Jason Arday's PhD Turnitin Report

Aug 02, 2026

Below is a linked PDF of what happens if you run Jason Arday’s PhD through Turnitin. Turnitin is a proprietary plagiarism checker that is used by most universities in the UK. Basically, it scans documents and compares them to its own large database of publications and theses as well as work submitted through its system at other universities around the world.

Turnitin isn’t perfect. It doesn’t catch everything. It can think it has caught plagiarism when it hasn’t: sometimes it mistakes common or idiomatic phrases for plagiarism; it always thinks there is plagiarism even if a source’s words have been put in quotation marks with a correct citation. It also always thinks there is a lot of plagiarism in bibliographic materials simply where two essays legitimately cite the same source in the same way. As academics, we tend not to use Turnitin as a final judge, but more as a diagnostic tool. It allows for a quick scan of work to see if there is anything fishy, and then we can follow up by hand, checking the text against sources ourselves.

There are some interesting results here. Alongside the plagiarism from Zwozdiak-Myers, which has been reported in the press, there is substantial plagiarism from a range of other sources including a PhD thesis by Christina P. Ligadu at the University of Wollongong. There is also a lot of plagiarism from sources by academics in the field, and in particular Arday seems to have borrowed liberally from various handbooks (for non-academics, a handbook is a publication where various thinkers in a field contribute definitive articles on a set topic.)

Most people outside of the academy don’t do plagiarism checking. So here are a few pointers for things that are important to note. The highlighted sections are all copied from some other place. They are numbered and those numbers refer to a list that is at the end of the PDF that gives a source. So you can go and look at where the words are from and compare it to the original if you are that way inclined. For plagiarism checks, the standard procedure would be for us to go and look at that original for each case.

It is quite usual to paraphrase in academic writing. However, there is a general expectation that if you use someone else’s words verbatim you put them in quotation marks or present them as a block quote (an indented paragraph with a citation following). Paraphrasing does not mean taking someone else’s words verbatim and sprinkling in tiny edits to make it look different in order to avoid plagiarism checks. In general, there is no real problem with including lots of quotations in academic work as long as they are critically contextualised, and it is striking that Arday actually gives very few quotations, instead presenting other people’s words as his own.

The large blocks of verbatim copying we see in Arday’s thesis are not normal. Nobody in academia would consider this normal, despite the conclusion of Cambridge and Liverpool John Moore’s that this is not academic misconduct. I am posting this because I think it is helpful for people to be able to see clearly why lots of academics are freaked out by the denial of issues here. A Turnitin report that looks like this rings every single alarm bell for people used to looking at them. Arday has argued that “if anyone’s academic work had been subjected to as much scrutiny it would show similar errors.” This is simply untrue. The report linked below is genuinely unusual.

There is one other thing to note: because this scan is new, it has matched also against sources newer than the thesis. This means that where anyone has subsequently quoted Arday’s thesis, the report will falsely suggest there is plagiarism. Luckily, Arday’s thesis has not been quoted much. Google Scholar says that it has received just four citations in published work (this is quite normal: PhDs are often not cited much.) However, the report did turn up a >1% match with a PhD thesis by Shatha Hamdan Alghamdi from Glasgow. It seems that she was plagiarising Arday’s thesis in her own, as she does not cite him and this similarity score for a single source in a PhD thesis is very high. The churn is real.

Some notes on how this PDF was prepared: I ran the Turnitin check on August 1st 2026. It matched 100% with Arday’s own thesis, which is part of he Turnitin database, so I filtered this out. Similarly, the thesis matched multiple copies of Zwozdiak-Myers’ PhD Thesis in the Turnitin database, from which large chunks were plagiarised, so I filtered out all but one of these. The report was then downloaded, and subsequently I ran text recognition on a low grade free online service (Turnitin reports download as images). I then stripped out the metadata because you have no business knowing who I am.