As a personal advice, writing throughout all your thesis time is tremendously important. 

Few lines, comments and collecting information regularly will be crucial (literature reading & lab work diary) . Having an organized folder or document will help you later on when "time to write your thesis" will arrive. This way, I will be able to read and comments anything at any moment during your thesis. You might find this continuous feedback important in improving your scientific writing skills step-by-step.



  • How do you structure your Introduction chapter? Find here some advices
  • How do you format your Bibliography? There are many ways you could refer to literature in your thesis manuscript. While there is no preferred style, please remember that all needed information need to be there for a Reader to retrieve the source (journal title, volume and issue, page, year).  Most commonly used ones in our research field are IEEE style or ACS style. Please discuss with me if you intend to use other reference style. 
  • Do you want to check your grammar? GRAMMARLY is a free app which does a very good job in checking grammatical errors.

  • What is good Thesis structure? (please note that this is a general structure)
              • Title page
              • Abstract
              • Preface
              • Table of Contents
              • List of the symbols and abbreviations    (explains those abbreviations, symbols and terms which are not common knowledge. symbols and abbreviations used must be explained when they are mentioned for the first time even if the symbol and abbreviation list was provided)
              • Introduction     (background for the research question: motivation, focus, aims, hypotheses)
              • Literature review      (should support solving the research question: understanding the system, learning from others and their research methodologies. should also be critical and analytical)
              • Experimental      (exact description of the experimental methods applied (to be repeated by anyone else)
              • Results and discussion    (exact and concise presentation, with focus on the main results (not individual observations) / error analysis and reliability of the results, connections to earlier literature)
              • Conclusions    (relative to the research question/claims on novelty and suggestions for further research)
              • References
              • Appendices    (if any)


  • You can have a look at Aalto MSc thesis on aaltodoc.aalto.fi repository to have an idea on how a MSc Thesis is actually looking like (please remember to search document from your own school)

Last modified: Saturday, 13 June 2020, 12:51 PM