Bibliography and quote exclusion definitions

For papers written in English

Excluding the bibliography

Turnitin's machine learning algorithm understands what elements of the paper to exclude from a submission and dynamically removes them from the Similarity Report. Users don't need to specify a specific bibliography section of their paper; we'll do that for you!

Beginning and terminating phrases are still used as a fall back in the rare event of our machine-learning algorithm is unavailable at the time of submission. You can resubmit your paper at a later date to take advantage of this advanced exclusion option.

Turnitin will detect the following keywords and disregard any matches between them:

Beginning phrases

  • work cited
  • works cited
  • citations
  • literature
  • literature cited
  • references and further reading
  • reference list
  • Resources Directory
  • additional reading
  • additional sources
  • annotated bibliography
  • article cited
  • bibliographic record
  • bibliographical references and notes
  • bibliography cited
  • citation
  • cited
  • cited articles
  • cited references
  • cited works
  • endnote
  • endnotes
  • footnote
  • footnotes
  • further information
  • further reading
  • key references
  • list of literature
  • list of references
  • literary sources
  • literature reviewed
  • literature used
  • literatures
  • literatures cited
  • previous work
  • previous works
  • published work
  • published works
  • reference notes
  • references and links
  • references index
  • references list
  • references section
  • referred articles
  • selected references
  • selected works
  • selective bibliography
  • sitography
  • source link
  • source list
  • sources
  • sources cited
  • used literature
  • used sources
  • works received
  • textbooks
  • reference
  • references
  • reference cited
  • references cited
  • reference and note
  • references and note
  • reference and notes
  • references and notes
  • reference & note
  • references & note
  • reference & notes
  • references & notes
  • resource
  • resources
  • bibliography

Terminating phrases

When the document reaches any of the following words in the paper, it will resume the similarity check:

  • appendix
  • appendices
  • glossary
  • table
  • tables
  • acknowledgment
  • acknowledgments
  • acknowledgement
  • exhibits
  • acknowledgements
  • figure
  • figures
  • chart
  • charts

Excluding citations

Turnitin will look for common in-line citation methods using our machine learning algorithm and remove them from the Similarity Report. Both the citation and associated text will be excluded. For quoted text, anything inside the quotes will be filtered out of the Similarity Report. For unquoted citations, the associated sentence will be filtered.

In the rare event that citation and reference detection is not working at the time of submission, Turnitin will default to header-based exclusion. Resubmit your paper at a later time to take advantage of our machine learning exclusions.

Excluding Quotes

Supported marks

Turnitin will disregard any matches that use the following quotation marks (as well as quotations within a quotation):

"..."

 '...' «...» »...« „…“ 《...》 〈...〉 『...』

If single quotes have not been excluded in a submission, it is possible that the word processor used to create the file has labeled the quotes as an apostrophe and will need to be manually excluded. This should not happen with Google, Microsoft, or Apple word processors.

Block quotations

Turnitin will exclude block quotation (an indented block of text) when the original file is a .doc or .docx file.