iThenticate does not check for plagiarism in a submission. It checks a submission against the content database, and if there are instances where the submission's content is similar to, or matches against, one or more sources, it will be flagged for review. The database includes billions of web pages (both current and archived content), a repository of work that has been submitted to Turnitin in the past, a collection of documents, which comprises of thousands of periodicals, journals, publications, and CrossRef member content.
Many journal publishers do analyze submitted manuscripts using the iThenticate service, including American Physical Society (APS), IEEE, Springer-Nature Publishing, Elsevier, Public Library of Science (PLoS), and many others. The version of iThenticate that the publishers use is commonly called 'Similarity Check' (formerly CrossCheck) and is part of the publisher services that the DOI registration agency, CrossRef, offers as a value added benefit. When publishers register a DOI for a given article, they submit it for iThenticate similarity checking and also agree to add the published article to the iThenticate database. In this way, the iThenticate database of content being checked for similarity is continuously updated with new papers, proceedings, book chapters, and books.
If you wish to know whether a particular publication is included in the iThenticate database, visit the Search Scholarly Journals page, and type in the title of interest in the the ‘search scholarly journals’ box in the middle of the page (example shown below). If the database includes the journal, the results will display the name of the journal, the publisher, and the number of articles that iThenticate includes.
