Usage analysis of system for theses acquisition and plagiarism detection

Abstract The national project of The Central Register of the Theses has started in 2008. The project serves as an integrating system for acquisition, archiving and plagiarism detection of the theses from academic information systems of Slovak universities. The first phase of its development has been devoted to the tasks accompanying the processes of acquisition and archiving electronic versions of theses. The national character of the project requires unification of processes associated with theses writing, plagiarism detection and acquisition final versions of the theses from different universities in Slovak republic. The universities, like primary users of this system, have had to adapt their own processes associated with writing, acquisition and archiving of electronic versions of the theses. These inevitable changes have naturally raised many students’ and academic staff’s questions at universities. The same situation has happened at the Constantine the Philosopher University in Nitra and has led to the development of the helpdesk designed for all stakeholders. The helpdesk has provided relevant and digestedly prepared tutorials and discussion forum about abovementioned changes. The activities of the users have been monitored for the purpose of their further processing and identification of the weaknesses of the theses writing, plagiarism detection and acquisition at the university level. The usage analysis of the presented helpdesk and the segmentation method of its users are discussed in detail in the paper. The segmentation method is based on the monitoring of the users’ activities in discussion forums, their searching techniques in available information sources and in posting questions about theses finalization, acquisition and archiving. The authors analyse some aspects of their behavior and discuss interesting findings of the usage analysis of the helpdesk. They give several recommendations for changes in the stakeholder awareness and in the structure of published information materials.