According to the above-mentioned copyright law, you should cite sources used. In this way you avoid plagiarism, i.e. taking over information from another work without stating it. You plagiarise if…
Regardless of the extent of an idea that you have drawn on (a word, sentence, paragraph, etc.), you are obliged to cite it so that the reader knows from what source the respective information comes.
As an example of plagiarism in the Czech Republic, we can mention the so-called Pilsner law school scandal. During this scandal it was found that one of the students copied his work from another student, and as a result his bachelor’s degree was revoked.
Plagiarism also happens if you present the results of someone else’s research without properly stating it, or if you do not mention that other scholars participated in your own research.
In 2009, the case of professor Scott J. M. Weber from the Pittsburgh School of Nursing was revealed. In some of his articles, the professor passed off certain research results as his own, although they had already been published earlier.
When quoting from a source verbatim, you must graphically set such a passage apart from your own text regardless of whether it is a word, sentence or a larger part of a text. The cited passage should be marked by inverted commas and often the font style is different as well (italics, another size, etc.). In practice, a citation of a larger extent is usually given in a separate paragraph written in a different type or size of font.
Modifying the original text stylistically is also considered to be plagiarism, e.g. replacing a word with a synonym, changing the word order, etc. Such breach of copyright may often not even be the author’s intention, but rather his language inaptitude when he intends to paraphrase a part of the text more briefly. Finally, it emerges that the original text had already been formed so skilfully that the author basically only copied it and changed a couple of words or phrases.
