Plagiarism or not? investigation of Turnitin®-detected similarity hits in biology laboratory reports.

In undergraduate biology laboratory courses, laboratory reports can be a useful tool for teaching scientific writing, integration of source material, and information literacy; however, these teaching objectives are at times undermined by students' plagiarism. Laboratory instructors often use similarity-matching software to detect plagiarism in laboratory reports, yet similarity hits detected with such software remain poorly characterized. In the upper division molecular biology laboratory course described here, Turnitin® routinely detected dozens of similarity hits in laboratory reports.