Guidelines for Written Theses

The guidelines posted below should be used for all written work at the Chair of East Asian Art History. Only the English version is currently available. If you have any questions, please contact the research assistants at the Chair of East Asian Art History.

Every submitted paper must be accompanied by a signed Statement of Independent Work. If submitted electronically, the declaration must be signed, scanned and sent with the work or submitted later.

By signing the Statement of Independent Work, the author confirms that the generally applicable citation rules have been followed.

See also theKHIST Guidelines (PDF, 212 KB) (in German, "5. Umgang mit Quellen und mit Ergebnissen anderer Verfasser*innen").

Academic ethics require that intellectual creations, ideas, or theories of others be identified through quotations, even if they are merely paraphrased in the text.
Certain disciplines have specific citation rules that must be observed when writing academic texts. This requirement generally does not apply to "encyclopedic knowledge," i.e., basic knowledge that can be assumed generally known in the field. However, if a specific presentation of this handbook knowledge is taken from other authors (e.g., from a textbook), this must be declared.

It goes without saying that the same work (or parts of it) cannot be submitted by the author for different credits (so-called "self-plagiarism").

Plagiarism is the complete or partial adoption of another person's work without citing the source or author. (Adapted from the "Guidelines for Dealing with Plagiarism," issued on April 30, 2007, by the University of Zurich Teaching Committee.)

The following actions constitute plagiarism in the broader sense (seeunijournal 4/2006, article by Prof. Christian Schwarzenegger (in German)):

• The author adopts text portions from another person's work without citing the source. This includes, in particular, the use of text portions from the internet without citing the source.
• The author adopts text portions from another person's work and makes slight adjustments and rearrangements (paraphrasing) without citing the source.
• The author translates foreign-language texts or parts of foreign-language texts and presents them as their own without citing the source (translation plagiarism).
• The author submits a work commissioned by another person ("ghostwriting") under their own name.
• The author submits another person's work under their own name (full plagiarism).
• The author takes parts of another person's text, paraphrasing them if necessary, and cites the corresponding source, but not in the context of the adopted part(s) of the text (example: hiding the plagiarized source in a footnote at the end of the work).