PhD thesis formatting
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There is no official pre-made departmental or University-wide style template for PhD theses. Some argue that learning (and advancing!) the art of beautifully typesetting a thesis is a crucial part of getting a PhD.
Here are some practical recommendations, examples, and useful starting points.
LaTeX
Most PhD authors in the Computer Laboratory prefer LaTeX as their typesetting system (under both Linux or Windows), mainly because of its
- excellent and yet unmatched support for mathematical formulae;
- good support for managing bibliographic references;
- good support for high-quality typography;
- easy integration with software-engineering tools (make, revision control, etc.);
- very safe and robust handling of large documents;
- long-term stability;
- comprehensive free tool support.
A common approach is to use the report style, with a suitable title page added, margins changed to make good use of the A4 format, and various other changes to suit submission requirements and individual tastes (e.g., other fonts).
Diagrams
For preparing publication-quality diagrams, some of the most powerful and popular tools used include:
- PGF/TikZ – the probably most sophisticated drawing package for LaTeX
- matplotlib – Matlab-style function plotting in Python
Official requirements
There used to be detailed Student Registry PhD format requirements, regarding font sizes and line spacing, but most Degree Committees have dropped these, recognizing that they were mainly motivated by past typewriter conventions. The rules left are now mainly about the word count.
In particular, it is no longer necessary for dissertations to be printed single sided or in “one-and-a-half spaced type”. If you still like to increase the line spacing, for easier proofreading, you can achieve this in LaTeX by placing into the preamble the line “\usepackage{setspace}\onehalfspacing”.
Recommendations
Margins
One Cambridge thesis-binding company, J.S. Wilson & Son, recommend on their web page to leave 30 mm margin on the spine and 20 mm on the other three sides of the A4 pages sent to them. About a centimetre of the left margin is lost when the binder stitches the pages together.
Title
Write your thesis title and section headings in “sentence case”, that is use the same capitalization that you would have used in normal sentences (capitalize only the first word, proper nouns and abbreviations). Avoid the US-style “title case” that some conference-proceedings publishers require.
| Good: | My favourite programming pearls in Perl |
| Bad: | My Favourite Programming Pearls in Perl |
Reasons:
- Sentence case is normal typographic practice in the UK (see any UK-published newspaper, magazine, journals such as Nature, etc.).
- The catalogues of both the University Library thesis collection and our departmental Technical Report series record titles this way, and you don't want the cataloguers mess with your title capitalization when your thesis finally reaches them.
- It preserves useful information about the correct capitalization of any names or technical terms used.
Page numbers
Use a single page-number sequence for all pages in your thesis, i.e. do not use a separate sequence of Roman numerals for front-matter (title page, abstract, acknowledgements, table of contents, table of figure). In LaTeX that means using the report style, not the book style.
Reasons:
- PDF viewers number pages continuously starting from 1, and using anything else as printed page numbers causes confusion.
- This will save you some reformatting when submitting your thesis as a techreport.
Bibliographic references
If you use purely-numeric bibliographic references, do not forget to still mention authors’ surnames, as a courtesy to both the authors and your readers. Also, try to add the exact page number on which the quoted point is found in the reference; LaTeX supports this really well. (“suggested by Crowcroft and Kuhn [42,p107]”)
Technical Report submission
After a thesis has been approved by the examiners, the author normally submits it for publication as a Computer Laboratory Technical Report.
It is a good idea to read early on the submission guidelines for technical reports, as this may reduce the need to change the formatting later.
If you want to minimize any changes needed between your submitted thesis and the corresponding technical report version, then – in addition to applying all the above advice – you can
- make page 1 the title page,
- make page 2 the required declaration of originality,
- make page 3 the summary, and
- choose a layout suitable for double-sided printing (required for techreport, since 2010 also allowed for final PhD submission).
This way, there is a very high chance that turning your thesis into a techreport could be as simple as replacing pages 1 and 2 with the standard Technical Report title page (which the techreport editor can do for you).
More information
- The Computer Laboratory house style page explains where to find the University identifier that many put on the title page of their thesis.
- Markus Kuhn’s simple PhD thesis template (snapshot) is just one possible starting point.
- The cam-thesis LaTeX class is a collaborative effort to maintain a Cambridge PhD thesis template for Computer Laboratory research students, initiated by Jean Martina, Rok Strniša, and Matej Urbas.
- Effective scientific electronic publishing – Markus Kuhn’s notes on putting scientific publications onto the web, especially for LaTeX/LNCS users.
- International Standard ISO 7144 Presentation of theses and similar documents (1986) contains also some general guidelines for formatting dissertations that may be of use.