3 ms·

Off topic: Is it common practice for a dissertation at a German university to be written in English?

• DaiPlusPlus 6y ago
  Yes - to ensure the widest possible audience. English is the lingua-franca of academia and has been for almost a century now.
  • kleiba 6y ago
    At least in MINT fields, probably less so in the humanities. Correct me if I'm wrong.
    • atq2119 6y ago
      You're right. German economics is famously insular, for example. Part of that is cultural, part of it is that they don't write as much in English.
• kkaefer 6y ago
  Depends on the field, but it is very common in computer science and generally in natural sciences. Studying computer science, I don’t think I ever even wrote as much as a paper in German; everything’s English.
• kleiba 6y ago
  Hardly anyone is going to read, let alone cite your work if you were to publish in German. I'm not even aware of any German-speaking conferences.
• cozzyd 6y ago
  In physics it certainly is. As far as I know, much all scientific conferences and journals are in English these days. Even journals like JETP (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journal_of_Experimental_and_Theoretical_Physics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journal_of_Experimental_and_Th...) became joint English and Russian in the 50's!
• ggrrhh_ta 6y ago
  It is also common in many fields in Switzerland, Italy, Spain, ... Newton's Principia was written in Latin, for example and not in 18th century English.