The content and structure of theses vary across disciplines. Consult any guidelines provided by your program to ensure your thesis includes all required sections and is organized appropriately for your discipline. Also consider reaching out to the subject librarians for your area. You can locate the relevant personnel by going to the Subjects page and navigating to your subject area.
The following are program-specific guidelines that have been shared with the library by the Master of Fine Arts faculty:
General Formatting:
The following features are common in theses, but may not be required for your program or applicable to your project:
For additional tips on how to format your thesis using a particular style guide, refer to:
For general assistance with graduate-level writing, consult Purdue Online Writing Lab (OWL) Resources on Graduate Writing.
Microsoft Word
Page numbers in Microsoft Word
Formatting a Table of Contents
Insert a page break in Microsoft Word
Setting Margins in Microsoft Word
Editing Headers and Footers in Microsoft Word:
Other Word Processors:
Google Docs:
Add a title, heading, or table of contents in a document
Change how Paragraphs and fonts look
Add page breaks & move margins
Use headers, footers, page numbers and footnotes
View document outlines, rulers, & non-printing characters
100 Great Google Docs Tips for Students and Educators
Pages:
Change page size, page orientation, and margins
Add page numbers and text to headers and footers
If you are a student in a Graduate Nursing or Master of Women's Leadership program, your thesis will be digitized and shared on The W's Institutional Repository, Athena Commons. Athena Commons is the hub of scholarship produced by faculty and students at the W, and is part of the Digital Commons Network. Participation in the network means that your research will be made available to people all over the world!
Metadata is a big part of making your research findable when people are searching for sources. On Athena Commons, metadata is a set of information about published works that lets people have a better understanding of what you've written about, and helps them correctly site your work. The library uses the following information to identify your work: Your first and land name, the first and last name of thesis advisor(s), an abstract, confirmed correct spellings of all author names, and the correct order of the authors' names. This information is often found on the first two pages of a thesis, but if one of those elements is not required, please send the information to the person in your program to whom you submit your thesis.
To see examples of this information, you can visit the Women's Leadership Page or the College of Nursing and Health Sciences Collection and view metadata for individual items as well as published theses.
For more information about our Institutional Repository, visit the Athena Commons - Institutional Repository LibGuide.
