This paper investigates the linguistic means used to express general scientific activity above the level of an individual word. The corpus approach and the contrastive method are used to analyze typical and characteristic, general scientific VERB + NOUN collocations of the Croatian language and compare them with collocations in the German general scientific language. The aim is to find out how VERB + NOUN collocations are positioned within euristic structures of scientific language, and finally to assign the collocations to the corresponding type of general scientific language activity. General scientific collocations are an important part of everyday scientific communication, primarily written. A bilingual list of isolated translation equivalents of transdisciplinary VERB + NOUN collocations in Croatian and German (e.g., use (scientific) sources ‘(wissenschaftliche) Quellen heranziehen’, use arguments ‘Argumente heranziehen’, apply the approach ‘einen wissenschaftlichen Ansatz’) has been compiled to meet the needs of Croatian authors in scientific writing. Furthermore, a contrastive approach is used to compile a list and provide a description of VERB + NOUN collocations through which eristic structures of scientific communication are realized, focusing on the most important interlingual differences and problems arising in the scientific writing of native Croatian speakers. The results of the research also have implications for native speakers of Croatian language who publish their scientific research in the Croatian language as they provide insight into the application of VERB + NOUN collocations in contemporary scientific language. The results of the analysis also show that there is a lack of contrastive research on the lexico–syntagmatic level and interlingual comparisons of individual aspects of the two scientific languages.