THE ETHICS OF WRITING A SCHOLARLY TEXT AND HOW TO CITE SOURCES USED

When writing your thesis, you will understandably use works (e.g. books, articles, etc.) by other authors. You should always make it clear what is your own text and what has been borrowed from others, i.e. you should always duly reference the source you have used in the form of a bibliographic citation.

Bibliographic citations should be part of every scholarly publication, and thus also of a university thesis. They consist of a description which unambiguously identifies a work which the author used when writing his or her text.

The obligation to uphold the ethics of citations is set out in the Copyright Act (Autorský zákon č. 121/2000) .

Plagiarism is considered to be:
•    the appropriation of someone else’s text and its publication under one’s own name;
•    the appropriation of an idea or result from someone else’s work without specifying the real author;
•    the appropriation of a portion of text or paragraphs without providing a bibliographic citation;
•    the appropriation of an original text and merely making stylistic adjustments;
•    the violation of academic ethics by using one’s own previous work without providing a requisite citation including authorship (self-plagiarism);
•    any form of hiring out the writing of a thesis (contract cheating).

The text of the thesis should be the author’s own original work. Thus, it is not possible to use AI tools to write parts of the text of a thesis.

Do not underestimate the risk, because it is very likely that you will be revealed:
a) by your thesis supervisor, or
b) by software tools for comparing texts which are used at universities including AMU.

Such conduct may also be considered a disciplinary offence or a violation of the AMU Code of Ethics.

WHERE TO FIND HELP

An aid for creating citations and the list of works cited is available HERE .

You can ask your thesis supervisor about it or enquire at the faculty library. Certain AMU faculty libraries have more detailed citation manuals available for students, which take into consideration the subject-area specifics of the art forms and disciplines taught at that faculty.

You can find a lot of information on citace.com , a website for generating citations. There are several synoptic, freely available reference manuals which explain in detail how to create bibliographic citations (e.g. for Czech the ČSN ISO 690 manual , 2011 version).