Hello and welcome to Starting your ETD: Right Foot Forward. This presentation is brought to you by
admissions and academic progress at the Virginia Tech graduate school. my name is Matthew Grice,
I'm one of the admissions and academic progress advisors here at the graduate school.
In this presentation I'll discuss what the graduate school looks for when we review
your thesis or dissertation, as well as how you can prepare ahead of time and compose your ETD,
your thesis or dissertation, so that it will sail through the review process at the end. We know
that when it when the time comes to defend your thesis or dissertation you're going to be focused
on your committee, on your chair, on satisfying your department, on meeting their expectations and
addressing their concerns, and that you probably won't want to expend too much time or brain power
satisfying the graduate school. We know that by the end of this process you're ready to
graduate and get your degree so the goal of this presentation is to help you do that as smoothly
and swiftly as possible so that you won't have to make potentially significant changes
to your thesis or dissertation at the end of the process before it goes to the library.
When we use the acronym ETD we mean an electronic thesis or dissertation.
All doctoral students will prepare a dissertation and submit it, all thesis masters students will
prepare a thesis, non-thesis master students won't need to worry about anything in this presentation
because you don't formally submit an ETD, however it may still be relevant for you if you're going
to prepare a major paper. We are working with the library so that you'll be able to soon submit
those to the library's archives in a special collection as well, should you wish to do so.
The graduate school only checks your thesis or dissertation for formatting
we don't review the ETD for content except for one section the general audience abstract we
won't request to require any changes to the text itself but we do try to ensure that ETDs
are relatively standardized and formatted, that there is a similarity to them that will enable
interested scholars or interested parties to peruse and to find information in them with ease.
The good news is that we don't do what many students think we're probably going to do we
don't measure margins font size we don't critique the indentations of your paragraphs or things like
that we never break out a ruler we do however require some standard formatting for all ETDs
and the goal of this presentation is to let you know exactly what we do require and allow
you to prepare for that ahead of time. One of the most important things that we do look at is your
page numbers. This is probably the number one formatting issue, the number one thing that
we send emails to students letting them know that they'll need to change that they'll need to modify
consistent and clear page numbers are very important even with today's tech searchable
electronic documents it helps those in the future who might be looking at your material
to find stuff quickly and easily and it helps them cite it or to put it
put it in context if they want a quote from you or want to draw on your work in their own work
we require standardized page numbers on all all the ETDs that are submitted to the library
all of our ETDs will need to have the front front matter paginated separately
from the body of the thesis or dissertation you'll use lowercase roman numerals to number
the pages at the front of your thesis and you'll use arabic numerals for the body of the ETD
lower case roman numerals are used for the front matter as an academic convention by front matter
we mean the title page the abstracts the table of contents perhaps a list of figures and tables or
a dedication or acknowledgement section etc. lowercase roman numerals meaning i for one i i
for two i i i for three etc um when you get to the body of the dissertation or thesis you'll
use arabic numerals the more standard numbers that we're used to seeing one two three etc
in addition and this is a difficult formatting requirement and we understand that no page numbers
should be visible until after the abstracts are over therefore if you've got a title page a
scholarly abstract and a general audience abstract and each one is one page long the first visible
page number in your document will be iv or four in lowercase roman numerals on the page after that
because this is difficult to format and we do recognize that and many students struggle with it
we have created templates that you can use these templates are already formatted so that the page
numbers will show up as they need to do you can develop your ETD within one of these templates
that way the page numbers should already be set up correctly so that they're not visible on
the first few pages with the abstracts but become visible later on and then they switch to arabic
numerals when you get to the body of the text we have both a Word template and a LaTeX template
both are on the library's guide to ETD formatting which is on the library's website
if you do use these templates do be careful because if you paste
a lot of material into them you might be pasting in page breaks or other things that could affect
the page number formatting so do be aware of that you don't have to use these templates you do
have to format the page numbers according to our guidelines but you don't have to use the templates
but do be aware that they're available to use and that the page number formatting is again probably
the most difficult formatting requirement that we have and the one that students are most likely
to say that they have trouble with and we simply want you to be aware of that and anticipate that
we we don't want students to find out that they have to make significant formatting changes
at the end of the process when they're probably ready to be done and be graduated
there are both Word and LaTeX templates we don't have LaTeX experts on staff at the
graduate school do be aware that if you have uh some more complicated or more difficult
formatting questions about how to use latex you may need to seek
advising from someone others in your department or from the library
either way when you submit the formal thesis or dissertation it'll be in PDF format at that time
now page number formatting is detail work and you may not be thinking at all about something
like that yet you may still be thinking about well what exactly is my thesis or dissertation
going to discuss what is the structure of it going to be you might not even be sure exactly of what
experiments or what overall ideas you're going to explore in your thesis or dissertation
even if you're at that very early formative stage it's a good idea to think about
these kind of formatting questions that will come up later or will be relevant later
one thing i want to discuss is what overall format you may want to use for your etd there are two
that might be good options for you standard or manuscript many students do have questions even
about this sort of basic how do i want my ETD to be set up question so i'll discuss that here
standard format is a good format to use when your etd is going to focus on basically one main idea
maybe there's just one experiment or one project or topic
the setup might look something like this you have a chapter one which is an introduction
chapter two which is perhaps a review of literature or a background on what else has
already been explored in this area um chapter three might be the materials and methods and
four might be the experiment in chapter five you might discuss the results and then you
might have a conclusion chapter at the end and then perhaps a bibliography an appendix etc.
again in this case the thesis or dissertation is all all basically focused on one main idea or
one problem however some students when they submit their dissertation or their thesis
will be including separate sections that could stand on their own perhaps they've already been
published separately perhaps the plan is to publish some of them separately as articles
in this case manuscript format might be better in manuscript format you might instead have an
introduction an overall introduction that forms the first chapter perhaps a review of literature
but then in chapter three you have what could almost stand on its own or could stand on its own
so you might have a first manuscript with its own abstract and that is allowed its
own separate introduction its own uh experiment or results its own separate conclusion etc and
then chapter four again might might be something that could stand alone by itself so it might have
its own separate abstract in its own separate introduction and experiment and conclusion etc
and some people might even have a third and a fourth manuscript particularly PhDs who may have
done research on a number of different problems over the course of their PhD career
or who may have done work that perhaps built from one step one step might have built on another
or started where the other one left off but perhaps you did publish your work as you went
along and already published one article in your first year and then another article in your second
and another article in your third and they do have the ability to stand alone this also might
be a good format for you either one is okay you are allowed for example if you published an
article and you want to include that as chapter four of your dissertation um but it has its own
separate abstract and its own separate sort of standalone introduction and conclusion perhaps
even its own separate standalone works cited you can have that that is allowed
important thing to think about as well is handling quoted excerpted material
previously published material all that stuff that you're going to have to credit or acknowledge
or handle carefully in some way or another and almost every PhD your master's student will be
will have this kind of material in their thesis or dissertation as they work with materials that
have already been written as they build on experiments or on research that's already
been done as they expand on ideas that have already been published or written by others
what are permissions well generally in most cases if you're citing a text
that's already been published it's okay as long as you cite the source appropriately
and you don't reproduce the whole text or a substantial part of it if you quote a sentence
or a paragraph or even a couple paragraphs from from a book um you know you've cited it
appropriately you've credited the author that's generally sufficient and that's fine it's
quite another thing altogether if you're going to quote or reproduce an entire work as for
what a substantial portion of a work is well that is subjective what is a substantial portion of
an article what is a substantial portion of a book that can be that can be subjective
if you're in doubt about that we advise checking with your advisor if you do need to reproduce
all or a substantial portion of a published work or as happens in many cases an image
you may need to think about obtaining additional permissions citing may not be enough the Virginia
Tech library is going to host your thesis or dissertation when it's approved and people will be
able to access it and view it the library doesn't want to host for free any material that belongs
by right to others and so you may need to obtain the needed permissions to include that material
this may apply even to yourself if any of your own work has been previously published you may
need to obtain permissions to show that you retain the right to republish in your ETD.
If you've published an article in a journal for example you may need to demonstrate that you
have the appropriate permissions if you want to include it in your thesis or dissertation
the library does not assume and we do not assume that you automatically retain the rights
to include this material in your dissertation which after all will
appear free of charge to the public and the library's website
if you've already published it somewhere else you may have to show that you retain that right
do be careful in particular with images artwork and photography do not assume that you can
simply reproduce it without permission it's generally whereas citing text it's it's much
more likely that you may be just citing a small portion with images and photography
you're usually providing the whole thing and so you shouldn't assume that that's that's simply
you know unobjectionable as long as you cite the artist or the artwork. U.S. fair use
law does allow us to in many cases reproduce an artwork or an image under fair use law assuming
that you're not selling it which you're not if it's just part of your thesis or dissertation
and assuming that you are not simply reproducing it as your own but rather commenting
on it or adding something by way of commentary. The Virginia Tech library has information on
fair use it has a fair use guide so you can look into that more if you have questions about that
related to appropriately citing sources appropriately crediting the authors of works that
you're citing or quoting is uh the authenticate software system this is a program that Virginia
Tech has a contract with and that Virginia Tech graduate students all have to submit their ETDs to
all thesis master students and PhD students will have to upload their thesis or dissertation
to the authenticate website and get an authenticate report from that website
authenticate is basically a plagiarism uh not plagiarism detection tool but it's connected to
detecting where you've gotten material from it will scan your document and it'll crawl the
web searching for substantially similar or identical text it'll then give you a report
and it'll show you what it found on the on the web almost everybody is going to get
some hits when they do this because almost everybody's cited work uh cited material in
their thesis or dissertation that comes from somewhere else um you know you may have even
written a line or sentence that's substantially similar enough to something that's been written
that even though you weren't quoting authenticate might still pick it up and that's fine
again almost everybody's going to get some hits back when they uh have authenticate scan their
document and then call the web and that's normal authenticate cannot tell and doesn't tell doesn't
detect whether you've appropriately cited the sources or not it doesn't know it's not smart
enough to know that so authenticate might give you a report that has a ton of matches or similarities
might give you all these websites where it found matching text and you might look and
see that you've appropriately cited and credited the author in every single case and that's fine
again it would be a misnomer to say that authenticate is a plagiarism detection tool
it doesn't detect plagiarism it just detects what from your thesis or dissertation appears to match
what's already out there um you do need to be aware of the numbers that you get back though
if your authenticate report gives you numbers that are high you'll want to pay attention to that um
you'll want to see if the identicate report says that 15 or more overall of your thesis
or dissertation matches what's found online or five percent or more matches any one single source
um we do need you to look at that and just look at why there's all kinds of good reasons this can
happen a very common reason is again a student has already published a chapter of their dissertation
as an article authenticate picks that up and it sees it as a huge you know matching percentage
that's fine just when your authenticate report is high the numbers are high always check to
make sure you've appropriately cited all sources and you've obtained any necessary permissions
to show that you retain the right to include this material in your dissertation or thesis
sometimes we get questions about this whole issue of well what if i have either published some
material that's going to be in my etd already or what if i want to publish it in the future
this is a question for a number of students you do certainly retain the right to republish anything
that's included in your etd in the future if you submit your dissertation to virginia tech
graduate school it's approved it's archived at the library and then you later want to publish
it or publish a part of it you certainly do retain the right to do that you do also have the right to
embargo or restrict free access to your thesis or dissertation for a year and that's renewable
if with permission if you apply for it that's renewable some students who plan to publish
stuff in the future don't want their material to be available for free online through the virginia
tech library because they again hope to publish it somewhere else and perhaps that publisher
doesn't want the material to become free available for free online because they want people to buy it
so you can restrict or embargo your etd if that's something that you want to do or hope to do
also related to this question of appropriately crediting others is make sure that if your etd
is a collaborative effort that you keep a record keep a document tracking people who either served
as co-authors or who perhaps didn't serve as co-authors but contributed materially to your work
we recommend keeping a record as you go so you don't forget anybody at the end
certainly if anybody is a co-author on any of your material they should
be explicitly acknowledged as such in your thesis or dissertation
it's appropriate to both do this towards the beginning and in the relevant sections
um so you can have an attribution page in the front matter of your etd that credits co-authors
and then if somebody for instance was a co-author on chapter three at that on the first page of
chapter three you can acknowledge them there as well um anybody who performed any original
research or created original work that's part of your etd should be recognized and credited
and you should make sure you have their permission to use the material you may think that goes
without saying but it may be a good idea to make sure you have that explicit permission
people who weren't co-authors and perhaps didn't perform any original research or
create original work but who nevertheless were very important to your efforts
you can credit them in an acknowledgement section at the beginning of the etd
we often get questions about what is required for example is an acknowledgement section
required it's not there are some things that we do absolutely require for all atds
every atd has to have a title page and we do requires those to be quite standardized
with relevant information immediately available on that first page of your etd the title your
name the degree and major your committee etc all students will have to have an abstract
uh an overall abstract for their thesis or dissertation all students will have
to have a general audience abstract which i will discuss in detail a little later
and all students need to have a table of contents for their epd a number of other
things like the acknowledgements or a list of figures or tables etc are optional it's up to you
getting back to the general audience abstract many students i think don't think about this very much
and don't worry about it a great deal um perhaps they only added in at the very end
at the last minute it's not a priority for them it's not a priority for their committee
um the people that matter to you when it comes to does your thesis or dissertation pass muster
are not the general audience they're your chair and they're your
your advisor and your committee and those people are obviously not general audience
abstract they're that they're the experts who are teaching you um and they're the people that
you know you want to impress they're the people who you want to vote pass on your defense um
and we understand that um however at the same time the general audience abstract is a requirement
and we do check it and we do in fact check at the content not just formatting
and i do want to advise you it's a very big deal and i think it
can be very different for some students to switch over their brain and to switch over
their uh writing process to suddenly start writing about the topic for a general audience
by the time most students are writing a thesis certainly by the time phd students
are writing a dissertation they've been immersed in their subject for a long time
for years many many phd students have been doing this for five or six years
many students studied the same subject as undergrads and so they've been immersed
in the field for that much longer perhaps some students even back beyond that back in high school
were focused very uh very much so on a certain field
you might be deeply saturated in the terminology in the esoteric language of the field
it might be very difficult to step back from that it might be very difficult to think
about the material in a different way we at the graduate school believe that it's really important
to be able to think about what you do what you study what you write about
um from from the perspective of the general audience or from the perspective of a layperson
we think it's really important we think that it would be great if students were thinking about it
all the time all the way all the way through the process and i do want to emphasize it here in this
presentation since this is a presentation about getting started with your etd think about it now
think about how you could communicate what you do the importance of your work the relevance of your
work to lay people or a general audience don't just think about it when it comes to communicating
to others in your field because it's an important skill it's an important skill and a valuable one
valuable one to be able to communicate about what you do to a general audience or to a layperson
some things that we strongly advise we see this a lot and we would not advise doing it
don't take your scholarly abstract and just change a few words um you really need to start from
scratch with the general audience abstract because the entire gist and entire focus and entire
approach might need to change if you're waiting for a lay person
start from scratch write something then read over what you've written
highlight every term that's jargon or that's highly specific to your field
and see if you can find another way to talk about it or discuss it or mention it if you're not sure
if something is jargon or highly specific error on the side of assuming that it is
there are some other ways to think about the general audience abstract or to approach
how do i do this um some suggestions that i've given to students in the past
you might try imagining you're in the elevator with somebody you've just met
imagine you need to give an elevator pitch a brief verbal snapshot while you're riding up to the 30th
floor or the 40th floor or whatever it is of what you've been working on for the past few years um
you know you've got to kind of cut to the quick you've kind of got to get to the meat of
it um and uh you're not you're not not really able to go into the weeds um
and you can't assume anything from the person you're in the elevator with about how much they
know about your field don't you can't assume that they have any real experience in the field
something else that i really like to recommend to students because i think this can be a very
good exercise and very relevant to what you might find yourself doing in the future
as a professional try pretending that your funding is about to be cut try pretending that
you need to convince an under an uninterested politician that what you do is meaningful and
worth spending money on why should this person care why should any of us care about what you do
what's the relevance what's the potential impact that's a really good thing to be thinking about
when it comes to writing something for a general audience or a layperson
and it's a really good thing to be thinking about no matter what you do
remember that things that might be very rel excuse me things that might be very relevant or that you
might see is very significant when it comes to the scholarly abstract or when it comes to
um what you would need to communicate to people in your field might not matter at all to a lay
person things like p-values or margins of error you really don't need to give those you don't need
to give certainly don't need to give number numero numbers there you might not want to go into detail
about the steps of the experiment especially if it's going to be unavoidably highly technical
it might it might be good to just step back from that altogether
some students in certain fields or certain disciplines will have etds that do look somewhat
different than other people's um and they might be wondering well how strict are these formatting
requirements because i want to do something very different um some things that i do want
to let you know um we do allow etd's thesis and dissertations to have what we call a cover sheet
a designed artistic uh cover or first page you'll still have to have the title page the very
standardized title page that has the title your name the degree and major your committee members
um the date of your defense you'll still have to have that but you can also have a cover sheet
that's designed by you it can have artwork on it it can look basically how you want it to look um
you're certainly allowed to have a large number of drawn or created images of different sizes
your ETD can be in landscape format rather than the more typical portrait format
a lot of architecture theses the pages are in landscape format in other words they're wider
than they are tall rather than being taller than they are wide and that's also allowed
um some students in some departments create uh some kind of creative thesis that's
web-based or internet based it's a website essentially rather than having created a
text rather than having created what's sort of like a a report or a book even they've
created what's essentially a website perhaps an interactive website um for the students in
those departments we do allow that too you'll need to submit what looks kind of standard a
standard title page in abstracts so that we can catalog those so there's a record in the catalog
of those things but then you can include you know a page with the link and then the link is to the
website and the website is your official thesis we are used to seeing those as well so if your
department is different and you're not sure about what you can do and what you can't do
you can look at what some other students have submitted before you try to look to something
that was submitted fairly recently rather than too far back or you can contact the graduate school
now many students might have questions that i didn't answer or didn't get to
um because this uh presentation is aimed more at
those students who are in the early processes of preparing their thesis or dissertation
um i didn't dwell or focus on some some of the more detail-oriented things that we might look at
certainly we can answer those questions or discuss those things and the graduate school does have
information on the ETD library guide has a lot of information about formatting that
goes into more detail and those things are available on that website as well
you can certainly contact us my contact information is right here on the screen
we can answer your questions about formatting ETDs we look at all of
them we review all of them for formatting so we've seen almost everything at this point
and we generally can answer your questions no matter what they are um again the hope is that uh
we can share with you what what matters to us and what doesn't matter to us so that you can
plan ahead and have stuff set up right from the start and not have to worry about making
formatting changes later on again we know that many students after they've passed their defense
are very ready to be done and to be finished and it's our goal to make submitting your ETD
and having it proved be as easy and smooth that you barely notice it again feel free
to contact the graduate school to reach out to me with any questions you might have thank you