General Tips on Thesis writing

How to plan for preparing good thesis.

These guidelines are specifically written for my graduate students. I am sharing these here so I may save time otherwise required briefing each student. Please feel free to share with anyone who may benefit. The list is not exhaustive and I may add more points later.

The tips are equally useful for planning on writing research papers.

Thesis outline

Make outline of thesis in advance i.e. make a thesis structure. A typical structure would be:

• Chapter 1 (Introduction — may be 4–6 pages)
• Chapter 2 (Literature Review — may be 15+ pages)
• Chapter 3 (Methodology — may be 20+ pages)
• Chapter 4 (Result and Discussion — may be 20+ pages )
• Chapter 5 (Conclusion — may be 4–6 pages)

Important:
When writing, always take into consideration comparison of your work with different recent models.

Figures

Figures such as block diagrams, flow charts should be drawn in MS visio tool, or draw.io tool. Avoid drawing figures in MS office.
• For text within figures, keep font size equal to 16 or 14. And use font “Calibri” or “Arial”
• Wherever possible, avoid using high contrast colors and avoid using red, purple colors in figures. Recommended colors are black, grey and different shades of grey. However, for images such as medical images, you can choose color figures.
• Save figures source files as .vsd and .svg. So, you may later on edit easily.
• Save final output figure in .PNG for use in LaTeX or MS word.
For figures insertion: insert figures and caption inside a text box. This will make your life easier otherwise you may struggle a lot with alignment of figures.
For tables insertion: insert tables inside a text box. This will make your life easier otherwise you may struggle a lot with alignment of tables.

References:

• Use IEEE style
  • Cite papers from good journals and conferences. For example, Journals with good impact factor or well-reputed in machine learning or applied machine learning domain or medical imaging domains such as IEEE Transactions, Springer journals, Elsevier journals, Nature, Scientific Report etc.) and Conferences such as CVPR, NeurIPS, ICML, IJCAI, ICLR, ECML, ECCV, ICCV, EMBC, etc. )
  • References should appear in ascending order and cited in ascending order.

Abbreviation:

• Acronyms are usually defined on first instance and then used throughout. Abbreviation/Acronyms to be used as given below:
  Example 1:
  We use convolutional neural network (CNN) with the …… The reason to use CNN is motivated by …..
  Example 2:
  Generative adversarial networs (GANs) were proposed by Ian Goodfellow. Our work on GANs for medical imaging has appeared in Springer Journal of Medical Systems.