Paper rejected after plagiarism detector stumped by references

...and you think this is exclusive to academe? The big consultancy firms have been selling this idea to large corporations for years. Mostly used in purchasing the accountants like it because it removes any professional judgement, skill and expensive people. Because they control the data, they can prove how much they appear to have saved. Beware - nobody noticed in the commercial world - robots have no sense of value.

It also gets in the way of integrating assessment across a course. Say you have a final year project module and one about testing running concurrently. So the lecturer writing the testing module invites students to use their project in their testing coursework, empowering them to apply their new-learned testing skills to a real piece of work. Great you might think... until they write their project reports and naturally wish to explain how they tested their work. All Turnitin's bells go off at once! Of course this is an opportunity to teach the students about 'self-plagiarism' and the need to reference things that they themselves have written elsewhere - but it's just as well this was spotted in time to give them the necessary guidance BEFORE they handed in their reports :)