Scope of examination papers

• Seminar papers at bachelor's level may comprise up to 35,000 characters (including spaces, excluding title page and bibliography) and at master's level up to 45,000 characters (including spaces, excluding title page and bibliography).
• Bachelor's theses should comprise approximately 70,000 to 80,000 characters (including spaces, excluding title page and bibliography), Master's theses up to 160,000 characters (including spaces, excluding title page and bibliography).
• All of these specifications refer to the text only, excluding the title page, table of contents, bibliography, and any data appendices.
• All specifications are guidelines and do not have to be adhered to exactly. A few pages more or less are not a problem. However, as a general rule, the greater the deviation (especially upward), the better your reasons must be, which you can explain during office hours, for example.

Literature research

• As part of your work, you must always demonstrate that you are familiar with and have a good command of the current literature in your field.
• Contributions from international journals with a peer review process are particularly important here. This means that all published articles have undergone a thorough, anonymous review process and are therefore highly likely to be of good academic quality.
• If you want to assess the quality of the journals yourself, the Handelsblatt ranking list will help you. You can find the list in the appendix to these guidelines.
• You can and should also use books and articles from edited volumes. However, you should make sure that you prefer sources from reputable academic publishers.
• Lecture notes, lecture slides, and similar materials are not useful sources.
• You should be extremely cautious with internet sources, newspapers, and magazines. These are generally only suitable for substantiating facts (e.g., company news, political decisions, quotes from public figures).
• Use academic internet databases for your literature research. The following are particularly suitable:
  • Business Source Premier / EconLit
  • WISO
  • Web of Science
  • scholar.google.com
• You can access the first three databases via the university library server; Google Scholar is freely accessible.

Stylistic guidelines

• Please use either Times New Roman as the font or, if you are writing in LaTeX, the cmr standard font. The standard font size is 12pt.
• Line spacing: 1.5.
• Margins: 2.5 cm at the top, left, and right; 2 cm at the bottom.
• There is no obligation to use gender-neutral language in the text.
• Seminar papers are usually distributed to all seminar participants. If you wish to keep your student ID numberconfidential, please do not include it on the title page of your seminar paper, but in the email in which you submit your paper.
• Seminar papers must be submitted only electronically as a PDF file via email. Bachelor's and master's theses must always be submitted also via email as a PDF file, in addition to the bound copies required by the examination regulations.
• In the bibliography, please follow the style of the following examples:
  • For journal articles:
  • Chetty, R., J.N. Friedman, T. Olsen & Luigi Pistaferri (2011). Adjustment Costs, Firm Responses, and Micro vs. Macro Labor Supply Elasticities: Evidence from Danish Tax Records. Quarterly Journal of Economics 126: 749-804.
  • For monographs:
  • Varian, H.R. (2010). Intermediate Microeconomics. A Modern Approach. 8th edition, New York and London: W.W. Norton & Company.
  • For contributions from anthologies:
  • Bovens, L. (2009). The Ethics of Nudge, in: T. Grüne-Yanoff & S.O. Hansson (eds.), Preference Change. Approaches from Philosphy, Economics and Psychology. New York and Berlin: Springer, 207–219.
  • For working papers in series:
  • Hillman, A.L. & H.W. Ursprung (2016). Where Are the Rent-Seekers? CESifo Working Paper 5833, Munich: CESifo.
  • For working papers without a series:
  • Hertwig, R. & M.D. Ryall (2016). Nudge vs. Boost: Agency Dynamics under ‘Libertarian Paternalism’, Working Paper, Toronto: University of Toronto.
  • Internet sources:
  • n.n. (2016). Abenomics: Overhyped, Underappreciated. What Japan's Economic Experiment Can Teach the Rest of the World. http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21702751-what-japans-economic-experiment-can-teach-rest-world-overhyped-underappreciated, last accessed on August 1, 2016.
  • Newspaper article:
  • Ockenfels, A. & M. Schmalz (2016). The silent threat to competition. Frankfurter Allgemeine ZeitungNo. 175, July 29, p. 18.
• To cite your sources in the text, please use the Harvard system. This system requires sources to be cited in the text rather than in footnotes. You can easily find out exactly how to format short references in this system online.
• This does not mean that it is completely forbidden to use footnotes. If, for example, you want to add supplementary comments to the main text, you can of course do so in footnotes. However, you should not use endnotes at all.
• Illustrations and tables should be embedded in the text. Only if tables are so extensive that this is not feasible should they be moved to an appendix.

How many sources do you need?

• There is no answer to this question. It is better not to ask it. You want to present a coherent, well-documented, and balanced line of argument in your academic paper. So you need as many sources as are necessary for your topic to achieve this goal. You have to find out for yourself how many and which sources these are. This is—along with the writing—the core of your task!
• As a general rule, every statement in your paper must be substantiated by a suitable source.
• Please remember that, in accordance with the BTU's examination regulations, we are obliged to respond to plagiarism with a grade of 5.0. Therefore, please cite all sources used and quote correctly!
• The following statement must be included on the last page of your paper, after the bibliography and appendices:
  
  Cottbus, on ... Signature of the author

The author declares that he/she has written this paper independently, without outside help and without using any resources other than those indicated. Any ideas taken directly or indirectly from external sources (including electronic sources) must be identified as such without exception. The paper has not been submitted in the same or a similar form or in excerpts as part of another examination.

How does the defense of final theses work?

• The defenses consist of a twenty-minute presentation by you, followed by a discussion with the examiners.
• The discussion can refer to all aspects of your thesis and should show that you are able to defend your work against critical objections.
• Make sure that you do not take more than twenty minutes! Do not make too many slides, and do a trial run! The presentation should summarize the core theses of your thesis.

What else should you keep in mind?

• Start working in good time. When you are taking your first steps in academic writing, you will rarely be able to write more than one page per day of acceptable quality!
• Remember that, as a rule, only a third of your time should be spent on the actual writing, with the rest devoted to literature research. This includes searching databases, reading sources, and organizing sources. Which sources refer to each other? Which arguments build on which other arguments? Who criticizes what? And so on.
• The correct order for your work plan:
  • Literature research
  • Reading
  • Organizing the initial sources
  • Creating an outline for the paper
  • More literature research, more reading, and filling in gaps
  • Writing
  • More literature research, more reading
  • Continue writing
  • Take a two-day break
  • Read your work thoroughly and ask yourself whether there is a clear thread running through it
  • Writing: Revision
  • Take another day off
  • Read everything again and make further minor corrections
  • Hand it in and relax
• When writing, remember that the primary goal of an academic paper is to demonstrate convincingly that you
  • have familiarized yourself with a subject area independently
  • have gained an overview of this subject area independently
  • you have taken note of and understood the most important arguments of the relevant contributions
  • you are able to summarize, weigh up, and critically question these arguments in your own words.
• If you are still unsure, try one of the numerous guides to academic writing, e.g. M.R. Theisen (2013). Wissenschaftliches Arbeiten. Erfolgreich bei Bachelor- und Masterarbeit. 16th, completely revised edition, Munich: Vahlen.