Some Guidelines for Writing a Thesis

Jessica Chen-Burger

06 November 2018

This document provides a few suggestive guidelines for a MSc/PhD student when producing a thesis for CISA, Informatics, The University of Edinburgh.

Note:

If you are working on a PhD thesis, before you start to write a thesis, you should firstly think about what are your contributions to the field – or claims of your thesis. For example, what have you done to add knowledge to the field? What istheinnovativeness about your work? Have you done something that others have not? Do not only discuss about the innovation that you have provided, but also justify it in terms of its usefulness – e.g. based on your new techniques, can people now carry out new tasks that previously can not?

These claims are the central idea of your thesis and your entire thesis should be written to illustrate how you can make those claims. Such claims should also be clearly described in your introduction, evaluation and conclusion chapters.

In your evaluation chapter, make sure that you design an appropriate evaluation framework that uses theoretical methods and/or empirical experiments to evaluate your system and therefore justify each one of your claims.

Outline of a Thesis:

A MSc/PhD thesis may consist of some of the below components (i.e. preambles, chapters, and appendixes) and in the following sequence:

  • Abstract (a compulsory preamble) – 2-3 paragraphs
  • Acknowledgement (preamble, optional) - 1-2 sentences
  • Dedication (preamble, optional) – 1-2 sentences
  • Introduction – 5-8 pages
  • Why this is an important problem? Trends in today’s world.
  • How AI/computer science may help resolve this problem?
  • Your research questions: e.g.
  • I believe technology X can resolve problem y
  • I believe by coming technology X and Y can improve the Z quality in the W domain
  • Problem and Motivation – 5-6 pages
  • A brief description of current research (without going into details, one or 2 sentences for mentioned relevant research topic)
  • A brief descriptions on gaps in the current research areas that you propose to fill
  • A brief descriptions on how you plan to fill this gap.
  • Literature review 10-15 pages
  • Work that has been used as a foundation for your work to be improved upon
  • Related work
  • The field that you are working within
  • how other people’s work is related to your work, and when appropriate point out briefly the motivation for your work (e.g. gap to be filled, problems to be solved, issues un-addressed)
  • In each of the literature review, you may also point out the gap in their research and how you address this gap.
  • Conceptual framework of your work 5-8 pages
  • Re-iterate the research gap briefly and then propose your conceptual framework
  • Steps of your algorithems
  • The system that you have built: 20 pages
  • Requirements for your system,
  • Design of your system,
  • Which data source that you plan to work on
  • Which techniques that you plan to utilise
  • Why choose them?
  • What are they used for?
  • Technical details of your system, and
  • Inc. programming languages, databases, computational platforms, used, etc.
  • Any technical difficulties overcome.
  • An example application of your system (e.g. using user scenarios)
  • How to use your system, given an example case study, inc. procedures to use the system, screen shots, if any.
  • Evaluation of your system: 10-15 pages
  • List your research questions above and address each one of them directly in each of your evaluation mechanism. E.g. I have done X to address the research question Y.
  • Provide an overview of the evaluation framework, inc.
  • What data has been used
  • What user groups (for testing) have been involved? (if any)
  • Why do you choose such data?
  • What are the case studies?
  • Why do you choose such user groups?
  • What is the evaluation process? Human interview? Questionnaires?
  • How did you carry out analysis and draw your conclusions?
  • What are the conclusions? Do they fully address the originally proposed research questions? If not, why not?
  • Compared with other similar systems in your area (if possible)
  • Conclusion and Future work: 10 pages
  • Briefly summarise the problem that you have tried to address, what you have done and the conclusions that you drawn.
  • Evaluate how well your chosen technologies and your improved approach have addressed the research problem.
  • Point out additional work that others may do in this area.
  • Appendix, e.g. 15-20 pages
  • A list of your publications during your PhD studies
  • (Example) input data used,
  • Representation issues/ and example of instances (of data),
  • (Partial) important program codes,
  • Important rules/axioms,
  • Illustration of use of system.

The thesis may be about 60-80(MSc/PhD) pages, excluding appendix. Diagrams of conceptual design, system architecture and other illustrative diagrams that provide intuitive representation to a complex domain are strongly encouraged. The thesis should be written in good English and presentation structure. The author should check and correct all spelling and grammar errors. The format of the thesis is defined in a latex style file that is provided by Informatics.

Advice on the Introduction and Conclusion chapter:

  • The introduction chapter should provide a concise summary of the dissertation. Content to be included are the problems addressed, the importance of such problems, existing works and their shortfalls; which will naturally lead to the rationale as why a particular method was chosen by you and reported upon in the thesis (and why it is suitable for this problem domain). It should also include a brief description of the work conducted, experiment results, comparisons with other work, your contribution to the field and conclusions. I will recommend this chapter to be ideally between 8 – 10 pages. Ideally, the Introduction chapter is written last when you have an overview of the entire thesis.
  • Conclusion chapter is also a concise summary of the thesis, but it emphasiseson results and therefore gives more details on the conclusionsof your work, analysis of your results, contribution of your work comparing with existing work, lessons learned,way forwards for other people if they were to continue your work, etc.

Advice on graphical presentation:

  • Keep focused: it is recommended that captions are kept to describe only the details of the indicated graphs. The definitions of formulas and conceptual issues are best described in the main text of the thesis.
  • Keep it short: captions of graphs should not be too long, e.g. given in several sentences. It is better that those texts are shortened and their concepts worked into the main text so that the main text flows well in explaining its main thread of thoughts while using the figures to help its arguments.
  • Keep it large: keep all textual and graphical information large enough so that the reader can easily read the text within the graph.

Writing a formula:

  • Explain each notation or convention that you have used in a formula;
  • Explain the detail of each formula that you have introduced;
  • Give each formula an ID, so that you can easily refer to them in the text.

Writing about an experiment:

  • Data Sets: Where have you gotten those input data sets for experiments? How do you know that they are representative and/or realistic? If you were getting these data sets from real life, how they may be collected?
  • A few main components are needed to be described: (1) the assumption of your method, (2) the rational for designing your method, (3) a detailed description of your methodology.
  • How did you conduct these experiments? Did you use several software packages? What are the input and output data? What are they related in your experiments? What language did you use? Did you set up web services during the experiments?
  • Provide example screen shots of the tool together with supporting descriptions, when appropriate.

Before you submit the thesis, run through a few checks and look for obvious mistakes, e.g.

  • Check that all chapter, session titles are coherent: capitalise the first letter of each “important” word,
  • Check that table, figures titles are coherent where they are mentioned in the thesis,
  • Spelling check the entire thesis,
  • Check for English grammar,
  • Each chapter should start from an odd page,
  • Each paragraph should contain at least 3 sentences,
  • Make sure that Chapter 1 reports a summary of all the work that you have done,
  • Make sure that the Conclusion Chapter reports a summary of your work and important findings that you have discovered. You may also suggest future work here,
  • Give your tool a name, if it is an extension of an existing tool, make it obvious in the thesis about the part of work that you have done to it,
  • If a diagram is a screenshot of your tool, indicate that in the title of the diagram, so that it is clear that you have implemented that tool,
  • Make sure all of the diagrams are readable when printed. If a diagram is far to large/complex to present clearly then consider breaking it into smaller diagrams, or only showing parts of it, otherwise enlarge it as far as possible,
  • Look out for and correct any other obvious errors, e.g. formatting errors that the reader can easily spot them without carefully reading the thesis.