Plagiarism
Plagiarism constitutes the intentional copying of another author's text and the
representation and publication of such a test as one's own original work, careless
or inaccurate citation of source literature and/or the omission of required
bibliographical information (however unintentional). In order to be able to write
specialized texts during the course of one's studies, it is essential to understand
citation norms and publishing ethics. The most commonly used citation styles
including the ISO bibliographic referencing standard (ISO 690) are explained in
the Citation Style Handbook (Czech only).
Sanctions for plagiarism are determined by the Copyright Act. With respect to
studies and the production of Bachelor's, Master's and Doctoral final theses or
other works produced during the course of studies, plagiarism constitutes a
violation of core academic ethics and as such is included among misdemeanours in
all faculty disciplinary codes.
The following sanctions may be inflicted for disciplinary misdemeanours:
admonition, exclusion from studies on probation and – in cases where a
misdemeanour has been carried out intentionally – unconditional exclusion from
studies.
Plagiarism Detection at MU
Plagiarism itself is inextricably linked to the issue of plagiarism detection. Potential
plagiarism at Masaryk University is being detected with the aid of a specialized
application implemented directly in the MU Information System. The plagiarism
detection application functions on the basis of comparing a new document to
documents already included in an existing database. The “find similar documents”
function locates documents with similar content, thus indicating potential
plagiarism. This tool may be used by teachers, administrative staff and students
alike.
While essays and other assignments may be checked by users individually using
either the Homework Vault application (a folder designed for the automated
collection of assigned coursework) or the personalized Web and File Depository
applications, final theses are inspected directly in the MU theses archiv,
generally by the thesis supervisor. The thesis or dissertation supervisor is
responsible for checking a thesis in accordance with section 38 of the MU Study
and Examination Regulations; this section also sets out the obligation to publish all
final theses. The University Repository, which stores and archives full-text
publications produced by MU scientists, is also capable of identifying textual
similarities.
The matching algorithm is constantly improving, resulting in an ever-expanding
database of comparable documents. This database contains texts produced at
schools which use the system for plagiarism detection in the case of final and
graduation theses (Theses.cz), seminar papers, final secondary school essays and
other documents (Odevzdej.cz) and habilitation theses and other scientific
publications (Repozitar.cz).
The system compares individual documents with the contents of data repositories
and other online sources.