Writing the Doctoral Thesis

There are no specific guidelines regarding the length and form of the doctoral thesis. Doctoral theses can be written as monographs or cumulative dissertations (collection of specialist articles). If you write a cumulative dissertation, please indicate your own contribution clearly.

Use of publications in scientific papers (cumulative scientific papers)

Since the use of images in scientific works repeatedly raises questions from a copyright point of view, the Studienpräses provides a checklist on the use of images and the guide for "Considering Copyright in Scientific Works" (both in German).

Assignment of a Thesis to Reviewers

You can assign your thesis to reviewers via the form assignment of thesis to reviewers (SL/D3).

With this form, you can propose three reviewers for the evaluation of your doctoral thesis. To enable an objective evaluation of your doctoral thesis, the proposed reviewers should not be close to your supervisor or workplace/subunit and should not be coauthors of your doctoral thesis.

You also have to submit an abstract (in English and German) for which you can use the template SL/D4 if you want to.

Please also send a CV and a list of publications of each of your proposed external reviewers to the SSC by email.

Information sheet for external reviewers

Two of the three proposed external reviewers will be selected.

Submission of the academic thesis

A prerequisite for the submission of the academic thesis is the approval of the topic and supervision (see Public Presentations at the Faculty), as well as the submission of the form "Regulations relating to good scientific practice" (see Public Presentations at the Faculty) .

The formal requirements for academic theses must be observed. For data protection reasons, no curriculum vitae or affidavit must be included.

Further information on the use of publications in academic theses can be found on the website of the office of the Studienpräses.

Submission procedure

  1. Start by uploading your thesis on u:space so that it can be checked for plagiarism. Once you have uploaded the document, you will receive an upload confirmation (“Hochladebestätigung”).
  2. If any textual similarities are detected between your work and other texts, the study program management will examine whether it constitutes plagiarism. Please do not proceed with printing your thesis until you have received feedback (via email to your u:account) confirming a successful plagiarism check. The printed version must exactly match the electronically submitted version.
  3. After a successful plagiarism check, you must submit the hard-bound copy of your thesis. You will need to present the upload confirmation (“Hochladebestätigung”) for this submission.
  4. For the submission of the dissertation, the following documents are required in addition to the upload confirmation:
    • Transcripts of all completed courses from the dissertation agreement (changes to the doctoral thesis agreement regarding courses must be announced in the annual progress reports)
    •  3 copies of the dissertation (these must be printed on both sides, hard bound and match the uploaded version)
    • Submission of the dissertation (form SL/D6)

Please note: From 05.03.2024, the digital version of the academic thesis has to be submitted via u:space.


Firstly, you need to review and verify the data in u:space that will be printed on the title page. This information is automatically loaded from university’s database and includes your name and academic degrees, as well as details regarding the supervision of your thesis.

Every thesis must contain a German abstract of at least 500 characters. The abstract is a brief summary of the central points of your thesis. Optionally, you can also include an English abstract.
Please note that depending on the curriculum, an additional obligatory foreign-language abstract may be required.

For the title page of the thesis, there are concrete specifications regarding the layout and the data listed. To ensure that your title page is correct in terms of form and content, the system in u:space will create it automatically from your data.

Please do not use a title page you have created yourself in advance, as this will not be accepted during the formal check.