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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}