Intricacies of utilizing Turnitin tool in agricultural extension content writing in Nigeria

Abstract

The study analyzed how Turnitin misjudges semantics used in agricultural extension writing in Nigeria. The paper applied thematic content analysis on 30 selected extension contents from Nigerian sources. Codes, percentage count and line graph were used in analysing data. The results show the inability of Turnitin to recognize agricultural extension semantics, such as, “The study was designed to…”, and “The result shows that…” which were flagged most with 81.0 and 75.0% occurrence, respectively. The text similarity was highest in the methodology section of the work, followed by the literature review section for empirical papers while text similarity peaked in the main body of the paper for non-empirical papers. The paper concludes that Turnitin algorithm is a text matching tool that cannot recognize semantics used in extension in Nigeria. Manual review and/or recalculation of Turnitin text similarity index were recommended.      Key words: Extension content, plagiarism, integrity, intellectual property, text similarity Turnitin.