Scientific Communication CITS7200

Lecture 13Writing a Thesis

• A thesis is an unusually long paper containing a detailed discussion of a unifying hypothesis regarding the work you have undertaken in your research

• A thesis is a proposition to be maintained or proved

• A hypothesis is a proposition made as a basis for reasoning without the assumption of its truth; a supposition made as a starting point for further investigation

• A PhD thesis shall be a substantial and original contribution to scholarship, for example, through the discovery of knowledge, the formulation of theories, or the innovative re-interpretation of known data and established ideas

• A thesis must describe your own work and thinking

• A thesis must demonstrate that you can work independently, accurately, and critically

• Before you start, check the regulations

• Use CS&SE Honours styleguide

• Plan your writing• Start early• Collect all data from all experiments

and format for inclusion• Collect all bibliographic information

at time of reading• Write synopses when you read

• Keep records as you go along, and date them

• Do systematic work• Don’t claim precision where

it is not justified• Don’t present a conjecture as a fact• Don’t plagiarise• Don’t falsify records or cook up data

• Keep backups of all work• Don’t underestimate the amount of

time writing takes

The form of a thesis

• Title Page

The Title of My Thesis

M. Y. Surname

This report is submitted as partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Honours Programme

of the School of Computer Science & Software

EngineeringThe University of Western Australia

2006

• Acknowledgements

• Thank those who helped you, and acknowledge any financial help

• Abstract

• “an abbreviated, accurate representation of the contents of a document, without added interpretation or criticism and without distinction as to who wrote the abstract”.

• An informative abstract answers, in about 100 - 250 words, the following questions: – Why did you start? – What did you do, and how? – What did you find? – What do your findings mean?

• If your paper is about a new method, the last two questions might be replaced with: – What are the advantages of the

method? – How well does it work?

• Preface (optional)• Contents • List of Figures• List of Tables

• Chapter 1. Introduction • Give an overview of the problem

and state the hypothesis that your thesis presents

• Chapter 2. Review of the literature

• Present previous work in this area that is relevant to the approach you have taken or that makes a complete story

• Chapter 3. Methods • Describe the methods and

materials of your work. This might be: – the details of existing theory, – mathematical developments, – experimental procedures, and – details about equipment

• Chapter 4 to n. Results • Give the experiments you conducted

and the results you found• Introduce each experiment with the

particular hypothesis you were testing in that experiment

• Give the results clearly in tables or graphs, and discuss how they relate to the hypothesis

• Chapter n+1. Discussion and Conclusion

• Draw together all your results and discuss how they relate to the unifying hypothesis from the Introduction

• Bibliography • Appendices

Latex stuff

• \documentclass[12pt, a4paper]{book}

• %preamble setting up formatting details

• \parindent 0pt • \parskip 5pt • \renewcommand{\baselinestretch}

{1.5}

• \begin{document} • \begin{titlepage} %design of title page

here

• \end{titlepage} • \pagenumbering{roman} • \tableofcontents

• \chapter{Title of first chapter} \pagenumbering{arabic}

• \input{chap1} • \chapter{Title of second chapter}• \input{chap2} %Continue until all chaps are

included

• \bibliographystyle{plain}• \bibliography{refs} • \end{document}

• Not that with the \input command, the file is not stand-alone Latex

• You can intersperse \input commands with other text

• Page numbering and cross-referencing is not handled correctly

\chapter{Introduction}There are two sections to this

chapter:\input{firstsection}\input{secondsection}

You can see from the really complexfigure in Figure~\ref{complex} that mytheory is better than yours.

\begin{figure}\input{myfigure1}\caption{My complex figure.}\label{complex}\end{figure}

\documentclass{…}

\begin{document}\include{firstfile}\include{secondfile}…\include{lastfile}\end{document}

\documentclass{…}\includeonly{secondfile}\begin{document}\include{firstfile}\include{secondfile}…\include{lastfile}\end{document}

\includeonly{firstbit,lastbit}