PhD Thesis Writing Tips

PhD thesis writing is important, challenging and interesting part in

completion of PhD. Various tips given in this document aims to guide
the researcher so that he will get acquainted with various aspects of
thesis writing, understand and follow to complete his thesis comfortably
and enthusiastically

Vikas J. Dongre
[01-02-2015]
 PHD THESIS WRITING TIPS
PhD thesis is one of the most important activities as a part of completion of PhD degree. It is
very creative and memorable phase of PhD. It has to be done with patience, enthusiasm to make it
interesting otherwise it may also turn to be very boring and painful. The choice is in the hands of
a researcher. The information in this article is written to help the fellow researchers to make them
comfortable and prepare them to start thesis writing work with zeal.

PhD thesis takes longer time to complete than expected. Usually one semester should be
spared for this work.

Lot of material incorporated in thesis will come from various research papers already
published on communicated. A thorough compilation of this material with careful insight is of
course necessary. Some work may not be very useful if it doesn't fall in line with outcome of main
work. Review paper published as a part of literature survey is very useful for literature review
chapter of thesis which is usually second chapter of thesis.

Insight thought on how the chapters will be arranged, their names should be given by
researcher in consultation with supervisor.

Various PhD theses in faculty, subject area should be referred. Various sources of PhD Thesis
can be as follows.

 Thesis available in research Centre

 University library
 requesting PhD completed person
 Google scholar research as "PhD thesis on -----"
 Shodhganga website Depositary (Inflibent) where universities upload thesis submitted
to the university.

Thesis Margins
Some suggestive specifications are provided by directions issued by university (direction 29
of 2012 in RTM Nagpur university). Try to follow them. Some minor variations are possible to
suit the requirement of page settings. Some suggestive details are as follows.

Paper size: A4.

Page margins:
 left 1.5"
 right: 1"
 Top: 1.25"
  bottom: 1.25"
 Header from top: 0.7"
 Header from bottom: 0.7"
Font: Times new roman

Font size:
 general paragraphs: 12
 Chapter heading: 16 CAPITAL BOLD
 section Title: 12 CAPITAL
 subsection title: 12 Title Case
 sub-subsection title: 12 Title Case Italics

Line Spacing:
 between lines: 1.5
 spacing between paragraph 12 points
 font size for figure title: 12 bold
 font size for table titles: 12 bold
 spacing before and after table title: 12 point and 6 point
 Spacing before and after figure title: 6 point and 12 point
Once these margins, fonts, sizes, spacing are decided or finalized, they should be followed
meticulously everywhere throughout the thesis.

Header and footer are not specified in University directions. But they are needed. Header
from top, needs to be increased to make it 0.7", in order to accommodate chapter number, page
number. Also small space is to be left for cutting during binding of the thesis. Decision need to be
taken whether to keep page no. in header or footer. If chapter no. is to be given, it should on
header; In that case page no. should be in footer.

Latin words appearing in the thesis are always italics ex. e.g., viz.

Some words always have their first character as capital ex. Proper name (Vikas J. Dongre),
Chapter, Section, Figure, Table. To ensure this, please refer to some standard books or journal
research papers. Some trivial but worth mentionable points for non-English people like us are as
follows.

 There is always a space after any punctuation mark like, . ".

 There is no space before any punctuation mark like, . ".
 Meticulously check again and again that there is full stop after completion of sentence
specially the last sentence of paragraph.
  Spell check is available in MS WORD. Please use it to correct spelling mistakes. Also
some technical words cannot be checked using spell checker. Here use your
commonsense. Get some other sources to refer.
Better planning at initial stage smoothens to the work in final stage; else all the formatting
needs to be modified and some type setting errors do exist even after n number of careful editing.

Desk top publisher's help is sought generally in the final phase of thesis printing. Those
fellows are expert in their work. Their suggestions are valuable to large extent as they have lot of
experience in their work. But don't expect them to be 100% correct for your requirement. They
are not responsible for your work output. Sought their suggestion, go as per your planning;
incorporate those suggestions which will make the work look better, gracious and aesthetic. Those
modifications or spacing changes should not change the essence of the thesis. Ultimately it is the
researcher who is going to be benefited or suffered.

Numbering the sections, subsections, tables, figures, and equations is researcher's job. He
only knows the final outcome, he only have the idea of final requirement from thesis. Hence too
much dependency on DTP operator should be avoided.

Get your thesis read and interrogated by some other person apart from you and your guide.
He can find out typographical, logical flow, grammatical errors. This is essential for improving
readability and understandability of thesis.

Good thesis writing is very interesting and patienceful work. Generally it is the first book you
are seriously publishing. Flow of the thesis should from the external examiner point of view. He is
the only target for which the thesis is written. Grammatical errors and typo errors are not
forgivable as it creates very bad impression on external examiner on the far end. It reflects the
lack of patience, seriousness, knowledge of the researcher.

Once printed and bounded, the thesis cannot be changed. There is no edition two of thesis.
But it is written for worldwide research audience for many years to come. Hence serious thought
process must be applied while writing the thesis.

Tools for writing thesis:

Thesis writing can be done beautifully in Latex which is open source tool. But it is a language
which must be learned. Thesis can easily be written MS Word. Reference and review tools of MS
Word are worth exploring. Many tools are available like Auto text styles, automatic Spell check,
Contents, List of Figures, List of Table, Automatic Chapter numbers, section numbers, subsection
numbers and proper spacing are available apart from page numbers, header and footers, auto
numbering. These can be used conveniently to make the thesis decent aesthetic and error free.
Many of these tools may not be known to DTP operator. Hence care must be taken while
modifying the pre-set the thesis with the help of DTP operator. He may remove all your automatic
setting and apply his own setting. The creates problem with settings initially made by you, and
numbering/ size/spacing may change or uniformity of the thesis may be lost.

Referring other thesis

Don't forget to refer some thesis already submitted through your research center. Follow the
same pattern as far as possible and as far as it is logically correct. Particularly, check for various
certificates to be attached to the thesis, their sequence, signing authorities. Research Centre
coordinator's guidance in this respect is extremely important, as he is aware of the latest updates,
changes and trends in your research center as well as the concerned university.

How many pages a thesis should have?

There is no specific standard regarding how many pages, a thesis should have. It varies from
faculty to faculty, branch to branch, subject to subject, guide to guide, topic to topic. A thesis in
Law had even 1500 pages and bounded in two volumes. For big size thesis, thesis may be printed
on both sides of the paper. Some universities like RTM Nagpur University recommend that thesis
should be printed on both sides in order to reduce volume and save paper. But the conventional
trend is to print thesis on single side. One is not aware of thinking of external examiner. Hence
majority of researchers prints the thesis on single side only.

Thesis for electronic engineering should not be too small or too big. Main thesis pages from
chapter 1 (Introduction) to last chapter (results and conclusion) is 90 to 150 pages.

Pages increase if there are mores figures, observations tables, graphs, and statistical data.
Only the research scholar knows what to incorporate in the thesis and what to avoid. The bottom
line is that all the required detail should be incorporated while repetition, minute details should be
avoided. Emphasis should be given to consolidated steps, algorithms, tabular data, figures, graphs
rather than paragraph of information. Keep into consideration that the external is neither a layman
nor the master of all trades. Only the common-sense of the researcher will decide what to
incorporate and what to avoid. Guide plays important role in thesis writing. His reviews and
suggestions provide proper shape to the thesis. Final thesis must not be printed without his
satisfaction and consent.

Completion of thesis is the last thing a researcher does as a part of PhD work. Also, all well
that ends well. Hence a great care must be taken to improve the thesis. It is the only thing that will
remain with the researcher for the rest of his career, and it is the only thing that he will be known
for, as a researcher. This highlights the extraordinary importance of thesis writing.

Main Parts of thesis:

Abstract: Abstract of thesis is similar to abstract of a research paper. It should generally contain
1) What is the problem in hand?
2) How is it handled so far?
3) What are the challenges?
4) What you have done to solve the problem?
5) What remains to be done or future scope?
Each point should in different paragraph. Generally the abstract should be one to three pages.
One page may be sufficient only if written with great care and proper use of words. Generally two
pages are sufficient as it is difficult to incorporate all the work PhD in a single page.

Abstract is the very first part of thesis read by examiner or other researcher. It is the mirror
image of whole the thesis. Hence due care needs to be taken while writing abstract of the thesis.
Please refer to the synopsis already submitted in the initial stage of PhD registration. It acts as a
lighthouse all the time. Check whether you are in line what you have proposed, and research plan
you made. Try to be in tune with it. Objectives of the work and contribution of work will be read
by everybody who refers to the thesis. Hence proper thought and time must be imparted to this
task. Don't use high end technical jargon of technical words here. A non-engineering person may
also refer and hence should be able to understand the abstract, objectives and contribution.

References:
One must decide in the beginning, the citation method for references. Citing by number in
square bracket ex. [1] is most common in publishing research papers, where reference papers may
vary in the range 10 to 100. In thesis however, references may vary in the range 100 to 250. It is
difficult to keep track of references if citations are numbers.

If numbers are manually given in the place where the research paper is referred, the referred
number cannot be maintained sequentially. This is because sometime one needs to insert or delete
a reference in between. This reshuffles the sequence of references. For this, one may use reference
tool (insert table of authorities) in MS WORD. But then one must learn this tool, which may be
cumbersome for the researcher.

Hence, most of the time the thesis citations are not referred by number but by writing name of
the researcher and year of publication, ex. [Dongre V. J., 2014]. Reference by name and year is
comfortable. In this method, the researcher has to enter details of cited reference in MS Excel and
simply sort as per name field. Any time one can add additional references and re-sort the
references. This also prevents repetition of reference which most probably happens during the
process of research writing where references more than 100.

While writing references, one must decide any one method of citation sequence and follow it
meticulously as follows.
  Initials should be kept or not
 commas to be kept or not
 Single or double quotation or full stop for specifying title of reference
 Year of publication in bracket or not
 Year of publication before title of reference or end of reference
 Title of reference in italic or normal
 For name, first name first or surname first
Any one style like IEEE, or Elsevier is not suitable for thesis many times. Hence choose the
style you feel comfortable after going through various thesis of university. Once it finalized,
follow it all the time for all references.

Generally, surname of author is written first, followed by his/her initials. All details of the
citation should be written. Ex. Name of all authors separated by comma, year of publication, title
of research paper, journal/ conference name, volume no, ( decide vol. or Vol.), issue no., page
from-to, should be mentioned. The reference should be serially numbered. Reference numbers are
generally written in square bracket ex. [1], and year of publication in small bracket ex. (1998).

Setting of Front page

There are many trends in setting the title on front page of thesis. It varies from university to
university, stream to stream. Some universities have decided the format and are to be followed
strictly. Some only prescribe minimum details needed on front page, like colour, embossing or
not. This is specified in the university directions. It is also known to DTP publishers. One should
better refer thesis submitted earlier recently through his research center in his faculty. He can
visit PhD cell of university to get an idea of thesis submitted recently. Select one pattern or get
guidance from DTP publisher as they are in this profession from many years.

Many such decisions are to taken by the researcher. Some are trivial some are major. Guide
will support and tell the way out all the time. Be judicious, Use Commonsense. Nothing is hard
and fast. Minimum requirement or norms of the university must be followed.

Page setting

Reducing size of thesis is much easier than expanding the thesis, in the same as cutting the
tree is much easier than growing the tree. Hence write the thesis in details. It is much easier to
write pre-submission report, abstract from thesis, than to follow the reverse approach.

Once you edit the thesis, page setting changes. It is tedious to set the figures and tables again
and again. But you need to do it. There is no other way than to accept it. Learn the method and
take the help of some expert. Most of the work is much easier in MS Word if we know right
method and logic. By the time you finish the thesis, you will be master in MS Word. This is one
advantage of thesis writing. Changing line spacing or paragraph settings slightly makes the page
settings very comfortable. Don’t stick to line spacing as 1.5 always. Some time you need to make
it 1.4 or 1.6 to suit the demand of a page for adjusting figures, tables on a single page. Though
documentation is not the research, but it adds great value to presentation and to the life as whole.

Final comments
Generally nobody is going to read your thesis except external examiner till PhD is evaluated.
You are publishing thesis for fulfillment of requirement of PhD. Satisfaction of external examiner
is most important. It is your responsibility that you have not left any stone unturned. You have
tried your level best. Once you finish, you will have great satisfaction with your work and
creativity.

Thesis writing work and creativity you have shown during this work may lead to write a book
on research area you worked for. You can read a book on a broader topic in the area you worked
since last 3 to 5 years. Now you have sufficient authority to write independent book with various
facets, without restriction you felt while writing thesis. Thesis was for a limited audience, with lot
of technical jargon. Book is for a larger audience requiring basic insight/ broader ideas in the
subject area. It will also have abundant references. It will be a pioneering book in your research
field.

Many research houses or publishers offer you for book writing, or you may approach them
with your idea. It will be yet another landmark in your career. Beginning of book authorship is
hidden in thesis writing. Hence be careful, patient and serious while writing your PhD thesis

----------------------------------------------------------

Disclaimer:
The author has submitted his PhD thesis recently. The information given in this article is
based on his own work. This article is the expression of his experience, which he wishes to share
with the fellow researchers. The comments are most suited for RTM Nagpur university, Nagpur
(MS), India researchers in electronics engineering in the faculty of engineering and technology.
But it may be broadly applicable to any faculty in any university. For exact details the fellow
researcher should check concerned details with his university and his supervisor.