Your report must rest on a scientific ground. This means that you must be able to support/motivate all claims and conclusions in your report. You must also have a reference if you have gotten your information from some information source. Be aware that you should always have a critical outlook on your sources. The mere fact that something has occurred in print is not a guarantee that it contains correct information. At the very least you must consider that results that were collected under certain circumstances or under certain assumptions may not be directly applicable on what you do.It is important to consider who is the intended reader of your report. Your report is read and approved by your supervisor and examiner. Write considering them and also so that it can be read by your fellow students. Consider what can be a reasonable level of prior knowledge on their part so that what you write doesn't become too elementary or too advanced. In this you can make good use of the supporting notes that you have taken during the work. They should be detailed enough to guide you in what is simple and what was not so obvious when you first encountered it. Try also not to get stuck in too many details.
Be careful with style and with the treatment of language. You are writing a scientific report. Avoid spoken language idioms and/or making the presentation too formal or rigid. Learning to write well takes a long time and requires experience. You can make good use of studying earlier masters thesis reports, scientific journals or from course literature. At the end of this document you find some links to pages containing very good material for the writer, please do study them!! There are also good books on how to write on the local library.
A good suggestion is to use a good word processor to write the report. It should support spelling checks, cross references (that you use for references to literature/sources, tables, figures and sections) and have support for drawing figures.
You can structure the content of your report thus (the exact structuring is determined by the nature of your work). The initial and the two final bullets should always be treated. The other bullets should also be covered in the text, but you can choose to have them separate, to merge two or more of them into one section or possibly to repeat them all on each subproblem:
Abstract: This should alway be in English for masters theses at this department. Appr. 200 words. A brief description of the most important parts/problem formulations and results in your report. An "abstract" must be readable as a stand-alone part. This means that you do not normally have references in an abstract.
Table of Contents.
Introduction with goals and extent: State what your study is about, what you have investigated, the goals of the investigation, and why it is interesting.
Background material: A critical review of what has been done before in the area and how it relates to your work.
Problem formulation: A more careful formulation of the problem(s) you have investigated.
Choice of methodology: What approaches/methods did you choose to solve your problem? Why? re there other alternatives?
Presentation and discussion of the results: Present and discuss critically the results you found. What do they say? What conclusions can be made? Carefully motivate what you write!
Conclusions: Sum up your most important results. Is there something general to say about them? What impact might they have? How can you move on?
References: A list of the sources you used.
Figures and tables
The reader can find it quite useful if you present your findings in the form of figures and tables. There are simple rules concerning figures and tables. Some of them are found below:
Each table should be numbered and have a text that describes what it contains.
Text associated to a a figure must be under the figure while text concerning a table should be placed above the table.
You must reference each figure and table in your text. That is, you should always describe what is said by the figure/table in words in your text and add a reference such as for instance: "Figure 4 illustrates the mean queue length as a function of XXX. From these results and Table 1 it is evident that ...".
the first reference to the figure/table should always come before the figure/table itself in the document.
If you write in English, you must always use a capital letter in the words "Section", "Figure" and "Table" in references. I.e.: "When we examine Figure 5 ...".
Choose the scale for figures such that what you want to illustrate is visualized in the best way possible. This involves not only the grading of axes but also the choice of linear or logarithmic scales.
It must be possible to interpret each figure together with its figure text without forcing the reader to read all text that describes it. It English you say that the figures/tables should be "self-contained". (In practice this can be hard to guarantee. After all, words can explain more than a mere figure. If not, humans might not have seen a need to invent language...)
A figure/table should always have a purpose. Never insert a figure/table in the report just to fill the space!
Enumeration of sections and pages
The purpose of enumeration of sections and pages is to make it easier for the reader to find his/her way around the report. The enumeration of pages and sections starts from 1 in the first actual part of the report that is normally the introductory section. The "abstract", that is the summary in the beginning if the report, should not be numbered as a section or be given a page number. If you still want to enumerate this initial part of the report you should use a separate page numbering for instance i, ii, iii...
The sections are enumerated to make it easier to reference these in the text. Normally subsections are also enumerated for the same reason. A good "rule of thumb" in the context is to avoid having more than 2 subsections, e.g. "Section 1.2.3" (part 3 in subsection 2 of section 1) is acceptable, but not e.g. "Section 1.2.3.4". The reason should be clear from the example - if you have too many sub-levels it does not help the reader. If you find that you would need have more than two sub-levels, you should instead consider how you can restructure the content. A rule could be "Please use one sub-level for division of sections and two when it can be motivated.
References
When you write your masters thesis report you must include references to the sources you use/refer to. Below follows a small guide to how you handle references in your report. There are several different accepted ways to write down references. The differences between the different ways are often just different layout. Below we describe a common way to write the reference list and two common ways to write the references in the text based on a system from Harvard University. NB! You must of course reference all the references listed in the reference list in the report text.
References in the text
A reference in the text in included in order to make clear that what you write is based on or is a direct quote from some source that you used. It is common to enumerate your references in the reference list and to use the numbers in parenthesis as a reference: E.g.: "This method to boil steel was first proposed in [23]" or "Jones proposed this method in [23]". If you use enumeration of references it is useful to use a system/word processor that supports cross references. If not you can run into problems if you want to add a new reference in the reference list, and you can be forced to go through all references in the text manually and re-enumerate them. This procedure is quite time consuming and is also prone to errors!
If your word processor does not support cross references, you can instead write an acronym to identify a reference containing:
The last name(s) of the author(s)
Year of the publication
Page number, in cases where you refer to a special text excerpt.
Examples of such references are: "This method is described in (Jones 1986)", "An example of this is illustrated in (Petterson and Sundström 1992:240-246)", "Jones (1988a) introduced this notion..." or "The second description of this occurred in (Jones 1988b)". If an author has written several references with the same publication year, you separate these by adding a letter to the year, e.g. 1988a and 1988b.
The reference list
Start the reference list on a separate page. Use the heading References). Order the references alphabetically based on the last name of the first author of each reference. If the same author has written several references they are sorted chronologically. For each reference the following must be included:
The full first and last names of the author (initials can be used for the first name). If there is no named author, for instance for a manual of a system, you can of course not name the author.
Publication year
Title of the work
Where is is published
The name of the editor/publisher (not for journals)
Use an italic style for names of books and journals.
Below follows examples of the three most commonly occurring types of references: Book (monograph) Gustafsson, Per. 2002. The Book That Doesn't Exist. ISBN 0-13-XXXXXX-8, Stockholm: The Invented Publisher.
Article in magazine Chandy, J. M and Misra J. 1981. Asynchronous Distributed Simulation via a Sequence of Parallel Computations. Communications of the ACM 24(4):198-205
Manual, dictionary etc. Guide to Parallel Programming on the Sequent Computer Systems. 1986, ISBN 0-13-370446-7, New York:Prentice-Hall
Examples of how you write references to material that has been published electronically, for instance on a CD or in the WWW, you find under http://www.eei-alex.com/eye/utw/96aug.html.
Quotations
If you quote a source the quotations should be repeated word-by-word ("verbatim"). You mark that it is a quotation by enclosing the text fragment with " ". If you leave out part of a quotation, if is too long or irrelevant in the context, you must mark this with three dots: ... If you add comments or explanations, you should put them in brackets []. Normally you do not quote more than 100 words in running text. E.g.: "This method [to synchronize a parallel simulation] is primarily suited for large scale systems. ... and has been found to work well for the simulation of mini-busses" (Unknown 1975:123). In the example we added "to synchronize a parallel simulation" as a comment/explanation and struck out uninteresting/irrelevant parts with ...
The best way to fail with your masters thesis report
The simplest way to get a failed degree on your masters thesis report is to steal ideas, results, text or pictures from a source without providing a reference. This is called plagiarism. Note that plagiarism is a quite serious offense, and in cases when the examiner has founded suspicions that a student tried to cheat in this way, (s)he has to report the incident to the disciplinary committé of KTH. The reason that plagiarism is considered so serious is that reports are often the result of a lot of work and thinking, perhaps the only visible proof thereof, and therefore represent not only an intellectual right but an economic asset for the company or the individual that publishes the material. Reports are practically always protected by copyright and author's rights, the claimed infringement of which occupy many lawyers throughout the world. There is practically always an owner of a text. The owner is the one who decides if and how the text can be used. Therefore copying of text (and pictures) without reference to the source (or in violation of its rules of accepted use) is a crime comparable to theft. There are exceptions from the copyright rules, since you must of course be able to reference or use the published works of others (look for instance at the section above on quotations). If these exceptions did not exists, you would have to reinvent everything again and again. Similarly if people stopped respecting intellectual property rights (including the copyright laws) very few publications would be possible, since they could be immediately stolen.
What do you do if you find a description of something in your background material that you consider has to be contained in your masters thesis report? Normally you try to summarize/formulate the ideas in your own words and give a reference to the source, for instance the document where the information was originally found. If you cannot reformulate the ideas in your own words you quote the source directly (see the guidelines on quotations above). If the amount of required quotation lies outside the copyright rules you must ask the copyright holder (and the author, if they are not the same) for permission to use the material. You should also indicate in the report that you got this permission. If you feel unsure about quotations or use of material owned by others in your masters thesis report, you should always discuss the matter with your academic supervisor/examiner at KTH!
Presenting your report
When you present your report you have no more than 20-25 minutes at your disposal. That is a short time to present 20 weeks of work. From this you can conclude that you should be well prepared and that you can probably not present all details of your work, but are instead forced to choose those parts that are the most interesting. This is a rather usual situation in working life. You get a very short time to present something that can be quite important both to yourself and to others. Then you have to come well prepared and take the chance that is offered. The most important thing is that you yourself have a clear goal with your presentation and that you succeed at conveying your message to your audience.
In summary one could say that your presentation should;
1) give the audience an overview of your work, and
2) present the most important results.
If you succeed with this and make the presentation interesting, the chance is greater that more people will read your report. In order to make the presentation interesting you have to adapt it to the audience. In the same way as when you write the report you should carefully consider the content, the structure and the presentation technique. A common structure for a masters thesis presentation is the following:
A short presentation of you (e.g. your name and what specialization you have)
An overview of how your presentation is organized
A presentation of the problem and the background (remember that the audience might not be experts in the topic)
A description of what you have done
The most important results/conclusions that your work led to
A discussion on the importance of your work
Problems that you encountered, but was unable to solve (if there are such)
What problems and questions should be considered if a continuation should be anticipated, and whether you can continue with this work and
Possibly a summary
In short you should for your presentation consider what you want to say, how you are going to present it, write an outline with highlighted issues, and prepare the actual presentation pictures. Please rehearse your presentation a few times so that you learn your presentation more or less by heart and have control over the time. Below we give more details concerning some of these points.
An important part of the presentation is the technology you use for the presentation. The most common is some form of OH-pictures. These should be designed primarily with the audience in mind. Do not add too much information; select what is important and relevant. If you succeed with that, these will also be a support for you in your presentation. Consider also using fonts and size of characters which allows also those that sit at the back to read clearly what is on your slides. Consider also that it you use A4 the whole picture will normally not be visible at the same time.
Another issue is how you remember what to say during the presentation. If you use OH-slides which are well designed they are a good support. Often you need to add support notes for your own use. My suggestion is to design these as short bulleted points, a few per OH-slide; one piece of paper per slide can be a good idea. Write using large letters so that you can easily read your own text! Trying to write down the whole presentation word-per-word is normally not a good idea. The text tends to be too small, it is difficult to navigate in a huge amount of text, and the chance that you will get stuck is increased. Furthermore you loose eye contact with your audience if you are to read from a sheet of paper and the presentation tends to be less lively than if you speak more freely using short notes.
Before you give your presentation you should rehearse/exercise it a few times. It is a good way to counter "stage fright" and gives you the chance to make sure that you can hold the time. The best way to do this is to stand as if you had the audience in front of you and to move the OH-slides as if it were "the real thing".
You can expect the audience to ask questions. If they don't do that it is often a sign that they didn't understand what you are talking about... You can choose to answer questions when they come as you move along, or ask the audience to postpone their questions to the end of the talk. Both ways are fully acceptable. If you know that you will not have time to take questions during the presentation or if you do not want to be interrupted, you do not normally need to say anything in advance, since that is the most common form. If you, on the other hand, are willing to answer questions during the presentation, you should say this at the beginning of the presentation. The advantages with answering questions during the presentation is mainly that it can be more easy to answer a question in connection with the presentation of the particular issue, and that you are more likely to get a better contact with the audience. (As a lecturer you often tell the students to ask questions for these very reasons!). In any case, you need to take the lead over the timing of your presentation and say that you take the answer afterwards, if it tends to be a long sequence of follow-up questions, the discussion of which have little interest. But please do this in a friendly way so that you do not offend the person who asked the questions. Remember that there are no stupid questions (at least not if you do not have a deliberately malicious audience). If you get tough or hard questions - do not take this as a critique of you as a person, do not get angry or agitated. If someone found an error, do not try to hide this fact - it is better to admit ones mistakes.
"Accepting that you were mistaken, is just to admit that you are today wiser than yesterday." J. C. Lavater
Some further useful suggestions for the presentation are these:
Establish and keep the eye contact with your audience. Then you see if they can follow what you talk about. It is rather boring to listen to someone who is constantly looking into a piece of paper and reads aloud!
There is no reason to become nervous: Stop. think about how you should proceed, do not stress ahead! (the audience can need a short break to collect their thoughts also. There is no reason to get nervous! For sure you know your topic, you have actually worked on it for 20 weeks! Look at the presentation as a means to show what you learned and did during this time!
If you still get nervous: Stop talking, think! Do not start to move your papers or your OH-slides around! It just irritates the audience and shows that you are insecure.