The article deals with the functioning of pronouns as elements in terms formation in the German language. The possibility of using such constructions is illustrated by the examples of texts on the humanities - linguistics, literary studies, philosophy and psychology. There are similarities and differences in the meaning of the same pronominal derivational elements depending on the belonging of a term to a particular scientific field. In the word formation of nouns, personal pronouns and the demonstrative pronoun selbst are mainly used. The material of the research is the German-language scientific and some popular scientific publications on the relevant topics.