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Guidelines for the Management of Theses and Course-Completion Related Plagiarism at the University of Oulu

Training material

Urkund.se/fi/

GOOD SCIENTIFIC PRACTICE AND THE URKUND SYSTEM

The University of Oulu has committed itself to complying with the guidelines of the National Advisory Board on Research Ethics for good scientific practice. One of the central goals of a research university is to guide its students to adopt the principles of high-quality scientific practice. The University of Oulu has drafted ethical guidelines for both teachers and students. Moreover, the University has guidelines for the management of proved cases of plagiarism. The latter guidelines are addressed to all members of the academic community and concern teachers as well as students.  The Urkund system is a software introduced at the University of Oulu in fall 2009 for the checking of bibliographic references and prevention of plagiarism.

The Urkund system conducts analyses of the materials submitted to it once in 24 hours. Besides public www pages, the system compares the target texts not only to texts in its own databases but also to texts in some protected databases of its partners such as ProQuest, DiVA (Digitala Vetenskapliga Arkivet), lustus, and Nationalencyklopedin. Thus, besides electronic materials, the Urkund system has access to an extensive corpus of published materials including scientific articles, newspaper articles, encyclopaedias, books, and database materials.  

The Urkund system compares the target documents with three sets of source materials:

• the Internet (approximately 10 billion pages)
• published materials
• student materials documents (more than 1.5 million pages in February 2009); Universities subscribing to URKUND