Citation & plagiarism detection
Quoting serves to protect intellectual property. A literal or analogous quotation is intended to indicate the author or source of information in a comprehensible manner. This also proves that the topic has been dealt with comprehensively and that the relevant literature has been taken note of. This information is an important part of the cooperation between scientists. Citations are references for argumentation and interpretation.
Citation styles (Output Styles) for theses of our faculty
The guidelines of the Mannheim Medical Faculty for citing in theses can be found in the guidelines for writing a doctoral thesis (PDF file), see the Faculty's doctoral page > Dr. med. or Dr. sc. hum. > section Writing the dissertation (in German). The formats of the journals Cell (author-year-principle) or Journal of the American Society of Nephrology (numerical principle) should be used; papers submitted to the ZI should be formatted according to the rules of the APA Style.
Notes:
As the above mentioned formats do not exactly implement the faculty's guidelines for citing theses from our faculty as well as from websites, the Output Styles have been revised and are available for download on the library's EndNote page in the section Output Styles for theses.
The citation styles prescribed by the medical faculty were designed by the Heidelberg University Library for Citavi, see the list item UMM: (in German).
Plagiarism
On the web page Detecting Plagiarism the University Library offers information on the licensed program Turnitin Similarity, which is only available to authorized examiners!
At relatively low costs, students can use the following tools, among others, which experts consider to be at least of limited use (see e.g. the Plagiarism Portal https://plagiat.htw-berlin.de/start-en/ > Links Plagiarism EN)
- PlagScan: www.plagscan.com
- PlagAware: www.plagaware.com/, 2016 recommended in the CHIP practical test "Plagiarism check".
In both cases you can buy credits, the cost of which depend on the number of pages to be checked.
The respective websites describe, among other things, which sources are used for comparison in order to find identical fragments of texts.
Consulting, Training Courses
If you have any questions about citation, you can arrange a personal consultation appointment online via our Book-a-Librarian offer.
In the two-part doctoral training course you will gain insight into scientific work:
- Part 1: Formal, organisational and content framework
- Part 2: Literature research and management- usually the course language is German; please ask for English language courses