There’s no official pre-made departmental or College-wide style template for PhD theses. Some reason that learning (and evolving!) the skill of superbly typesetting a thesis is an important a part of obtaining a PhD.

Here are a few practical recommendations, examples, and helpful beginning points.

LaTeX

Most PhD authors within the Computer Laboratory prefer LaTeX his or her typesetting system (under both Linux or Home windows), mainly due to its

• excellent but unmatched support for mathematical formulae
• good support for managing bibliographic references
• good support for top-quality typography
• easy integration with software-engineering tools (make, revision control, etc.)
• safe and powerful handling of huge documents
• lengthy-term stability
• comprehensive free tool support.

A typical approach is by using the report style, having a appropriate title page added, margins altered to create good utilisation of the A4 format, as well as other changes to match submission needs and individual tastes (e.g. other fonts).

Diagrams

For preparing publication-quality diagrams, probably the most effective and popular tools used include:

• PGF/TikZ &#8211 the most likely most sophisticated drawing package for LaTeX
• matplotlib &#8211 Matlab-style function plotting in Python

Official needs

There was once detailed Student Registry PhD format needs. regarding font sizes and line spacing, but many Degree Committees have dropped these, recognizing that they are mainly motivated by past typewriter conventions. The guidelines left are actually mainly concerning the number of words.

Particularly, it’s no longer essential for dissertations to become printed single sided or perhaps in &#8220one-and-a-half spaced type&#8221. Should you still prefer to boost the line spacing, for simpler proofreading, you are able to accomplish this in LaTeX by putting in to the preamble the road &#8220 usepackageonehalfspacing &#8221.

Recommendations

Margins

One Cambridge thesis-binding company, J.S. Wilson Boy. recommend on their own web site to depart 30 mm margin around the spine and 20 mm alternatively three sides from the A4 pages delivered to them. In regards to a centimetre from the left margin sheds once the binder stitches the web pages together.

Title

Write your thesis title and section headings in &#8220sentence situation&#8221, that’s make use of the same capital that you’d used in normal sentences (capitalize just the first word, proper nouns and abbreviations). Steer clear of the US-style &#8220title situation&#8221 that some conference-proceedings publishers require.

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• Sentence situation is common typographic practice within the United kingdom (use whatever United kingdom-printed newspaper, magazine, journals for example Nature. etc.).
• The catalogues of both College Library thesis collection and our departmental Technical Report series record titles by doing this, and you wouldn’t want the cataloguers wreck havoc on your title capital whenever your thesis finally reaches them.
• It preserves helpful details about the right capital associated with a names or terminology used.

Page figures

Make use of a single page-number sequence for those pages inside your thesis, i.e. don’t use another sequence of Roman numerals for front-matter (title page, abstract, acknowledgements, table of contents, table of figure).

In LaTeX which means while using report style, not it style.

• PDF viewers number pages continuously beginning from 1, and taking advantage of other things as printed page figures causes confusion.
• This could save you some reformatting when submitting your thesis like a techreport.

Bibliographic references

If you are using purely-number bibliographic references, make sure you still mention authors’ surnames, like a courtesy to both authors as well as your readers. Also, consider adding the precise page number which the quoted point can be found in the reference LaTeX supports this very well. (&#8220suggested by Crowcroft and Kuhn [42,p107]&#8221)

Technical Report submission

Following a thesis continues to be authorized by the examiners, the writer normally submits it for publication like a Computer Laboratory Technical Report.

It may be beneficial to see in early stages the submission guidelines for technical reports. because this may reduce the necessity to alter the formatting later.

If you wish to minimize any changes needed involving the posted thesis and also the corresponding technical report version, then &#8211 additionally to applying all of the above advice &#8211 you are able to

• make page&#1601 the title page,
• make page&#1602 the needed promise of originality,
• make page&#1603 the summary, and
• select a layout appropriate for double-sided printing (needed for techreport, since 2010 also permitted for final PhD submission).

By doing this, there’s an excellent chance that turning your thesis right into a techreport may be as simple as replacing pages 1 and a pair of using the standard Technical Report title page (that the techreport editor can perform for you personally).

More details

• The Pc Laboratory house style page explains how to locate the College identifier that lots of placed on the title page of the thesis.
• Markus Kuhn’s simple PhD thesis template (snapshot ) is simply one possible beginning point.
• The cam-thesis LaTeX class is really a collaborative effort to keep a Cambridge PhD thesis template for Computer Laboratory research students, initiated by Jean Martina, Rok Strni&#353a, and Matej Urbas.
• Effective scientific electronic publishing &#8211 Markus Kuhn’s notes on putting scientific publications to the web, specifically for LaTeX/LNCS users.
• Worldwide Standard ISO 7144 Presentation of theses and other alike documents (1986) contains several general guidelines for formatting dissertations which may be useful.

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