Plagiarism

It is considered plagiarism if text or ideas from other works (books, journals, the Internet, etc.) are adopted or translated without proper citation in your scientific paper and thus falsely passed off as your own intellectual achievement.

The use of third-party content must be labelled as follows:

• in each individual case and to the exact extent and stating the source actually used,
• in the case of text passages, directly following the adopted text part (a reference to the source, e.g. at the end of a paragraph that also contains own text or text parts from other sources, is not sufficient),
• regardless of the type of source (e.g. journal article, website, book, conference paper, primary source, secondary literature) and regardless of the the extent of the borrowing, i.e. regardless of whether the content has been used in full or in part, identically or modified, literally, analogously or translated.

This is to ensure that it is clear what has been developed by the author of the term paper or thesis and what has been developed by others.

The department strictly and surely penalises any and all attempts to plagiarise. Instructors will screen all written academic performance assessments when and if they are suspected of containing plagiarised text. It is therefore necessary to submit all seminar papers and theses also in electronic form (pdf or docx). The plagiarism detection software Turnitin is used at the faculty to prevent attempts at cheating and to make it easier to detect disregard for the principles of good scientific practice.

Every case of plagiarism will be reviewed and ruled on by the examination board. This process will make it easier to detect cases where a student has attempted to repeatedly plagiarise text. Submitted work that has been identified to include plagiarised text will be graded as “fail” (5,0). 

Submitted work that includes plagiarised text will be graded as “fail” (5,0). The examination board will decide on further consequences for plagiarism violations. Depending on the severity of the violation, the board can make the following decisions:

• The student will have to repeat a single or several academic performance assessments.
• The student’s academic performance assessments that led to a violation will be graded with “fail” (5,0), which will factor into the final grade calculation. Or the assessment or assessment component will be graded as failed.
• In cases of serious violations, the examination board can disqualify students from repeating an academic performance assessment. As a general rule, this will lead to the complete forfeiture of the right to take an examination.

When submitting written assessments, all students are required to sign a declaration of authorship that confirms that their work was produced through independent means. The declaration form can be downloaded from the blue info-box on on this website.

The department attaches great importance to compliance with the high standards of academic work. In order to prevent attempts at deception (plagiarism) and to make it easier to detect disregard for the principles of good scientific practice, the plagiarism detection software Turnitin is in use.

All students are encouraged to voluntarily upload their thesis to Turnitin. In the blue box on this page you will find the instructions for uploading your thesis to Turnitin.

Important: To upload your thesis to Turnitin, you need a link, which you can obtain from your first supervisor.