Research Thesis Guidelines
Your research thesis should include the following elements:
- Title Page: Must include the title of your thesis, your name, and the date.
- Acknowledgements and Dedication (if desired)
- Table of Contents
- List of Tables and Figures
- List of Abbreviations (if appropriate)
- Abstract: (not more than 250 words). Briefly summarize the nature of the project, the
results obtained and the relevance of the results. - Introduction: Introduce the research the problem, giving enough relevant background
information that a non-specialist can understand why the problem is of interest.
(Remember, your faculty reader(s) may not be as conversant with the work in your
advisor’s lab as are you.) - Materials and Methods: Provide sufficient details for all aspects related to how the
experiments were conducted so that someone reading the thesis after your
departure could replicate your work. If helpful, include figures and/or tables. (This
section is often the most useful to your advisor and labmates later on.) - Results: Provide a detailed description of the experimental data, using figures and
tables as necessary. - Discussion: Evaluate the results obtained including caveats where appropriate and
discuss their relevance and significance to current models and other data in the field. - References: Include complete citations (authors’ names, year, paper title, journal,
volume, pages). See the journal Cell for example. - Appendix(ces) (if applicable): Here you can put in data that weren’t complete enough to
make sense in the body of the thesis, but you still want to include somehow.
Of course if you had multiple projects that were significantly different and/or have so
much data it can’t fit into one Results section, you could break your thesis up into
chapters more like a Ph.D. dissertation. In this format, each chapter would have its own
Intro, M&M, Results and Discussion sections. If you think you might want to do it this
way, ask your advisor to show you a copy of a Ph.D. dissertation so that you can check
out that format.