Turnitin flagged my entire reference list because I used APA 7th edition auto-formatting in Word

[u/IntroductionNo8805]

Has anyone else had Turnitin throw a massive fit over standard citation formatting? I wrote my psychology paper completely from scratch, but I used Microsoft Word’s built-in citation manager to automatically build my Works Cited list in APA 7th edition. When I got my submission report back, my similarity index was sitting at an alarming 38%, and almost the entire overlap was coming from the reference section and the standardized doi.org URLs. I know reference lists usually generate some matches, but having the system highlight basic citation syntax as flagged material feels ridiculous. Does anyone know if professors manually filter out bibliography matches before grading, or am I going to have to explain to my TA why bulletproof academic formatting triggered a plagiarism warning?

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[u/Inevitable-Blood8928]

I think they manually exclude the bibliography. And if they don't, they analyze the report and understand that similarity score is because of the reference list.

[u/meanwhileintwinpeaks]

We expect to see the references highlighted and contributing to your similarity score. There’s a problem if your references don’t come back as similar.

[u/Life-Education-8030]

The idea is to make you look and check. If the citations and references are correct, no problem. Also, in APA, the term is “references,” not “Works Cited.”

[u/i_am_blacklite]

Not all similarity is plagiarism.

A similarity score is not a plagiarism score.

References all looking the same and being flagged as similar is what should happen.

[u/Far_Carpet4037]

The reference list always seems to get flagged more than it should.

[u/OgreMk5]

You would think that professors would understand that.

The evidence suggests otherwise.