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Technical University of Munich

Typical Structure of a Bachelor's or Master's Thesis

Most thesis are structured as shown below. Each part may be split into several chapter. For example, the part introduction may have two separate chapters for a the general introduction to the topic and the research question. But the parts commonly appear in the following order:

TUM provides a template for theses that is recommended to use. You can download this template in Word or LaTeX format (login with your TUM account required to access).

There is no mandatory length of a thesis. Most well-written master's theses have between 50 and 80 pages, Bachelor's theses typically have between 40 and 60 pages. However, depending on your topic and your writing style, more or fewer pages may be appropriate. Be aware that your thesis will only be evaluated based on the written document and the defense. If you did some nice work (that you might have shown to your adviser at some point) and forget to add it to your written document, it cannot be evaluated.

Title Page

The title page should include the following information:

  • Technical University of Munich Logo
  • Title of the thesis
  • Subtitle of the thesis (optional)
  • Full author name
  • Name of advisers

It is also nice (but optional) to add a pretty graphic from your research to the title page.

Acknowledgement

In this part, you acknowledge any support you may have gotten while preparing your thesis. For example, if an agency provided you with data, you definitely should thank them here. It is also not uncommon to offer personal thank to friends and/or family who supported the thesis. You may also mention your adviser if (s)he was helpful, but that is optional of course.

If you received a scholarship that supported you during the time you wrote your thesis, you definitely should acknowledge that support here as well.

Summary

The summary is a key part of your thesis and part of what is evaluated by your thesis committee. Make sure to reserve sufficient time at the very end to write a very good summary. The summary should be about one page long and include your research question, describe the data you used, briefly describe the methodology applied and (very important) also summarize the results you found.

Table of Contents

The table of contents lists all chapters and subchapters of your thesis and provides the page number where each chapter starts. Word and LaTeX offer automated functions to create a table of contents if you defined headers properly. Make sure to update the table of contents before you print to ensure that all page numbers are correct.

Following the table of contents, you also need to provide a list of figures and a list of tables. Likewise, these lists also provide the page number where the figures and tables can be found. Again, word and LaTeX provide automated functions for creating such lists.

1. Introduction

The introduction shall provide the reader with an entryway to your topic. Commonly, the introduction is not too technical and provides the reader with a very general introduction why the topic of the thesis is relevant. Empirical examples are particular popular in introductions (make sure to provide citations), such as:

Thesis Topic: Managing Freight Flows to Reduce Highway Maintenance Costs

The first sentence of introduction could be: Freight flows largely define the costs for maintaining infrastructure, as the rear axles of a typical 13 ton van cause 1,000-times the structural damage of a car (Small, Winston, and Evans 1989: 11).

The introduction should also provide at least one research question that you try to answer. Last but not least, the introduction should also introduce the structure of the thesis (i.e., which chapters the reader should expect) in one paragraph.

2. Literature Review

The literature review is a core element of your thesis and shows that you are capable of working scientifically. As you explain what other researchers have found on your topic, the reader will realize that you know this topic extremely well. This will build trust that you can provide a piece of work yourself that is scientifically relevant.

Equally important, you will need to identify a gap in the literature that you intent to fill. This is how you justify your thesis, and it helps the reader to assess the importance of your work. This gap may be methodological ("I will develop a new method that is able to answer my research question, which previously applied methods cannot as well."), use new data ("Other researchers used database X, but I will use data retrieved by Y."), or a new application ("This method has never been applied to the city of Munich.").

3. Data Collection

Describe in detail which data you use and how you collect these data. This may include qualitative data ("I analyze these in-depth travel behavior surveys."), or statistics you use, or data you collect yourself. The description should be as detailed that a very good fellow student in your field would be able to more or less reproduce your work.

If you conduct a case study, the study area needs to be introduced here.

4. Analysis

Obviously, here you describe in great detail the actual analysis you conducted. The level of detail should be sufficient to allow a very smart fellow student in your field to reproduce more or less your research.

5. Conclusions

The most important at the beginning: The chapter Conclusions does not contain a summary of your thesis! The summary is provided in the abstract of the beginning of your thesis, but not here.

Instead, the conclusions shall do what the title suggests: Synthesize your findings and conclude what we learn from that. It will be useful to refer to your research question(s) and discuss if those were confirmed or rejected by your research. You may also refer back to you literature review and compare your findings with the findings that others have published.

This is also a good place to talk about limitations of your research. By clearly stating what your research is not able to do well, your thesis becomes stronger. If you show that you understand what your methodology misses, you show the reader that you understand very well what you research has accomplished, and what may need further research.

Which brings us to another topic you should touch on in your conclusions: What are future research needs? If a fellow student of you wanted to build on your research, what would be the next logical step that (s)he should try to address?

Last but not least, you may also assess if your findings have practical implications. Examples: Should waste water engineers use an additional test to assess water quality? Should transportation planners use different data to assess the level of service?

List of references

Here you list all references that were cited in your work, and only those references. References you read but did not cite do not appear here. After all, they were not relevant enough for this thesis to be cited, so they do not belong in your list of references.

If you use a reference management system (highly recommended), the list of references is created automatically. LaTeX also nicely integrated with Bibtex to automatically create a list of references. TUM offers Citavi and Endnote for free to students (access here, log in required), and there are a number of other systems that also may work well for you (see this list on wikipedia).

Statement of independent work

Finally, you need to provide a statement that reads as follows:

In German: Ich versichere hiermit, dass ich die von mir eingereichte Abschlussarbeit selbstständig verfasst und keine anderen als die angegebenen Quellen und Hilfsmittel benutzt habe.

Or in English: I hereby confirm that this thesis was written independently by myself without the use of any sources beyond those cited, and all passages and ideas taken from other sources are cited accordingly.

Appendix (or Appendices)

You may provide additional information in appendices. Some researchers are of the opinion that if something is important it should go into the main body of the thesis; and if it doesn't deserve being in the main body of the thesis, it should not be provided at all. Others say that is may be useful to provide extensive tables, mathematical proofs or series of graphics in the appendix if they are not required to understand the main text but useful for the interested reader.

It is very uncommon to provide a single graphic or a single table in the appendix. Those usually work better in the main body of the text. Commonly, only material that covers several pages would go into the appendix, it it distracts the reader if all those materials were shown in the main body of the thesis.

Extensive appendices may be left out in the printed version and only be provided on a CD or a thumb drive. Note, however, that some advisers refuse to open any files stored on a CD or a thumb drive while evaluating your thesis. As a rule of thumb, your thesis needs to be understandable without reading any appendices.

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