A practical PhD thesis template and formatting guide

When I was writing my PhD thesis, I found that understanding formatting guidance in practice often involved piecing together information from different sources. This guide is intended to help you write yours by bringing that guidance together in one place.

As a University of Aberdeen student, formal guidance is centred on the library thesis submittance guidance and the pgr code of practice. Informally, this is supplemented by advice from our supervisors and by looking at previous theses stored by the library on Primo. Ultimately, there are certain things a thesis must include, but also a lot of flexibility in how you deliver them.

I aim with this post to provide a practical guide to what a thesis usually needs, what tends to be flexible and give you some formatting choices and tips that can make life much easier for you and your examiners.

The core components of a thesis

The exact order and names of sections can vary. A lot.

But most theses include these same core sections:

• Cover/Title page
• Declaration
• Acknowledgements
• Thesis summary / abstract
• Table of contents
• General introduction
• Data chapters
• General discussion
• References

Some theses also have:

• Glossaries (if your study system is very niche, consider this!)
• Lists of figures/tables (if you keep figures in text, this can be very useful for navigation. I keep figures at the end of the chapter text so this wouldve been redundant for my thesis)
• General Intro/discussion as titled as chapters (e.g Chapter One: General Introduction”)
• General Intro/discussion titled without chapter numbers eg “General Introduction”/”General Discussion”

Cover page

This is the core text on thesis cover/title pages. Check your university’s submission guidance for exact wording - especially for the final library submitted version.

Your thesis title

Your Name
[Last degree, University, Country]

A thesis presented for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy
at [Your University]

Year

You might consider adding your sponsor details- not many people did in the theses I looked at. Perhaps if you have a more private sponsor versus the UK UKRI research training grants (e.g Doctoral Training Partnerships).

Declaration

Most declarations follow very similar wording:

I declare that the work presented in this thesis was composed by me, is my own and has not been submitted for any previous application for a degree.

Each thesis chapter has been the result of collaboration with different researchers whose names are listed at the beginning of the relevant chapters. Below are their names, affiliation and summary of contribution:

[Supervisor 1 name] – [Affiliation]
Summary of contribution

[Supervisor 2 name] – [Affiliation]
Summary of contribution

etc…

If chapters are published add:

A version of Chapter X has been published as: [Full citation]

Then you typically write your name, date and sign it. I used a table cell with the gridlines off to get my name and the date on the same line but left/right aligned

Acknowledgements

This is where you thank all the people who’ve helped you. There’s a loose order:

1. Supervisors
2. Collaborators / academic support
3. Peers / lab mates
4. Friends and family

Style varies massively based on the authors preferences. Some are very formal, some make it very personal (I liked ones that address each person specifically eg, Thank you XXX for your kindness etc..). Some people include quotes or thank their study systems/species at the end. Some keep it short, mine was quite long in the end. I got pretty senimental with it!

Side note: Favourite quotes of mine are “It takes a village” and “If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants” (attributed to Isaac Newton, great quote, less nice backstory?). I also suggest you check out the works of Maya Angelou!

Thesis summary (and/or abstract)

A full summary of the entire thesis. Usually have a word limit, I believe Aberdeens is 300 words.

Some people include both a thesis abstract and a thesis summary…technically they are different things…but most (including me) only include one.

This is often written very late. That’s common - not necessarily ideal - but common.

Table of contents

Your ToC will be auto-generated if you use Word heading styles. I prefered to number my headings, and MS Word can do that for you too

General introduction

This sets up your thesis. For me I went for something along the lines of:

Background / context > Research gap > Study system > Why this work matters

Aims and objectives

Usually one page. Structure that worked for me:

• One paragraph summing up your argument,
• One paragraph giving your thesis an overarching aim
• Paragraphs each giving each chapter specific aims.
  • Chapter 1 uses…
  • Chapter 2 combines…
  • Chapter 3 tests…
• Then a paragraph restating the overall thesis aim.

(Data) Chapter structure

These are just common manuscript structure. AKA:

• Abstract (some people prefer page breaks after abstracts- I think I did this?)
• Introduction
• Methods
• Results
• Discussion
• Personally I like figures out of text so I then have a “Figures” section here
• Supplmentary Materials (some people prefer the word Appendix)

Subheadings are very helpful to break up the text for the reader, especially if you use the MS Word styles/navigation

If your chapter is published or manuscript-style, you might include:

• Data availability
• Conflict of interest
• Ethical approval
• Acknowledgements

I kept these in my published chapter but not all chapters - I am still not sure if I should have but if made sense to me to keep the whole published manuscript in.

General discussion

I really struggled with this- trying to avoid parroting back the abstracts or conclusions of each individual chapter-by this point I was very zoomed in to my specific chapters and struggled to zoom out.

This was my roughest bit of work, and I think its common that the general discussion is written quite quickly at the end- I am not saying that is the wisest thing to do but I am just saying so maybe you give yourself a break.

After looking at many many different theses I concluded everyone approaches it differently and it really depends on student/supervisor/examinor preference.

The key idea is to move from chapters > themes > wider contribution

Focus on key themes (your aims!), what the thesis shows overall, broader implications. You can structure around questions (using subheadings) or write it as a continuous narrative. I have seen both approaches used and both seem acceptable. It seems to really depend on student/examiner preference!

This was my structure, however I think each examiner and supervisor likes different things so please bear that in mind!

• Briefly recapping the gap in the literature (aka my intro in one paragraph)
• Briefly recapping the results/findings of each chapter in one paragraph
• Then not mentioning chapters specifically but three central questions of the thesis (although some people do…but I found by doing this I ended up parroting the details of chapters and not wider findings/themes) explain what you think of how you’ve answered them? Or what you’ve learned?
• Then go wider still- how does the thesis as a whole contribute to the wider scientific community?
• Pull in some issues/limitations/caveats and what you hope for the future.
• Then summarise and conclude

I think what examiners are most interested here is where you think your thesis sits in the literature. Its a fun game with not being afraid to pat yourself on the back, but also showing your examiners you know the caveats and limitations of your work eg “I have singlehandedly saved this species” versus “If we account for X, Y and Z, this work is an important and valid contribution to the wider scientific discussion”

References

Some people incude references per chapter, some people have just one combined reference list at the end of the thesis. Preferences again vary.

If using a reference manager in Word, and have you thesis within a single Word doc, a single combined reference list is usually easiest! This is what I did :)

Formatting Guidance

After checking your supervisors opinion, any formatting seems acceptable as long as your thesis is professional, consistent, and easy to read (i.e. not Comic Sans or Papyrus).

Here are some common formats I’ve seen across theses:

Page numbers

• For page numbers, I prefer roman numerals for the front matter (eg. Declaration, Acknol. etc) and arabic numbers for the main text (eg General intro, data chapters etc). However I have seen theses (and it is probably easier) just use arabic numbers from start to finish of the thesis document. I didn’t want this, so I fiddled with Word page numbering settings

Font

• Sans-serif (e.g. Arial) is commonly used and very readable. Serif fonts (e.g. Times New Roman) are often seen as more traditional. I used the default MS Word font but anything “professional” is generally fine.

Line spacing

• 1.5 spacing is very common. I personally found this harder to read and used 1.15 instead. I think larger spacing likely comes from examiners annotating printed theses in the past (?) - most examiners now read and annotate digitally.

Margins and paragraphs

• I used MS Word defaults (including spacing between paragraphs rather than indents). As long as you are consistent, then you should be good.

Text alignment

• I used left-aligned text. Justified text is also common but in my opinion the uneven spacing between words can make it harder to read.

Line numbers

• Can be very helpful to facilitate revisions and discussion. I considered including them, but chose not to for submission. They can make the document feel less “finished”, which some people prefer to avoid!

Referencing system

• I think a standard reference system is the most important thing here! If I had to pick one, I would say Harvard. I went with the same referencing system I used for my first chapter as it was published- to keep consistency and stay true to the published text. But alternatively, you could add a note at the beginning of the odd chapter saying “A note on formatting”…

Tips

Next I want to take you through some tips that made my life so much easier in case you havent heard of them!

Figures and tables

Image quality

• When exporting from R I used 600 dpi (which is what some journals request- better save high quality than have to remake!)
• Stop your image quality being auto-compressed in Word: File → Options → Advanced → Image Size and Quality. Tick: “Do not compress images”

Inserting figures:

• Personally, I prefer figures and tables outside the main text body as it makes them easier to read with no constant scrolling- you can just print them all out or split screen.

• For wide figures- use section breaks (not just page breaks) → allows landscape pages for wide figures

• Even if you use figures in text- always put figures inside table cells- which stops them jumping around
• Turn on “View Gridlines” to position things neatly

Auto-numbers

• Using Word auto numbering with figure/table captions is your best friend.
• To ubdate the numbers, press Ctrl A+F9
• In the cross-ref syles you can make them link to the multilevel numbering of chapters/sections eg Figure 1.1, Figure 2.3 (I set my introduction as Section 0 → Figure 0.1)

Exporting you thesis

In Aberdeen we submit a PDF copy of our thesis. I expect this is the usual way of submitting theses. It was really important to me that the clickable Navigation links (from using MS styles/headers) in my document remained - as most examiners would read it digitally and links would save a lot of unecessary scrolling. Therefore instead of the usual Print->Save as PDF pipeline, I used File > Export > PDF > Options > Keep document structure tags / headings. This keeps clickable navigation

Printing for the viva

Highly recommend printing a copy or two of your thesis- I found it much easier to annotate and navigate plus its nice to break from the screen for a bit! You can keep this cheap by:

• printing at your university
• get it cheaply bound locally (mine was “comb bound” for £3)

Download the template

I’ve put together an editable Word template based on this guide:

Download my PhD thesis template

Final thoughts

The biggest thing I learned is there is far more flexibility than you think and there is no single “correct” thesis format.

Most guidance boils down to- include the required sections, make it readable/professional and follow submission requirements of your institution. Beyond that, the rest is up to you.

If your examiners don’t like your formatting choices, they will usually suggest minor (and easy to implement) corrections. In most cases, the focus is on your research rather than the exact formatting.

So, look at previous theses, check official guidance, ask your supervisor and then choose what makes the most sense for your work.

If you find this helpful

Please give it a share and tag me!

And if you’ve found better approaches - even better. Please let me know and I will update this with credit to you of course