Understanding Similarity Score

What is the similarity percentage?

The similarity percentage shown in the downloadable plagiarism reports a user can access is an evaluation of their submitted document and texts originality. The similarity percentage gauges how similar is your text to other texts that it is matched against. The target sources that it is matched against includes more than 16 billion public access and online sources when checking with the Online Plagiarism feature of the software.

A high similarity report means that the originality of the text is low because a large portion of it is the same as other sources available online in the form of various types of publications.

What does the similarity score mean?

If the similarity percentage says 0% then that means that the submitted document or text is not similar to any of the 16+ billion sources it was scanned against. Instead, if the score says 100% that it means that all of the text matches one or more sources that it was checked against to detect plagiarism.

The lower the score, the more originality your writing has.

What Percentage of Plagiarism is Acceptable?

Any amount of plagiarism is not okay. There is no definitive limit or similarity score that is considered unacceptable as each university, college, publisher etc. has their own range that they consider acceptable. One college may have 10 % similarity as the maximum amount of similarity that can be accepted in student assignments and another could have it as 20%. A general practice and range is that any amount above 20% is considered to be unacceptable.