Sciences Des Elites

Style

Degree-awarding institutions often define their own house style that candidates have to follow when preparing a thesis document. In addition to institution-specific house styles, there exist a number of field-specific, national, and international standards and recommendations for the presentation of theses, for instance ISO 7144.[2] Other applicable international standards include ISO 2145 on section numbers, ISO 690 on bibliographic references, and ISO 31 on quantities or units.

Some older house styles specify that front matter (title page, abstract, table of content, etc.) uses a separate page-number sequence from the main text, using Roman numerals. The relevant international standard[2] and many newer style guides recognize that this book design practice can cause confusion where electronic document viewers number all pages of a document continuously from the first page, independent of any printed page numbers. They therefore avoid the traditional separate number sequence for front matter and require a single sequence of Arabic numerals starting with 1 for the first printed page (the verso of the title page).

Presentation requirements, including pagination, layout, type and color of paper, use of acid-free paper (where a copy of the dissertation will become a permanent part of the library collection), paper size, order of components, and citation style, will be checked page by page by the accepting officer before the thesis is accepted and a receipt is issued.

However, strict standards are not always required. Most Italian universities, for example, have only general requirements on the character size and the page formatting, and leave much freedom on the actual typographic details.[citation needed]

Literature review

Main article: Literature review

A literature review examines the existing academic literature to:

a) place the proposed or current work with the stream of academic development and history, and/or

b) to discover the strengths and weakness in the literature, uncovering gaps which may justify the significance of the current work.

A thorough review of literature provides the backdrop to, and reasons for, conducting the research. In addition, the discussion sets up the items in the methodology in a 1:1 correspondence. For example, if a researcher wants to query variable A in a particular population, their review of the literature should discuss the importance of, or other research that has studied variable A.

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