I am thrilled that you have decided to do your thesis in my lab. Because there are few general guidelines provided by the university for the formatting of your thesis, I have decided to lay out some basic guidelines myself. I think this will help us to align our expectations from the thesis, and set a clear and achievable goal for you.
This page is set out with some general formatting guidelines for all theses, followed by specifics for the three kinds of degrees with regards to length and other details.
General Formatting Guidelines
Page layout: A4, 2 cm margins left, right, top, and bottom. (note: PhD theses might differ from this size guideline; to be checked).
Font: Times New Roman, 12 pt, 1 or 1.5 spacing, alignment either left hanging or preferably left justified. Headings and subheadings can of course differ however you wish. Please write in black. Headings can be in another colour if you wish.
Cover page:
- Title in large text
- Your ‘publishing name’, the name that you currently use, or intend to use in the future, for academic publishing. Not necessarily your full name, and remember that you don’t actually have to list initials you do not like to include or do not use.
- ‘Bachelor’s thesis, submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for a [degree level] at the University of Copenhagen’
- ‘Supervised by [supervisors, with academic titles, e.g. Dr Mark D. Scherz]’. This line should indicate who is main and who co-supervisor. The main supervisor is always the person who signed the contract.
- ‘Submitted: [date of submission, usually best in the format dd MMMM yyyy, so e.g. 15 June 2024]’
Please note that a degree completed with me as primary supervisor is done at the Natural History Museum Denmark, and not the Department of Biology or any other department of the university. If you intend to use a logo, please use the NHMD one (in English here), or just the University of Copenhagen logo.
I encourage the use of a nice illustration or figure on the cover of the thesis, though this is by no means mandatory.
Figures: Please check your figures for legibility when printed. This is *extremely* important. Figures should be numbered in the order in which they appear in the text; never include a figure that is not referred to. A figure should be appropriately captioned. Think about arranging your figures into multi-panel plates, both for ease of reading and ease of reference. This can also help keep the number of figures reasonable.
References: You must reference your thesis thoroughly as you would in a published paper. I expect students to use EndNote (free from KU), Mendeley (free), or Zotero (free) (or other equivalents, if preferable) to manage your citations, and their built-in Microsoft Word plugins to do your in-text citations and reference list management. As a basic standard, I suggest using the Zootaxa reference format, which I here replicate from their website, but please feel free to use another style if you prefer it, as long as it is not totally inconvenient to navigate:
References should be cited in the text as Smith (1999), Smith & Smith (2000) or Smith et al. (2001) (3 or more authors), or alternatively in a parenthesis (Smith 1999; Smith & Smith 2000; Smith et al. 2001). All literature cited in the text must be listed in the references in the following format (see a sample page here in PDF).
A) Journal paper:
Smith, A. (1999) Title of the paper. Title of the journal in full, volume number, issue number if possible & page range.B) Book chapter:
Smith, A. & Smith, B. (2000) Title of the Chapter. In: Smith, A, Smith, B. & Smith, C. (Eds), Title of Book. Publisher name and location, pp. x–y.C) Book:
Smith, A., Smith, B. & Smith, C. (2001) Title of Book. Publisher name and location, xyz pp.D) Internet resources
Author (2002) Title of website, database or other resources, Publisher name and location (if indicated), number of pages (if known). Available from: http://xxx.xxx.xxx/ (Date of access).Dissertations resulting from graduate studies and non-serial proceedings of conferences/symposia are to be treated as books and cited as such. Papers not cited must not be listed in the references.
Please note that:
(1) journal titles must be written in full (not abbreviated)
(2) journal titles and volume numbers are followed by a “,”
(3) page ranges are connected by “n dash”, not hyphen “-“, which is used to connect two words.
For websites, it is important to include the last date when you see that site, as it can be moved or deleted from that address in the future.
Language: Unless otherwise discussed, I expect all students to write their theses in English. Your mastery of the English language is not part of the assessment of the thesis, and grammar errors are therefore unimportant—though of course, it must be understandable. However, you almost certainly will receive some feedback or corrections to grammar both during the writing process and on your final thesis, because I always correct it as I read.
Style: Your writing style should be consistent with that which you would read in a published scientific paper: concise, direct, and not excessively flowery or descriptive. You must not use contractions. Write in the first person singular (‘I found’) unless you explicitly state something was done as a group (‘we found’). You can use active or passive voice (i.e. ‘I found’ vs ‘it was found’), but be aware that many people hate the passive voice, so you may find the active voice is better received.
Numbers: In English, decimal places are separated with fullstops, not commas, and you should carefully check this in your supplementary/data files, and especially in your thesis. Commas are used for thousands separators (only needed for five digits or more, so 1000 is fine, but 10,000 needs a comma).
Sections: I prefer BSc and MSc theses to be written very closely modelling published scientific papers. Before the main text, there is typically an Abstract of not more than 300 words, which summarises the big question, approach, results, and implications; and an Acknowledgements section. The main text should be broken into Introduction, Methods, Results, and Discussion. Particularly, I emphasise the distinction between the Results section, which reports largely on your direct findings and how they relate to each other, and the Discussion section, which contextualises your results in the context of the literature, and discusses the implications. You are strongly encouraged to read far beyond your study system, to think about how your work integrates into the existing work that has used similar methods, or how your study compliments existing work using other methods. After the main text are the References, as well as any supplementary materials or appendices you may want to add. We can also discuss if any of this needs to be deposited in a public repository like Zenodo.org.
Data: It is important to remember that, per university policy, data and results that you produce belong to the university and not you, and thus you must ensure that they are all transferred to me at the end of your thesis project, or handed in alongside it. We will talk about how and when to do this. I will always try to maintain clear and open communication with students about how data they have collected will or may be used in the future, and include you to whatever extent is appropriate in work that makes use of data you have collected; depending on the scope and role of the data, this may range from acknowledgement to inclusion as a coauthor.
Taxonomic names: I wish for members of my group to have a strong understanding of formatting procedures for taxonomic names, so please adhere closely to the following:
- Genus name is capitalised and in italics (e.g. Gehyra). It should be spelled out at first use in each section, and always when it is the first word of a sentence. When used together with species names in other contexts, it can be abbreviated to the first letter, or, in the case of multiple genera with the same first letter, the shortest unambiguous string. So, for example, G. mutilata is fine, but if we are also talking about Gekko gekko, then Geh. mutilata and Gek. gekko would be necessary.
- Species group names (species and subspecies) are lowercase and in italics (e.g. mutilata). With rare exception, they should not appear without their genus name. So you would not just start talking about e.g. traits of mutilata, but would always specify at least the abbreviated genus name. For subspecies, it is sometimes acceptable to abbreviate also the species name in cases of repeated use, so subspecies of Phelsuma lineata might be referred to as Phelsuma l. lineata and P. l. elantha, but only when this is unambiguous. Remember that you are always writing for a reader, and you should be helping them understand as much as possible, even if that means restating the obvious.
- All ranks above genus (e.g. family, order, etc.) are capitalised and are not italicised (e.g. Colubridae). But note also that these ranks can be adjectivised, and when this is done, the name should not be capitalised (i.e. colubrid snakes vs snakes of the family Colubridae).
- At first mention, taxonomic names of all ranks should be given with their authorities in the thesis. Authorities for taxonomic names are the authors who described them. This information is available from various sources, including Wikipedia in most cases (Wikipedia mostly follows Amphibians of the World Database and Reptile Database for naming of herps). The authors follow the taxonomic name, separated only by a space (no comma). These are citations, and should be listed in your references. But they are also special, because they follow specific rules about the use of brackets:
- For ranks above species, the authority is never given in brackets. E.g. Mantellidae Laurent, 1946.
- For species, the authority is given in brackets only if the genus has changed since the original description. So, Boophis luteus (Boulenger, 1882) is given with Boulenger in brackets because it was originally described as Rhacophorus luteus Boulenger, 1882. Plethodontohyla brevipes Boulenger, 1882 is given without brackets, because it is still in the genus Plethodontohyla Boulenger, 1882.
- Avoid possessive species names (‘Phelsuma grandis’ tail’ is ugly; use ‘the tail of Phelsuma grandis‘)
Artificial Intelligence (AI): By KU rules, it is forbidden to use ChatGPT or similar tools to generate text or code for your thesis. This rule will almost certainly be reversed in the Autumn of 2025, but until then, you are not allowed to use Large Language Models (LLM) or Generative AI for your work.
Bachelor’s Thesis
Length: The most common question I get is ‘how long should my thesis be?’. There is no hard and fast rule for this. However, remember that your thesis is marked not only by me, but also by an external censor. The external censor is often from a totally different subject area, so you should be writing for someone who does not know the subject. So, you may need to explain things in greater detail than you would normally see in a paper. In general terms, I would expect a Bachelor’s thesis to be between 20 and 40 pages at 1.5 spacing, including figures and tables but excluding references and supplementary materials.
Oral Exam: Your oral exam will consist of a 15 minute presentation, followed by at least 15 minutes of questions. It will be public, and if possible will be held in person. The oral exam is public, and we will try to schedule it as early as possible to ensure as many people as possible can attend, including any friends and family you wish to invite.
Master’s Thesis
Length: As for a Bachelor’s thesis, your Master’s thesis is marked not only by me, but also by an external censor with only limited familiarity with your subject and project. It is therefore imperative that you write a thesis that contains the basic information needed to understand and interpret your results. However, with a Master’s thesis especially, I want the thesis to be closely modelled on how an actual paper would (could! will‽) look. Consequently, it is important to be appropriately concise and precise in your writing. I therefore do not expect that a Master’s thesis is necessarily longer than a Bachelor’s thesis, though of course sometimes this will be necessary when your topic requires a lot of writing. So, in general terms, I would expect a Master’s thesis to be between 20 and 60 pages at 1.5 spacing, including figures and tables but excluding references and supplementary materials.
Oral Exam: Your oral exam will consist of a 20 minute presentation, followed by at least 20 minutes of questions. It will be public, and if possible will be held in person. The oral exam is public, and we will try to schedule it as early as possible to ensure as many people as possible can attend, including any friends and family you wish to invite.
PhD Thesis
To come.