I would like to know few important points to be remembered before writing thesis.
Dear Simon Raj F
Find attachment related to "Quality Ph. D. Thesis ".
First, put your heart into it. Read atleast 100-150 papers related to your area to see where your work stands.. Reading current literature helps you grasp the essence and write better. See if you can answer some of the points:
1.The scope of your research
2. How aware are you of the problem chosen
3.Give the statement of your problem and the motivation for choosing it.
4. What is the research design and methodology adopted including the assumptions made.
Consider writing an introduction focusing on the above points. Follow it by the salient features of your work and the flow of the thesis. Rest of the chapters include
Literature review., your contributions in a phased manner and the validation of the methodology adopted.
Dear Simon,
I found useful reading completed theses from top schools. The focus should be on the structure, the contributions you are making, methodology applied and results achieved. You need to know precisely why you are doing this work and what will it add.
I hope that helps.
Kind regards,
Sylvia
Thanks to Gopi and Sylvia. Can you add some points on technical writing and good presentation? And what are the common mistakes have you found in a thesis ?
Dear Simon,
It is difficult to give an extensive list of tips upfront. The PhD process is a training, and hence one learns technical writing through - writing and re-writing and re-writing...
Regards,
Sylvia
I endorse the suggestion by Sylvia Szabo: "I found useful reading completed theses from top schools. The focus should be on the structure, the contributions you are making, methodology applied and results achieved. You need to know precisely why you are doing this work and what will it add."
It is my personal experience, in 1987, without internet, without computer, the only source was " PhD Theses library in Moscow, the Soviet Union capital (This country does not exist anymore), wherein I got a couple of engineering theses related to my field, and much more. I got microfilms of those theses and studied them on a 35 mm optical projector. I did exactly what Dr Sylvia Szabo stated. A happy co-incidence!
There are guidelines provided by your department. You definitely want to know what those guidelines are and adhere to them. Even within departments, certain things may differ slightly. However, the content of the research is the key and important, not necessarily the length. For example, a research in pure math may be 40 or fewer pages long because an unproven theorem gets proven (with additional lemmas and corollaries), while one in applied mathematics can be extensive because of the applications that need to be justified. So let the content be sound and original.
One advice that may be helpful: When reading past works in the field / background material, jot down important points under mini topics, stating their citations and page numbers. That way, when you need them later, you can just look through the points you jotted and you do not have to waste time searching through hundreds of papers you might have read. Of course, if you need to clarify a point, then you can just reread the paper again.
Good-luck
The last para of Ms Miranda's statement needs particular attention. Taking notes with quotes and page numbers will constitute the citation required in review of previous work done by others and comparison of your result with others in your thesis.
Find a good advisor. It is a good sign if he/she had supervised some successful students that have completed their theses in reasonable time.
Dear Simon,
I am adding few more to the comment of Steffen Weider, after getting good Supervisor, go through few state of the art papers in your/advisor's area of interest, next go through current research (2011-2013) and identify gaps in literature, then fix you objective accordingly.
Best of Luck for future good quality publications
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