Without wasting too much time on talking about how difficult writing a large report or a PhD thesis, I’ll say what this post is about. It provides an outline of PhD thesis, a recipe for getting started. It is not a strict format or structure you should follow because every project, every thesis is different. You should adapt it for how it suits you. For a docker enabled LateX repository in VS Code, checkout this post.

I will describe paragraph by paragraph to get your started. I assume you have a main piece of work(s) and they are the main contributions.

Abstract

Answer these questions (usually 1 sentence each) for each contribution chapter:

  • What is the motivation? Why we should be interested? It could be shortcoming, a new problem etc.
  • What you have done? What is the contribution? Something along the lines of: we propose a novel method, experiment etc. to overcome something.
  • How you evaluated it? What metrics are used and what are important results? We show better accuracy, new insights into animal behaviour, cancer treatment…
  • What’s the resulting impact? How do you think this will affect the field going forward?

You don’t need to write verbosely. Keep everything short and concise. Remember, no one wants to read pages and pages of report or thesis but they have to.

Introduction

  1. Start by talking about the beginning, the main motivation along with the impact. What is the field of study of this thesis? How does it affect our lives? Why is it relevant to us? Remember that it’s about humans and humans self-interest. It should be relevant to our understanding, improvement or laziness. For example, curing a disease or making something more efficient or safer. Even if you are studying an animal, for example how insects grip objects, the point is how that study will help us do something such as construct robots that can grip objects better. Another example is an environmental study, improving animal welfare in an area actually improves our lives by keeping biodiversity, forests etc. Why is this important? Because humans read your thesis or report if at all, not the animals or the cells or the plants you’ve studied.

  2. Talk about the specific domain. What is the actual problem you are trying to solve? Be specific. What is the technical term for it? What is the brief history for this problem (don’t go crazy as you will many related work coming up)? For example, the ability to identify cancerous cells using this protein has been studied in the field biology for many years (cite papers, cite, cite).

  3. State your hypothesis or research question? What is (are) the thing(s) you’ve done? This will be a short statement such as we present a novel solution to the early detection of this disease using this method that … (describe the novelty). We present the affects of social media on teenagers and found that … (again describe it).

Motivation

  1. Why are we interested in this problem? What is the overall motivation for studying this? —» Actually means, why should anyone give you money to undertake this research? Answer it here.

  2. Provide an example. What is a past success or failure of this problem? For example if you are studying safety of air plane materials, you could say some disaster happened and your research or contribution would help with this.

  3. Repeat 2 if you have other examples to talk about.

Challenges

  1. Every project has challenges, don’t run away from this section. Think. What are the problems you faced? A classic one is financial problems or not having enough time. If you are studying an animal, access to them. Or if you need an MRI machine for example, that sounds challenging to me.

  2. For each main challenge, give examples, expand and justify why it is a challenge. Don’t just say this was challenging. Why was it challenging?

  3. Repeat 2 for extra examples and challenges.

Existing Work

  1. Set the scene. Who has done what in your area? What are their general shortcomings? Categorise them. This is not related work, this is existing work. Related work you will mention in the related work section of the contributions.

  2. For each category of existing work, describe the general trend. What are their main features? How are they potentially different from your approach? For example, you could say, (cite, cite and cite) have studied the adaption of neurons in the important region of the brain, but it is unknown whether these produce proteins that lead to some disease.

  3. Repeat for each category the above routing.

Contributions

  1. For each contribution chapter / main work you have write a paragraph.

If you have papers published, then the abstract of those papers go here give or take. Do not copy paste stuff, make sure they flow with the rest of the text.

Publications

List your publications if any with links to the papers, code and further results. Cite them properly to avoid any self-plagiarism.

Background

Write what you actually use in the thesis. Don’t describe the entire field. This is not a textbook. Don’t worry about the explanation chain of doom where to describe something you need to describe something else. Assume a certain audience, assume some familiarity with the field and start from there. Otherwise, you might as well just provide a link to a text book. I can’t say much here because it really depends on the nature of project and what it is about. Make sure to organise it, do not over-organise it. Keep the sections clean and don’t worry, you can always come back and update it. But don’t skip it and leave it to the end, because having a background chapter will help you write and use technical terms so that you can refer to them later in the thesis.

Contribution N

Repeat for each main contribution of your project or thesis. If you have published papers, it is most likely to be one contribution chapter per paper with the chapter title somewhat matching the paper title.

  1. What is your contribution related motivation? What is the problem (again) but more specifically? If you have published a paper, this would like the introduction of the paper.

  2. What are the existing contenders of your particular solution or conclusions in this chapter? This is existing work specific to this chapter. For example, in the introduction you talk about the general principles of the existing work, here drill down to one or two key ones. It’s like reading those existing work and saying, yes I will do this project. What were those papers and why did you read them? Talk about them there, in this paragraph(s).

  3. State your contribution and results, finding, conclusions. What did you do new? What was the result? What is the potential impact? Don’t be afraid to finish this section by saying something like we cut the diagnosis times by 10x and save lives. Like I said before, it has to be related to humans and here is what you state how it impacts us.

My Awesome Method

  1. Describe the method, approach and novelty of it all. What is the process? Why and how is it new? Be specific, be technical, give equations, tables, figures.

  2. Give an example, a diagram of the method. This must be visual. People like looking at pictures. If your thesis is about theoretical mathematics and you can’t visualise anything, well tough luck.

  3. Link this method to the existing work and drill down its novelty. For example, no one has explored this using this. Or the closest method does not do this. You are allowed to rephrase previous claims in the context of a more technical setting because people forget in a large document the previous nice things you said. For example, you could have said a general statement regarding existing work but know you can point to an equation or a diagram to be more specific.

Data / Datasets

  1. Everyone deals with data. What is yours? Where did you get it? What are its properties?

  2. Give examples, visualise properties, histograms, plots. Demonstrate you understand what is going with this data.

  3. Limitations. What are the limitations of this data? Can we trust it? Is it simple, complex, sound enough to draw conclusions from? For example, if you went out and collected data, what are the potential systematic errors? Talk about them here.

Experiments

  1. So how did you employ the scientific method? What are the controlled variables? What, where, how did you conduct the experiments? Give details, tables. Describe the conditions. If it was raining, say it was raining and how it might affected the results.

  2. RESULTS. The time has come, reveal them in gory detail. What did you find? Give tables, plots. Make people see the results, not just read them.

  3. Talk about why. Why did you get these results? What is your interpretation? What are the likely implications of this? State your business here. These paragraphs along with the results should provide your expert understanding as the person who carried out the experiments. For example, say things like, the outlier we observe in Figure X is most likely because of something.

  4. Repeat for all your results points 2 and 3.

Be safe. If the data is not showing don’t claim it. Use phrases such as it might, may have been, we speculate that…

Analysis

  1. Analyse your auxiliary findings. What else did you find? Was there anything surprising? What does that mean? For example, you managed to detect a disease or train an animal, what else did it do?

  2. Give specific examples of success and failure! Talk more about what were the bits your approach did really well and what bits it failed.

  3. Repeat 1 and 2 for each aspect of your method.

  1. Describe the work that is related to your method. What have other done in a similar fashion but perhaps not directly comparable? Categorise them.

  2. For each category of related work, write a paragraph. Make sure to relate them back to your approach, results and analysis. For example, say things like, our results match with those of (cite).

Related work is infamously known as trash their work section because you are expected to trash other people’s work. Unfortunately, it’s true and you will have to say why these related works are either very different to yours or inferior. Otherwise, your work does not stand out.

Discussion

  1. How does this contribution fit into the rest of the thesis? Refer back to the hypothesis, research question you had in the introduction chapter.

  2. Talk about limitations. What are the problems with your approach? Is it specific to your method, results or is it something the field is suffering from? If you think your approach is perfect, invent problems with your approach.

  3. Link to the next chapter if any. How does this chapter open up the next? Don’t do this if this is your last contribution chapter.

Conclusion

  1. State what you did in past tense. What were the main contributions in each chapter? Refer to the chapters and sections now. This is one paragraph.

  2. Make an overall observation. For example, the contributions of this thesis shed light to the destructive nature of social media and the provides evidence. How is this related to some other general topics? Cite more broader topics. This observation is across all the contribution chapters.

  3. Conclude but don’t conclude. Say how from the initial motivation you have now added to the knowledge to the human kind but always say there is more to explore (readying up for future work below). These are relatively boring paragraphs such as the study of the effects of social media on our lives remains critical in shaping our society and future.

Future Work

  1. First say what can immediately be done, low hanging fruit. If you had more time, what would you do? That is this paragraph right here.

  2. What would be nice to do? Ideally, in what direction would this work go? For example, you might interested in detecting other diseases. In all these cases, describe the impact of these future work if they were to be successful.

  3. Finally, make a guess about the future of this work? Get it? It’s not future work, it’s the future of this work. How do you see this problem evolve? Don’t be afraid to make a claim that it might or might not be solved in the next decade for example.

Alternative Avenues (Optional)

  1. If you are interested describe what other approaches and methods and studies have done that are not directly related. Did you come across a piece of interesting work but did not cite it? Cite it here and describe it.

  2. Potentially give examples about these alternative avenues. For example, anti-venom is made using horses, perhaps the protein you studied can also be made using the same method. But making a chemical using horses is not related to your work, it is an alternative avenue if someone wanted to explore.

  3. Repeat 1 and 2 for different alternative avenues, at most 3 or 4, you don’t want to make the conclusion chapter too long.

Broader Impact

  1. How does this work, research impact our society today? Emphasis on today. Do you expect things to change in our lives? Are there any dangers such as using this AI method to generate more fake news? Talk about them here.

  2. How does this work, the problem you are working on will impact our society in the future? Do you potential problems of people using certain methods or techniques. If we do not act now, will it be too late to reverse climate change?

I hope this serves as a helpful guide. As I mentioned before, every project and thesis is different but there are always similarities in the ones I’ve read. Take what is useful and work your way forwards.