[tropdrop]

FWIW Turnitin does treat things like quotes and footnotes a little differently on the academic side – on the instructor end, it simply gives you an estimation of the amount of text it found that has appeared somewhere else. Citations usually account for about 5-10% "potentially plagiarized" but anything below 10% is treated as fine by the software. You can always go check each of the sections and see if it's a quote or not; if you have a paper that consists of more than 10% quotes it's not a good paper anyway and should be revised.

I did have a very interesting case once of a student who copied and pasted someone's Master's thesis for sections of her paper, but also listed that thesis in the citations... it remains up to the jury (not me) to decide whether she just didn't understand what plagiarism was. I would not have known if Turnitin didn't mark it as 30% plagiarized.

Disclaimer: Someone more senior than I was in charge of the decision to use this software, but it was interesting to see it in action