwide, with more than 71 million students enrolled, but as early as 2006, Princeton, Harvard, Yale and Stanford decided not to use Turnitin.

==Company history== Turnitin originated in 1994 at the University of California, Berkeley, where graduate student John M. Barrie developed an online peer-review system that later evolved into plagiarism-detection software. To commercialize the system, he and collaborators Christian Storm, Emmanuel (Max-Emmanuel) Briand and Melissa Lipscomb established iParadigms LLC in 1996. Development of the Turnitin platform progressed over the next several years. The company introduced the Turnitin service in 1998, launched its precursor site Plagiarism.org to the public in April 1999, and released Turnitin.com more broadly in early 2000.