Prevention of Plagiarism in Academic Papers

Plagiarism – the word-for-word appropriation or paraphrasing of entire passages without source attribution – makes it impossible to grade an academic paper as a student’s own work. Plagiarism leaves the origin of the knowledge and how the student acquired it in doubt and precludes an academic discussion. Plagiarism violates intellectual property rights.

The Department of Sociology strives to prevent plagiarism and to detect instances of plagiarism in submitted work, and to initiate appropriate actions in suspected cases of plagiarism.

All papers submitted to the Department of Sociology must therefore include a signed declaration of authorship. Use the declaration of authorship provided in the templates for papers submitted by students (German).

Papers that contain plagiarized passages will be outright rejected. If a student attempts to attain a qualifying academic achievement by fraud and if parts or all of the paper submitted have been plagiarized, the paper will be reported to the appropriate authorities and the university will initiate disciplinary proceedings, if so warranted.