Some Guidelines for Writing a Thesis
Jessica Chen-Burger
16 February 2016
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 is the
innovativeness 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:
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Abstract (a compulsory preamble) – 2-3 paragraphs
Acknowledgement (preamble, optional) - 1-2 sentences
Dedication (preamble, optional) – 1-2 sentences
Introduction – 5-8 pages
o Why this is an important problem? Trends in today’s world.
o How AI/computer science may help resolve this problem?
o 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
o A brief description of current research (without going into details, one
or 2 sentences for mentioned relevant research topic)
o A brief descriptions on gaps in the current research areas that you
propose to fill
o A brief descriptions on how you plan to fill this gap.
Literature review 10-15 pages
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o Work that has been used as a foundation for your work to be improved
upon
o Related work
o The field that you are working within
o 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)
o 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
o Re-iterate the research gap briefly and then propose your conceptual
framework
o Steps of your algorithems
The system that you have built: 20 pages
o Requirements for your system,
o 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?
o Technical details of your system, and
 Inc. programming languages, databases, computational
platforms, used, etc.
 Any technical difficulties overcome.
o 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
o Briefly summarise the problem that you have tried to address, what
you have done and the conclusions that you drawn.
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o Evaluate how well your chosen technologies and your improved
approach have addressed the research problem.
o Point out additional work that others may do in this area.
Appendix, e.g. 15-20 pages
o A list of your publications during your PhD studies
o (Example) input data used,
o Representation issues/ and example of instances (of data),
o (Partial) important program codes,
o Important rules/axioms,
o 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:
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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 emphasises
on results and therefore gives more details on the conclusions of 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:
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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:
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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:
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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.
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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.