As academics we are not disposed to say “I know the world is round...”

The aim of this contribution is to present recent results of a contrastive quantitative study on the use of evidential markers in Russian and German historiographic texts, based on 40 research articles. As the data suggests, evidentiality is less frequently explicitly marked in Russian texts, and sources tend to be more often underspecified than in German texts, e.g. in referring to general knowledge by kak izvestno (‘as is commonly known’). The results will be discussed and related to earlier contrastive studies on academic discourse in Russian or other Slavonic languages. Specific conditions of historical writing – its position “between truth and fiction” – will also be considered here.