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What is a thesis | A Complete Guide with Examples

Table of Contents

A thesis is a comprehensive academic paper based on your original research that presents new findings, arguments, and ideas of your study. It’s typically submitted at the end of your master’s degree or as a capstone of your bachelor’s degree.

However, writing a thesis can be laborious, especially for beginners. From the initial challenge of pinpointing a compelling research topic to organizing and presenting findings, the process is filled with potential pitfalls.

Therefore, to help you, this guide talks about what is a thesis. Additionally, it offers revelations and methodologies to transform it from an overwhelming task to a manageable and rewarding academic milestone.

What is a thesis?

A thesis is an in-depth research study that identifies a particular topic of inquiry and presents a clear argument or perspective about that topic using evidence and logic.

Writing a thesis showcases your ability of critical thinking, gathering evidence, and making a compelling argument. Integral to these competencies is thorough research, which not only fortifies your propositions but also confers credibility to your entire study.

Furthermore, there's another phenomenon you might often confuse with the thesis: the ' working thesis .' However, they aren't similar and shouldn't be used interchangeably.

A working thesis, often referred to as a preliminary or tentative thesis, is an initial version of your thesis statement. It serves as a draft or a starting point that guides your research in its early stages.

As you research more and gather more evidence, your initial thesis (aka working thesis) might change. It's like a starting point that can be adjusted as you learn more. It's normal for your main topic to change a few times before you finalize it.

While a thesis identifies and provides an overarching argument, the key to clearly communicating the central point of that argument lies in writing a strong thesis statement.

What is a thesis statement?

A strong thesis statement (aka thesis sentence) is a concise summary of the main argument or claim of the paper. It serves as a critical anchor in any academic work, succinctly encapsulating the primary argument or main idea of the entire paper.

Typically found within the introductory section, a strong thesis statement acts as a roadmap of your thesis, directing readers through your arguments and findings. By delineating the core focus of your investigation, it offers readers an immediate understanding of the context and the gravity of your study.

Furthermore, an effectively crafted thesis statement can set forth the boundaries of your research, helping readers anticipate the specific areas of inquiry you are addressing.

Different types of thesis statements

A good thesis statement is clear, specific, and arguable. Therefore, it is necessary for you to choose the right type of thesis statement for your academic papers.

Thesis statements can be classified based on their purpose and structure. Here are the primary types of thesis statements:

Argumentative (or Persuasive) thesis statement

Purpose : To convince the reader of a particular stance or point of view by presenting evidence and formulating a compelling argument.

Example : Reducing plastic use in daily life is essential for environmental health.

Analytical thesis statement

Purpose : To break down an idea or issue into its components and evaluate it.

Example : By examining the long-term effects, social implications, and economic impact of climate change, it becomes evident that immediate global action is necessary.

Expository (or Descriptive) thesis statement

Purpose : To explain a topic or subject to the reader.

Example : The Great Depression, spanning the 1930s, was a severe worldwide economic downturn triggered by a stock market crash, bank failures, and reduced consumer spending.

Cause and effect thesis statement

Purpose : To demonstrate a cause and its resulting effect.

Example : Overuse of smartphones can lead to impaired sleep patterns, reduced face-to-face social interactions, and increased levels of anxiety.

Compare and contrast thesis statement

Purpose : To highlight similarities and differences between two subjects.

Example : "While both novels '1984' and 'Brave New World' delve into dystopian futures, they differ in their portrayal of individual freedom, societal control, and the role of technology."

When you write a thesis statement , it's important to ensure clarity and precision, so the reader immediately understands the central focus of your work.

What is the difference between a thesis and a thesis statement?

While both terms are frequently used interchangeably, they have distinct meanings.

A thesis refers to the entire research document, encompassing all its chapters and sections. In contrast, a thesis statement is a brief assertion that encapsulates the central argument of the research.

Here’s an in-depth differentiation table of a thesis and a thesis statement.

Now, to craft a compelling thesis, it's crucial to adhere to a specific structure. Let’s break down these essential components that make up a thesis structure

15 components of a thesis structure

Navigating a thesis can be daunting. However, understanding its structure can make the process more manageable.

Here are the key components or different sections of a thesis structure:

Your thesis begins with the title page. It's not just a formality but the gateway to your research.

Here, you'll prominently display the necessary information about you (the author) and your institutional details.

• Title of your thesis
• Your full name
• Your department
• Your institution and degree program
• Your submission date
• Your Supervisor's name (in some cases)
• Your Department or faculty (in some cases)
• Your University's logo (in some cases)
• Your Student ID (in some cases)

In a concise manner, you'll have to summarize the critical aspects of your research in typically no more than 200-300 words.

This includes the problem statement, methodology, key findings, and conclusions. For many, the abstract will determine if they delve deeper into your work, so ensure it's clear and compelling.

Acknowledgments

Research is rarely a solitary endeavor. In the acknowledgments section, you have the chance to express gratitude to those who've supported your journey.

This might include advisors, peers, institutions, or even personal sources of inspiration and support. It's a personal touch, reflecting the humanity behind the academic rigor.

Table of contents

A roadmap for your readers, the table of contents lists the chapters, sections, and subsections of your thesis.

By providing page numbers, you allow readers to navigate your work easily, jumping to sections that pique their interest.

List of figures and tables

Research often involves data, and presenting this data visually can enhance understanding. This section provides an organized listing of all figures and tables in your thesis.

It's a visual index, ensuring that readers can quickly locate and reference your graphical data.

Introduction

Here's where you introduce your research topic, articulate the research question or objective, and outline the significance of your study.

• Present the research topic : Clearly articulate the central theme or subject of your research.
• Background information : Ground your research topic, providing any necessary context or background information your readers might need to understand the significance of your study.
• Define the scope : Clearly delineate the boundaries of your research, indicating what will and won't be covered.
• Literature review : Introduce any relevant existing research on your topic, situating your work within the broader academic conversation and highlighting where your research fits in.
• State the research Question(s) or objective(s) : Clearly articulate the primary questions or objectives your research aims to address.
• Outline the study's structure : Give a brief overview of how the subsequent sections of your work will unfold, guiding your readers through the journey ahead.

The introduction should captivate your readers, making them eager to delve deeper into your research journey.

Literature review section

Your study correlates with existing research. Therefore, in the literature review section, you'll engage in a dialogue with existing knowledge, highlighting relevant studies, theories, and findings.

It's here that you identify gaps in the current knowledge, positioning your research as a bridge to new insights.

To streamline this process, consider leveraging AI tools. For example, the SciSpace literature review tool enables you to efficiently explore and delve into research papers, simplifying your literature review journey.

Methodology

In the research methodology section, you’ll detail the tools, techniques, and processes you employed to gather and analyze data. This section will inform the readers about how you approached your research questions and ensures the reproducibility of your study.

Here's a breakdown of what it should encompass:

• Research Design : Describe the overall structure and approach of your research. Are you conducting a qualitative study with in-depth interviews? Or is it a quantitative study using statistical analysis? Perhaps it's a mixed-methods approach?
• Data Collection : Detail the methods you used to gather data. This could include surveys, experiments, observations, interviews, archival research, etc. Mention where you sourced your data, the duration of data collection, and any tools or instruments used.
• Sampling : If applicable, explain how you selected participants or data sources for your study. Discuss the size of your sample and the rationale behind choosing it.
• Data Analysis : Describe the techniques and tools you used to process and analyze the data. This could range from statistical tests in quantitative research to thematic analysis in qualitative research.
• Validity and Reliability : Address the steps you took to ensure the validity and reliability of your findings to ensure that your results are both accurate and consistent.
• Ethical Considerations : Highlight any ethical issues related to your research and the measures you took to address them, including — informed consent, confidentiality, and data storage and protection measures.

Moreover, different research questions necessitate different types of methodologies. For instance:

• Experimental methodology : Often used in sciences, this involves a controlled experiment to discern causality.
• Qualitative methodology : Employed when exploring patterns or phenomena without numerical data. Methods can include interviews, focus groups, or content analysis.
• Quantitative methodology : Concerned with measurable data and often involves statistical analysis. Surveys and structured observations are common tools here.
• Mixed methods : As the name implies, this combines both qualitative and quantitative methodologies.

The Methodology section isn’t just about detailing the methods but also justifying why they were chosen. The appropriateness of the methods in addressing your research question can significantly impact the credibility of your findings.

Results (or Findings)

This section presents the outcomes of your research. It's crucial to note that the nature of your results may vary; they could be quantitative, qualitative, or a mix of both.

Quantitative results often present statistical data, showcasing measurable outcomes, and they benefit from tables, graphs, and figures to depict these data points.

Qualitative results , on the other hand, might delve into patterns, themes, or narratives derived from non-numerical data, such as interviews or observations.

Regardless of the nature of your results, clarity is essential. This section is purely about presenting the data without offering interpretations — that comes later in the discussion.

In the discussion section, the raw data transforms into valuable insights.

Start by revisiting your research question and contrast it with the findings. How do your results expand, constrict, or challenge current academic conversations?

Dive into the intricacies of the data, guiding the reader through its implications. Detail potential limitations transparently, signaling your awareness of the research's boundaries. This is where your academic voice should be resonant and confident.

Practical implications (Recommendation) section

Based on the insights derived from your research, this section provides actionable suggestions or proposed solutions.

Whether aimed at industry professionals or the general public, recommendations translate your academic findings into potential real-world actions. They help readers understand the practical implications of your work and how it can be applied to effect change or improvement in a given field.

When crafting recommendations, it's essential to ensure they're feasible and rooted in the evidence provided by your research. They shouldn't merely be aspirational but should offer a clear path forward, grounded in your findings.

The conclusion provides closure to your research narrative.

It's not merely a recap but a synthesis of your main findings and their broader implications. Reconnect with the research questions or hypotheses posited at the beginning, offering clear answers based on your findings.

Reflect on the broader contributions of your study, considering its impact on the academic community and potential real-world applications.

Lastly, the conclusion should leave your readers with a clear understanding of the value and impact of your study.

References (or Bibliography)

Every theory you've expounded upon, every data point you've cited, and every methodological precedent you've followed finds its acknowledgment here.

In references, it's crucial to ensure meticulous consistency in formatting, mirroring the specific guidelines of the chosen citation style .

Proper referencing helps to avoid plagiarism , gives credit to original ideas, and allows readers to explore topics of interest. Moreover, it situates your work within the continuum of academic knowledge.

To properly cite the sources used in the study, you can rely on online citation generator tools  to generate accurate citations!

Here’s more on how you can cite your sources.

Often, the depth of research produces a wealth of material that, while crucial, can make the core content of the thesis cumbersome. The appendix is where you mention extra information that supports your research but isn't central to the main text.

Whether it's raw datasets, detailed procedural methodologies, extended case studies, or any other ancillary material, the appendices ensure that these elements are archived for reference without breaking the main narrative's flow.

For thorough researchers and readers keen on meticulous details, the appendices provide a treasure trove of insights.

Glossary (optional)

In academics, specialized terminologies, and jargon are inevitable. However, not every reader is versed in every term.

The glossary, while optional, is a critical tool for accessibility. It's a bridge ensuring that even readers from outside the discipline can access, understand, and appreciate your work.

By defining complex terms and providing context, you're inviting a wider audience to engage with your research, enhancing its reach and impact.

Remember, while these components provide a structured framework, the essence of your thesis lies in the originality of your ideas, the rigor of your research, and the clarity of your presentation.

As you craft each section, keep your readers in mind, ensuring that your passion and dedication shine through every page.

Thesis examples

To further elucidate the concept of a thesis, here are illustrative examples from various fields:

Example 1 (History): Abolition, Africans, and Abstraction: the Influence of the ‘Noble Savage’ on British and French Antislavery Thought, 1787-1807 by Suchait Kahlon.

Example 2 (Climate Dynamics): Influence of external forcings on abrupt millennial-scale climate changes: a statistical modelling study by Takahito Mitsui · Michel Crucifix

Checklist for your thesis evaluation

Evaluating your thesis ensures that your research meets the standards of academia. Here's an elaborate checklist to guide you through this critical process.

Content and structure

• Is the thesis statement clear, concise, and debatable?
• Does the introduction provide sufficient background and context?
• Is the literature review comprehensive, relevant, and well-organized?
• Does the methodology section clearly describe and justify the research methods?
• Are the results/findings presented clearly and logically?
• Does the discussion interpret the results in light of the research question and existing literature?
• Is the conclusion summarizing the research and suggesting future directions or implications?

Clarity and coherence

• Is the writing clear and free of jargon?
• Are ideas and sections logically connected and flowing?
• Is there a clear narrative or argument throughout the thesis?

Research quality

• Is the research question significant and relevant?
• Are the research methods appropriate for the question?
• Is the sample size (if applicable) adequate?
• Are the data analysis techniques appropriate and correctly applied?
• Are potential biases or limitations addressed?

Originality and significance

• Does the thesis contribute new knowledge or insights to the field?
• Is the research grounded in existing literature while offering fresh perspectives?

Formatting and presentation

• Is the thesis formatted according to institutional guidelines?
• Are figures, tables, and charts clear, labeled, and referenced in the text?
• Is the bibliography or reference list complete and consistently formatted?
• Are appendices relevant and appropriately referenced in the main text?

Grammar and language

• Is the thesis free of grammatical and spelling errors?
• Is the language professional, consistent, and appropriate for an academic audience?
• Are quotations and paraphrased material correctly cited?

Feedback and revision

• Have you sought feedback from peers, advisors, or experts in the field?
• Have you addressed the feedback and made the necessary revisions?

Overall assessment

• Does the thesis as a whole feel cohesive and comprehensive?
• Would the thesis be understandable and valuable to someone in your field?

Ensure to use this checklist to leave no ground for doubt or missed information in your thesis.

After writing your thesis, the next step is to discuss and defend your findings verbally in front of a knowledgeable panel. You’ve to be well prepared as your professors may grade your presentation abilities.

Preparing your thesis defense

A thesis defense, also known as "defending the thesis," is the culmination of a scholar's research journey. It's the final frontier, where you’ll present their findings and face scrutiny from a panel of experts.

Typically, the defense involves a public presentation where you’ll have to outline your study, followed by a question-and-answer session with a committee of experts. This committee assesses the validity, originality, and significance of the research.

The defense serves as a rite of passage for scholars. It's an opportunity to showcase expertise, address criticisms, and refine arguments. A successful defense not only validates the research but also establishes your authority as a researcher in your field.

Here’s how you can effectively prepare for your thesis defense .

Now, having touched upon the process of defending a thesis, it's worth noting that scholarly work can take various forms, depending on academic and regional practices.

One such form, often paralleled with the thesis, is the 'dissertation.' But what differentiates the two?

Dissertation vs. Thesis

Often used interchangeably in casual discourse, they refer to distinct research projects undertaken at different levels of higher education.

To the uninitiated, understanding their meaning might be elusive. So, let's demystify these terms and delve into their core differences.

Here's a table differentiating between the two.

Wrapping up

From understanding the foundational concept of a thesis to navigating its various components, differentiating it from a dissertation, and recognizing the importance of proper citation — this guide covers it all.

As scholars and readers, understanding these nuances not only aids in academic pursuits but also fosters a deeper appreciation for the relentless quest for knowledge that drives academia.

It’s important to remember that every thesis is a testament to curiosity, dedication, and the indomitable spirit of discovery.

Good luck with your thesis writing!

Frequently Asked Questions

A thesis typically ranges between 40-80 pages, but its length can vary based on the research topic, institution guidelines, and level of study.

A PhD thesis usually spans 200-300 pages, though this can vary based on the discipline, complexity of the research, and institutional requirements.

To identify a thesis topic, consider current trends in your field, gaps in existing literature, personal interests, and discussions with advisors or mentors. Additionally, reviewing related journals and conference proceedings can provide insights into potential areas of exploration.

The conceptual framework is often situated in the literature review or theoretical framework section of a thesis. It helps set the stage by providing the context, defining key concepts, and explaining the relationships between variables.

A thesis statement should be concise, clear, and specific. It should state the main argument or point of your research. Start by pinpointing the central question or issue your research addresses, then condense that into a single statement, ensuring it reflects the essence of your paper.

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How to Write a Science Thesis/Dissertation

A thesis/dissertation is a long, high-level research paper written as the culmination of your academic course. Most university programs require that graduate and postgraduate students demonstrate their ability to perform original research at the thesis/dissertation level as a graduation requirement.

Not all theses/dissertations are structured the same way. In this article, we’ll specifically look at how to structure a thesis/dissertation in the sciences and examine what belongs in each section. Before you begin writing, it is essential to have a good understanding of how to structure your science thesis/dissertation and what elements you must include in it.

How are science theses/dissertations structured?

There isn’t a universal format for a science thesis/dissertation. Each university/institution has its own rules, and these rules can vary further by department and advisor. For this reason, you must start writing/drafting your thesis/dissertation by checking the rules and requirements of your university/institution.

Some universities mandate a minimum word count for a thesis/dissertation, while others provide a maximum. The number of words you are expected to write will also vary depending on the program/course you are a part of. A Master’s level thesis/dissertation can range, for example, from 15,000 to 45,000 words, while a PhD thesis/dissertation can be around 80,000 words.

While your university/institution may have its own specific requirements or guidelines, this article provides a general overview of how a typical thesis/dissertation in the sciences should be structured. For easier understanding, let’s break it up into two parts:

• Thesis body
• Supplemental information

The thesis body of your thesis/dissertation includes:

• Acknowledgements

Table of contents

Introduction/literature review, materials/methodology, discussion/conclusion, figure and tables, list of abbreviations.

Your thesis will conclude with the supplemental information section, which comprises:

Reference list

Your thesis may or may not include each and every one of these sections. Now, let’s examine the parts of a thesis/dissertation in greater detail.

The parts of a science thesis/dissertation: Getting started

Let’s begin by reviewing the sections of the thesis body, from the title page to the glossary. This part of your thesis/dissertation should ideally be written last, even though it comes at the beginning. That is because it is the easiest to put it togethe r once you have written the rest of your thesis/dissertation.

Your thesis/dissertation should have a clear title that sums up the content. In addition, the title page should include your name, the degree of your thesis/dissertation, your department, your advisor, and the month/year of submission. Your university/institution likely has its own format for what should be included in the title page, so make sure to check the relevant guidelines.

Acknowledgments

This section gives you the opportunity to say thanks to anyone who gave you support while you worked on your thesis/dissertation. Many people use this section to give credit to their advisor, editor, or even their parents. If you received any funding for your research or technical assistance, make sure to mention it here.

Your abstract should be a brief summary (generally around 300 words) of your thesis/dissertation. You can think of your abstract as a distillation of your thesis/dissertation as a whole. You need to summarize the scope and objectives, methods, and findings in this section.

 The table of contents is a directory of the various parts of your thesis/dissertation. It should include the headings and subheadings of each section along with the page numbers where those sections can be found.

 Think of this section as the table of contents for figures and tables in your thesis/dissertation. The titles of each figure/table and the page number where it can be found should be in this list.

This list is intended to identify specialized abbreviations used throughout your thesis/dissertation. This can include the names of organizations (WHO, CDC), acronyms (PFC), and so on. For a science thesis/dissertation, it is preferable also to include a note regarding any abbreviations for units of measurement and standard notations for chemical elements, formulae, and chemical abbreviations used.

In this section, you would define any terminology that your target audience may be unfamiliar with.

The parts of a science thesis/dissertation: Presenting your data

Following the glossary, the thesis body of a science thesis/dissertation begins with the introduction. The introduction section of a science thesis/dissertation often also includes the literature review. This is unlike most social science or humanities theses/dissertations, where the literature review commonly forms a separate chapter. The introduction section should begin by clearly stating the background and context for your research study, followed by your thesis question, objectives, hypothesis , and thesis statement . An example might be: 

“The connection between nicotine consumption and insulin resistance has long been established. However, there is no substantial body of research on how long insulin resistance is maintained after people quit smoking. In this study, we aim to measure levels of insulin resistance in otherwise healthy subjects following a total cessation of nicotine consumption. We hypothesize that insulin resistance will begin to decline rapidly within six months.”

 The introduction should be immediately followed by a review of earlier literature written on the thesis topic. In this section, you should also clearly identify where the literature connects to your study and how your research study fills a gap or bolsters previous studies. Fit your study within the puzzle of previous work and demonstrate the importance of your research.

In the methodology section of your thesis/dissertation, you must explain what you did and how you did it. If you used materials (for example, bacteria), make sure you clearly list each one. Live materials should be listed, including the specific strain and genus. You must explain your techniques, materials, and methods such that another researcher can replicate exactly what you have done.

In the results section, you will explain what happened. What were your findings? This section should be heavy on data and light on analysis. Usually, in-depth analysis and interpretation of your results will be covered in the discussion section of your thesis/dissertation. While you should present your results in full, any supplementary data that you don’t have room for can be included in an appendix. As a note, this section is often written in the past tense. While other portions of your thesis/dissertation may use past and present interchangeably depending on the topic at hand, the results section of a scientific paper focuses on what has already happened (in an experiment), which is why it is written this way.

In this part of your thesis/dissertation, you will discuss what your findings mean. Did they align with your hypothesis? If so, how? If not, what was different? If there were any exceptions, errors, or total lack of correlation found, do not try to hide it. Clearly discuss what it might mean, or if you aren’t sure, don’t be afraid to say so. In this section, you can also highlight potential practical applications for your research study, limitations of your study, directions for future studies, and once again highlight the importance of your study in the field. This section usually concludes with an overall summarization of whether your results support your hypothesis or not. For example:

“Our study found that 500 of our 600 subjects continued to exhibit high levels of insulin resistance three years or more after stopping nicotine use. This does not support our hypothesis that insulin resistance would begin to drop around six months after subjects stopped nicotine use. Further research is warranted into the mechanisms by which past nicotine use alters insulin resistance levels in former smokers.”

The reference list is an alphabetical or numerical list of sources you’ve used while researching and writing your thesis. The formatting of your reference list will be dependent on your university guidelines. Useful tools like citation generators can help you correctly format your references. Reference managers like EndNote or Mendeley are also helpful for compiling this list. Furthermore, a professional editor or proofreading service can ensure that each reference is correctly formatted.

This section can be very useful if you want to include materials that are relevant to the topic of your thesis/dissertation but that you were unable to include in the main text. Tables, large bodies of text, illustrations, forms used to collect data or perform studies, and other such materials can all be included in an appendix.

Critical steps for planning, drafting, and structuring a science thesis/dissertation

Writing your thesis/dissertation is a daunting and lengthy task. Here are some helpful tips to keep in mind when drafting your science thesis/dissertation:

• Choose a thesis topic that is of professional interest to you. You are going to spend a lot of time thinking, reading, and writing about your thesis topic. Many aspiring young researchers end up working in a field related to their thesis/dissertation . If you start researching or writing a proposal and then decide you aren’t into the topic, don’t be afraid to change directions!
• Plan your thesis timelines carefully. Is your topic realistic given the time and material constraints you have? Do you need to apply for external funding for your research study? Will that take additional time? Write a schedule and revisit/revise it often throughout your thesis/dissertation process.
• Don’t wait until the last minute to start writing! A thesis/dissertation isn’t like an undergraduate paper where you spend some time researching and then some time writing it. You will need to write your thesis/dissertation as you continue your research study. Write as you work in the lab. Write as you learn things and then revise. Ideally, by the time you have finished your actual research study, you will already have a substantive draft.
• Start writing the methodology section first. This is often the easiest because it is straightforward and you have already done quite a lot of the work while preparing your research study. The order in which you write your thesis/dissertation doesn’t matter too much—if you find yourself jumping between sections, that is perfectly normal.
• Keep a detailed list of your references using a reference manager or similar system, with tags so that you can easily identify the source of your information.

Final tips for writing and structuring a science thesis/dissertation

Writing a thesis/dissertation is a rewarding process. As a final tip for getting through this process successfully, don’t forget to leave sufficient time for editing and proofreading. Your thesis/dissertation will go through many drafts and revisions before it reaches its final form.

Engaging the services of a professional can go a long way in helping you produce a professional and high-quality document worthy of your research. In addition, there are many helpful tools like AI grammar checker tools available online for students and young researchers.

Check out our site for more tips on how to write a good thesis/dissertation , where to find the best thesis editing services , and more about thesis editing and proofreading services .

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Review Checklist

Use this checklist to ensure that your science thesis/dissertation isn’t missing any important structural components.

Title page: Does your thesis/dissertation have a title page with your title, name, department, advisor’s name, and other important information?

Acknowledgements: Did you give credit to your funders, research colleagues, and anyone else who helped you?

Abstract: Does your thesis/dissertation include a brief summary?

Table of contents: Does your table of contents include headings, subheadings, and page numbers?

Figure and tables: Is there a complete list of figures and tables that are in your thesis/dissertation?

List of abbreviations: Are all of the abbreviations used in your thesis/dissertation listed here?

Glossary: Did you clearly define any specialized terminology used in your thesis/dissertation?

Introduction/Literature review: Did you justify your research study, state your objectives, and your hypothesis? Did you review the previous relevant literature in your field and explain how your thesis/dissertation fits in?

Materials/Methodology: Could another scientist replicate what you did by reading this section?

Results: Did you include all of the data from your experiments/research study?

Discussion/Conclusion: Did you clearly explain what your results mean and whether your hypothesis was correct or not?

Reference list: Are your references properly formatted and listed alphabetically or numerically?

Bibliography and Appendices: Did you include any additional relevant data, figures, or text that didn’t fit into the main section of your thesis/dissertation?

How long is a typical science thesis/dissertation? +

A typical Master’s thesis/dissertation ranges from 15,000-45,000 words, while a Ph.D. thesis/dissertation can be as much as 80,000 words.

How do I start my thesis/dissertation? +

You don’t have to start with the introduction when you begin writing. You can start with the methodology section or any other section you prefer and revise it later.

How do I structure a science thesis/dissertation? +

The main section of a science thesis/dissertation includes an introduction/literature review, materials/methodology section, results, discussion/conclusion section, and a references list.

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• Knowledge Base
• Dissertation
• How to Write a Results Section | Tips & Examples

How to Write a Results Section | Tips & Examples

Published on 27 October 2016 by Bas Swaen . Revised on 25 October 2022 by Tegan George.

A results section is where you report the main findings of the data collection and analysis you conducted for your thesis or dissertation . You should report all relevant results concisely and objectively, in a logical order. Don’t include subjective interpretations of why you found these results or what they mean – any evaluation should be saved for the discussion section .

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Table of contents

How to write a results section, reporting quantitative research results, reporting qualitative research results, results vs discussion vs conclusion, checklist: research results, frequently asked questions about results sections.

When conducting research, it’s important to report the results of your study prior to discussing your interpretations of it. This gives your reader a clear idea of exactly what you found and keeps the data itself separate from your subjective analysis.

Here are a few best practices:

• Your results should always be written in the past tense.
• While the length of this section depends on how much data you collected and analysed, it should be written as concisely as possible.
• Only include results that are directly relevant to answering your research questions . Avoid speculative or interpretative words like ‘appears’ or ‘implies’.
• If you have other results you’d like to include, consider adding them to an appendix or footnotes.
• Always start out with your broadest results first, and then flow into your more granular (but still relevant) ones. Think of it like a shoe shop: first discuss the shoes as a whole, then the trainers, boots, sandals, etc.

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If you conducted quantitative research , you’ll likely be working with the results of some sort of statistical analysis .

Your results section should report the results of any statistical tests you used to compare groups or assess relationships between variables . It should also state whether or not each hypothesis was supported.

The most logical way to structure quantitative results is to frame them around your research questions or hypotheses. For each question or hypothesis, share:

• A reminder of the type of analysis you used (e.g., a two-sample t test or simple linear regression ). A more detailed description of your analysis should go in your methodology section.
• A concise summary of each relevant result, both positive and negative. This can include any relevant descriptive statistics (e.g., means and standard deviations ) as well as inferential statistics (e.g., t scores, degrees of freedom , and p values ). Remember, these numbers are often placed in parentheses.
• A brief statement of how each result relates to the question, or whether the hypothesis was supported. You can briefly mention any results that didn’t fit with your expectations and assumptions, but save any speculation on their meaning or consequences for your discussion  and conclusion.

A note on tables and figures

In quantitative research, it’s often helpful to include visual elements such as graphs, charts, and tables , but only if they are directly relevant to your results. Give these elements clear, descriptive titles and labels so that your reader can easily understand what is being shown. If you want to include any other visual elements that are more tangential in nature, consider adding a figure and table list .

As a rule of thumb:

• Tables are used to communicate exact values, giving a concise overview of various results
• Graphs and charts are used to visualise trends and relationships, giving an at-a-glance illustration of key findings

Don’t forget to also mention any tables and figures you used within the text of your results section. Summarise or elaborate on specific aspects you think your reader should know about rather than merely restating the same numbers already shown.

Figure 1: Intention to donate to environmental organisations based on social distance from impact of environmental damage.

In qualitative research , your results might not all be directly related to specific hypotheses. In this case, you can structure your results section around key themes or topics that emerged from your analysis of the data.

For each theme, start with general observations about what the data showed. You can mention:

• Recurring points of agreement or disagreement
• Patterns and trends
• Particularly significant snippets from individual responses

Next, clarify and support these points with direct quotations. Be sure to report any relevant demographic information about participants. Further information (such as full transcripts , if appropriate) can be included in an appendix .

‘I think that in role-playing games, there’s more attention to character design, to world design, because the whole story is important and more attention is paid to certain game elements […] so that perhaps you do need bigger teams of creative experts than in an average shooter or something.’

Responses suggest that video game consumers consider some types of games to have more artistic potential than others.

Your results section should objectively report your findings, presenting only brief observations in relation to each question, hypothesis, or theme.

It should not  speculate about the meaning of the results or attempt to answer your main research question . Detailed interpretation of your results is more suitable for your discussion section , while synthesis of your results into an overall answer to your main research question is best left for your conclusion .

Prevent plagiarism, run a free check.

I have completed my data collection and analyzed the results.

I have included all results that are relevant to my research questions.

I have concisely and objectively reported each result, including relevant descriptive statistics and inferential statistics .

I have stated whether each hypothesis was supported or refuted.

I have used tables and figures to illustrate my results where appropriate.

All tables and figures are correctly labelled and referred to in the text.

There is no subjective interpretation or speculation on the meaning of the results.

You've finished writing up your results! Use the other checklists to further improve your thesis.

The results chapter of a thesis or dissertation presents your research results concisely and objectively.

In quantitative research , for each question or hypothesis , state:

• The type of analysis used
• Relevant results in the form of descriptive and inferential statistics
• Whether or not the alternative hypothesis was supported

In qualitative research , for each question or theme, describe:

• Recurring patterns
• Significant or representative individual responses
• Relevant quotations from the data

Don’t interpret or speculate in the results chapter.

Results are usually written in the past tense , because they are describing the outcome of completed actions.

The results chapter or section simply and objectively reports what you found, without speculating on why you found these results. The discussion interprets the meaning of the results, puts them in context, and explains why they matter.

In qualitative research , results and discussion are sometimes combined. But in quantitative research , it’s considered important to separate the objective results from your interpretation of them.

Cite this Scribbr article

If you want to cite this source, you can copy and paste the citation or click the ‘Cite this Scribbr article’ button to automatically add the citation to our free Reference Generator.

Swaen, B. (2022, October 25). How to Write a Results Section | Tips & Examples. Scribbr. Retrieved 25 March 2024, from https://www.scribbr.co.uk/thesis-dissertation/results-section/

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How to Write a Scientific Report | Step-by-Step Guide

Got to document an experiment but don't know how? In this post, we'll guide you step-by-step through how to write a scientific report and provide you with an example.

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Is your teacher expecting you to write an experimental report for every class experiment? Are you still unsure about how to write a scientific report properly? Don’t fear! We will guide you through all the parts of a scientific report, step-by-step.

How to write a scientific report:

• What is a scientific report
• General rules to write Scientific reports
• Syllabus dot point 
• Introduction/Background information
• Risk assessment

What is a scientific report?

A scientific report documents all aspects of an experimental investigation. This includes:

• The aim of the experiment
• The hypothesis
• An introduction to the relevant background theory
• The methods used
• The results
• A discussion of the results
• The conclusion

Scientific reports allow their readers to understand the experiment without doing it themselves. In addition, scientific reports give others the opportunity to check the methodology of the experiment to ensure the validity of the results.

A scientific report is written in several stages. We write the introduction, aim, and hypothesis before performing the experiment, record the results during the experiment, and complete the discussion and conclusions after the experiment.

But, before we delve deeper into how to write a scientific report, we need to have a science experiment to write about! Read our 7 Simple Experiments You Can Do At Home article and see which one you want to do.

General rules about writing scientific reports

Learning how to write a scientific report is different from writing English essays or speeches!

You have to use:

• Passive voice (which you should avoid when writing for other subjects like English!)
• Past-tense language
• Headings and subheadings
• A pencil to draw scientific diagrams and graphs
• Simple and clear lines for scientific diagrams
• Tables and graphs where necessary

Structure of scientific reports:

Now that you know the general rules on how to write scientific reports, let’s look at the conventions for their structure!

The title should simply introduce what your experiment is about.

The Role of Light in Photosynthesis

2. Introduction/Background information

Write a paragraph that gives your readers background information to understand your experiment.

This includes explaining scientific theories, processes and other related knowledge.

Photosynthesis is a vital process for life. It occurs when plants intake carbon dioxide, water, and light, and results in the production of glucose and water. The light required for photosynthesis is absorbed by chlorophyll, the green pigment of plants, which is contained in the chloroplasts.

The glucose produced through photosynthesis is stored as starch, which is used as an energy source for the plant and its consumers.

The presence of starch in the leaves of a plant indicates that photosynthesis has occurred.

The aim identifies what is going to be tested in the experiment. This should be short, concise and clear.

The aim of the experiment is to test whether light is required for photosynthesis to occur.

4. Hypothesis

The hypothesis is a prediction of the outcome of the experiment. You have to use background information to make an educated prediction.

It is predicted that photosynthesis will occur only in leaves that are exposed to light and not in leaves that are not exposed to light. This will be indicated by the presence or absence of starch in the leaves.

5. Risk assessment

Identify the hazards associated with the experiment and provide a method to prevent or minimise the risks. A hazard is something that can cause harm, and the risk is the likelihood that harm will occur from the hazard.

A table is an excellent way to present your risk assessment.

Remember, you have to specify the  type of harm that can occur because of the hazard. It is not enough to simply identify the hazard.

• Do not write:  “Scissors are sharp”
• Instead, you have to write:  “Scissors are sharp and can cause injury”

The method has 3 parts:

• A list of every material used
• Steps of what you did in the experiment
• A scientific diagram of the experimental apparatus

Let’s break down what you need to do for each section.

6a. Materials

This must list every piece of equipment and material you used in the experiment.

Remember, you need to also specify the amount of each material you used.

• 1 geranium plant
• Aluminium foil
• 2 test tubes
• 1 test tube rack
• 1 pair of scissors
• 1 250 mL beaker
• 1 pair of forceps
• 1 10 mL measuring cylinder
• Iodine solution (5 mL)
• Methylated spirit (50ml)
• Boiling water
• 2 Petri dishes

The rule of thumb is that you should write the method in a clear way so that readers are able to repeat the experiment and get similar results.

Using a numbered list for the steps of your experimental procedure is much clearer than writing a whole paragraph of text.  The steps should:

• Be written in a sequential order, based on when they were performed.
• Specify any equipment that was used.
• Specify the quantity of any materials that were used.

You also need to use past tense and passive voice when you are writing your method. Scientific reports are supposed to show the readers what you did in the experiment, not what you will do.

• Aluminium foil was used to fully cover a leaf of the geranium plant. The plant was left in the sun for three days.
• On the third day, the covered leaf and 1 non-covered leaf were collected from the plant. The foil was removed from the covered leaf, and a 1 cm square was cut from each leaf using a pair of scissors.
• 150 mL of water was boiled in a kettle and poured into a 250 mL beaker.
• Using forceps, the 1 cm square of covered leaf was placed into the beaker of boiling water for 2 minutes. It was then placed in a test tube labelled “dark”.
• The water in the beaker was discarded and replaced with 150 mL of freshly boiled water.
• Using forceps, the 1 cm square non-covered leaf was placed into the beaker of boiling water for 2 minutes. It was then placed in a test tube labelled “light”
• 5 mL of methylated spirit was measured with a measuring cylinder and poured into each test tube so that the leaves were fully covered.
• The water in the beaker was replaced with 150 mL of freshly boiled water and both the “light” and “dark” test tubes were immersed in the beaker of boiling water for 5 minutes.
• The leaves were collected from each test tube with forceps, rinsed under cold running water, and placed onto separate labelled Petri dishes.
• 3 drops of iodine solution were added to each leaf.
• Both Petri dishes were placed side by side and observations were recorded.
• The experiment was repeated 5 times, and results were compared between different groups.

6c. Diagram

After you finish your steps, it is time to draw your scientific diagrams! Here are some rules for drawing scientific diagrams:

• Always use a pencil to draw your scientific diagrams.
• Use simple, sharp, 2D lines and shapes to draw your diagram. Don’t draw 3D shapes or use shading.
• Label everything in your diagram.
• Use thin, straight lines to label your diagram. Do not use arrows.
• Ensure that the label lines touch the outline of the equipment you are labelling and not cross over it or stop short of it
• The label lines should never cross over each other.
• Use a ruler for any straight lines in your diagram.
• Draw a sufficiently large diagram so all components can be seen clearly.

This is where you document the results of your experiment. The data that you record for your experiment will generally be qualitative and/or quantitative.

Qualitative data is data that relates to qualities and is based on observations (qualitative – quality). This type of data is descriptive and is recorded in words. For example, the colour changed from green to orange, or the liquid became hot.

Quantitative data refers to numerical data (quantitative – quantity). This type of data is recorded using numbers and is either measured or counted. For example, the plant grew 5.2 cm, or there were 5 frogs.

You also need to record your results in an appropriate way. Most of the time, a table is the best way to do this.

Here are some rules to using tables

• Use a pencil and a ruler to draw your table
• Draw neat and straight lines
• Ensure that the table is closed (connect all your lines)
• Don’t cross your lines (erase any lines that stick out of the table)
• Use appropriate columns and rows
• Properly name each column and row (including the units of measurement in brackets)
• Do not write your units in the body of your table (units belong in the header)
• Always include a title

Note : If your results require calculations, clearly write each step.

Observations of the effects of light on the amount of starch in plant leaves.

If quantitative data was recorded, the data is often also plotted on a graph.

8. Discussion

The discussion is where you analyse and interpret your results, and identify any experimental errors or possible areas of improvements.

You should divide your discussion as follows.

1. Trend in the results

Describe the ‘trend’ in your results. That is, the relationship you observed between your independent and dependent variables.

The independent variable is the variable that you are changing in the experiment. In this experiment, it is the amount of light that the leaves are exposed to.

The dependent variable is the variable that you are measuring in the experiment, In this experiment, it is the presence of starch in the leaves.

Explain how a particular result is achieved by referring to scientific knowledge, theories and any other scientific resources you find. 2. Scientific explanation: 

The presence of starch is indicated when the addition of iodine causes the leaf to turn dark purple. The results show that starch was present in the leaves that were exposed to light, while the leaves that were not exposed to light did not contain starch.

2. Scientific explanation:

Provide an explanation of the results using scientific knowledge, theories and any other scientific resources you find.

As starch is produced during photosynthesis, these results show that light plays a key role in photosynthesis.

3. Validity 

Validity refers to whether or not your results are valid. This can be done by examining your variables.

VA lidity =  VA riables

Identify the independent, dependent, controlled variables and the control experiment (if you have one).

The controlled variables are the variables that you keep the same across all tests e.g. the size of the leaf sample.

The control experiment is where you don’t apply an independent variable. It is untouched for the whole experiment.

Ensure that you never change more than one variable at a time!

The independent variable of the experiment was amount of light that the leaves were exposed to (the covered and uncovered geranium leaf), while the dependent variable was the presence of starch. The controlled variables were the size of the leaf sample, the duration of the experiment, the amount of time the solutions were heated, and the amount of iodine solution used.

4. Reliability 

Identify how you ensured the reliability of the results.

RE liability = RE petition

Show that you repeated your experiments, cross-checked your results with other groups or collated your results with the class.

The reliability of the results was ensured by repeating the experiment 5 times and comparing results with other groups. Since other groups obtained comparable results, the results are reliable.

5. Accuracy

Accuracy should be discussed if your results are in the form of quantitative data, and there is an accepted value for the result.

Accuracy would not be discussed for our example photosynthesis experiment as qualitative data was collected, however it would if we were measuring gravity using a pendulum:

The measured value of gravity was 9.8 m/s 2 , which is in agreement with the accepted value of 9.8 m/s 2 .

6. Possible improvements 

Identify any errors or risks found in the experiment and provide a method to improve it.

If there are none, then suggest new ways to improve the experimental design, and/or minimise error and risks.

Possible improvements could be made by including control experiments. For example, testing whether the iodine solution turns dark purple when added to water or methylated spirits. This would help to ensure that the purple colour observed in the experiments is due to the presence of starch in the leaves rather than impurities.

9. Conclusion

State whether the aim was achieved, and if your hypothesis was supported.

The aim of the investigation was achieved, and it was found that light is required for photosynthesis to occur. This was evidenced by the presence of starch in leaves that had been exposed to light, and the absence of starch in leaves that had been unexposed. These results support the proposed hypothesis.

Written by Matrix Science Team

© Matrix Education and www.matrix.edu.au, 2023. Unauthorised use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Matrix Education and www.matrix.edu.au with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

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• How to Write Discussions and Conclusions

The discussion section contains the results and outcomes of a study. An effective discussion informs readers what can be learned from your experiment and provides context for the results.

What makes an effective discussion?

When you’re ready to write your discussion, you’ve already introduced the purpose of your study and provided an in-depth description of the methodology. The discussion informs readers about the larger implications of your study based on the results. Highlighting these implications while not overstating the findings can be challenging, especially when you’re submitting to a journal that selects articles based on novelty or potential impact. Regardless of what journal you are submitting to, the discussion section always serves the same purpose: concluding what your study results actually mean.

A successful discussion section puts your findings in context. It should include:

• the results of your research,
• a discussion of related research, and
• a comparison between your results and initial hypothesis.

Tip: Not all journals share the same naming conventions.

You can apply the advice in this article to the conclusion, results or discussion sections of your manuscript.

Our Early Career Researcher community tells us that the conclusion is often considered the most difficult aspect of a manuscript to write. To help, this guide provides questions to ask yourself, a basic structure to model your discussion off of and examples from published manuscripts. 

Questions to ask yourself:

• Was my hypothesis correct?
• If my hypothesis is partially correct or entirely different, what can be learned from the results? 
• How do the conclusions reshape or add onto the existing knowledge in the field? What does previous research say about the topic? 
• Why are the results important or relevant to your audience? Do they add further evidence to a scientific consensus or disprove prior studies? 
• How can future research build on these observations? What are the key experiments that must be done? 
• What is the “take-home” message you want your reader to leave with?

How to structure a discussion

Trying to fit a complete discussion into a single paragraph can add unnecessary stress to the writing process. If possible, you’ll want to give yourself two or three paragraphs to give the reader a comprehensive understanding of your study as a whole. Here’s one way to structure an effective discussion:

Writing Tips

While the above sections can help you brainstorm and structure your discussion, there are many common mistakes that writers revert to when having difficulties with their paper. Writing a discussion can be a delicate balance between summarizing your results, providing proper context for your research and avoiding introducing new information. Remember that your paper should be both confident and honest about the results! 

• Read the journal’s guidelines on the discussion and conclusion sections. If possible, learn about the guidelines before writing the discussion to ensure you’re writing to meet their expectations. 
• Begin with a clear statement of the principal findings. This will reinforce the main take-away for the reader and set up the rest of the discussion. 
• Explain why the outcomes of your study are important to the reader. Discuss the implications of your findings realistically based on previous literature, highlighting both the strengths and limitations of the research. 
• State whether the results prove or disprove your hypothesis. If your hypothesis was disproved, what might be the reasons? 
• Introduce new or expanded ways to think about the research question. Indicate what next steps can be taken to further pursue any unresolved questions. 
• If dealing with a contemporary or ongoing problem, such as climate change, discuss possible consequences if the problem is avoided. 
• Be concise. Adding unnecessary detail can distract from the main findings. 

Don’t

• Rewrite your abstract. Statements with “we investigated” or “we studied” generally do not belong in the discussion. 
• Include new arguments or evidence not previously discussed. Necessary information and evidence should be introduced in the main body of the paper. 
• Apologize. Even if your research contains significant limitations, don’t undermine your authority by including statements that doubt your methodology or execution. 
• Shy away from speaking on limitations or negative results. Including limitations and negative results will give readers a complete understanding of the presented research. Potential limitations include sources of potential bias, threats to internal or external validity, barriers to implementing an intervention and other issues inherent to the study design. 
• Overstate the importance of your findings. Making grand statements about how a study will fully resolve large questions can lead readers to doubt the success of the research. 

Snippets of Effective Discussions:

Consumer-based actions to reduce plastic pollution in rivers: A multi-criteria decision analysis approach

Identifying reliable indicators of fitness in polar bears

• How to Write a Great Title
• How to Write an Abstract
• How to Write Your Methods
• How to Report Statistics
• How to Edit Your Work

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The contents of the Writing Center are also available as a live, interactive training session, complete with slides, talking points, and activities. …

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WASP (Write a Scientific Paper): How to write a scientific thesis

Affiliations.

• 1 Anatomy Department, University of Malta, Malta. Electronic address: [email protected].
• 2 University of Malta and Consultant Paediatric Cardiologist, Mater Dei Hospital, Malta. Electronic address: [email protected].
• 3 Department of Obstetrics and Gynaecology, with the Faculty of Medicine & Surgery, University of Malta, Malta. Electronic address: [email protected].
• PMID: 30086984
• DOI: 10.1016/j.earlhumdev.2018.07.012

The prospect of writing a thesis is considered daunting by many but the task is a requisite when embarking into reading for any academic degree. A thesis is a written document following personal research. It is performed to obtain an academic degree or qualification, both at undergraduate and postgraduate level. When writing a thesis, it is imperative that the student follows the universal well-acknowledged structure format known as "IMRAD": i.e. Introduction, Methods, Results and Discussion. A summary of the thesis, known as the 'Abstract', is placed at the beginning of the "IMRAD", while all references cited in the thesis are placed at the very end. The thesis format is similar to a research manuscript prepared for publication in scientific journal, but there are significant differences between the two types of academic works. For example, the liberal use of graphical aides in the form of figures and/or tables enhances the delivery of results. It is essential to ensure that all the literature referred to in the thesis is cited, while paying particular attention to potential plagiarism. When writing a thesis, the student needs to keep in mind three factors: [1] the structure, [2] the substance and [3] the style. Once the student has developed a good plan for thesis layout, then writing becomes greatly faciliated.

Copyright © 2018 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

• Academic Dissertations as Topic*
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What’s Included: The Dissertation Template

If you’re preparing to write your dissertation, thesis or research project, our free dissertation template is the perfect starting point. In the template, we cover every section step by step, with clear, straightforward explanations and examples .

The template’s structure is based on the tried and trusted best-practice format for formal academic research projects such as dissertations and theses. The template structure reflects the overall research process, ensuring your dissertation or thesis will have a smooth, logical flow from chapter to chapter.

The dissertation template covers the following core sections:

• The title page/cover page
• Abstract (sometimes also called the executive summary)
• Table of contents
• List of figures /list of tables
• Chapter 1: Introduction  (also available: in-depth introduction template )
• Chapter 2: Literature review  (also available: in-depth LR template )
• Chapter 3: Methodology (also available: in-depth methodology template )
• Chapter 4: Research findings /results (also available: results template )
• Chapter 5: Discussion /analysis of findings (also available: discussion template )
• Chapter 6: Conclusion (also available: in-depth conclusion template )
• Reference list

Each section is explained in plain, straightforward language , followed by an overview of the key elements that you need to cover within each section. We’ve also included practical examples to help you understand exactly what’s required in each section.

The cleanly-formatted Google Doc can be downloaded as a fully editable MS Word Document (DOCX format), so you can use it as-is or convert it to LaTeX.

FAQs: Dissertation Template

What format is the template (doc, pdf, ppt, etc.).

The dissertation template is provided as a Google Doc. You can download it in MS Word format or make a copy to your Google Drive. You’re also welcome to convert it to whatever format works best for you, such as LaTeX or PDF.

What types of dissertations/theses can this template be used for?

The template follows the standard best-practice structure for formal academic research projects such as dissertations or theses, so it is suitable for the vast majority of degrees, particularly those within the sciences.

Some universities may have some additional requirements, but these are typically minor, with the core structure remaining the same. Therefore, it’s always a good idea to double-check your university’s requirements before you finalise your structure.

Will this work for a research paper?

A research paper follows a similar format, but there are a few differences. You can find our research paper template here .

Is this template for an undergrad, Masters or PhD-level thesis?

This template can be used for a dissertation, thesis or research project at any level of study. It may be slight overkill for an undergraduate-level study, but it certainly won’t be missing anything.

How long should my dissertation/thesis be?

This depends entirely on your university’s specific requirements, so it’s best to check with them. As a general ballpark, Masters-level projects are usually 15,000 – 20,000 words in length, while Doctoral-level projects are often in excess of 60,000 words.

What about the research proposal?

If you’re still working on your research proposal, we’ve got a template for that here .

We’ve also got loads of proposal-related guides and videos over on the Grad Coach blog .

How do I write a literature review?

We have a wealth of free resources on the Grad Coach Blog that unpack how to write a literature review from scratch. You can check out the literature review section of the blog here.

How do I create a research methodology?

We have a wealth of free resources on the Grad Coach Blog that unpack research methodology, both qualitative and quantitative. You can check out the methodology section of the blog here.

Can I share this dissertation template with my friends/colleagues?

Yes, you’re welcome to share this template. If you want to post about it on your blog or social media, all we ask is that you reference this page as your source.

Can Grad Coach help me with my dissertation/thesis?

Within the template, you’ll find plain-language explanations of each section, which should give you a fair amount of guidance. However, you’re also welcome to consider our dissertation and thesis coaching services .

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Writing a scientific paper.

• Writing a lab report

What is a "good" title?

"title checklist" from: how to write a good scientific paper. chris a. mack. spie. 2018., other hints for writing a title.

• INTRODUCTION
• LITERATURE CITED
• Bibliography of guides to scientific writing and presenting
• Peer Review
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The title will be read by many people. Only a few will read the entire paper, therefore all words in the title should be chosen with care. Too short a title is not helpful to the potential reader. However too long a title can sometimes be even less meaningful. Remember a title is not an abstract. Also a title is not a sentence.

Goals: • Fewest possible words that describe the contents of the paper. • Avoid waste words like "Studies on", or "Investigations on" • Use specific terms rather than general • Watch your word order and syntax • Avoid abbreviations and jargon

 The title should be clear and informative, and should reflect the aim and approach of the work.

 The title should be as specific as possible while still describing the full range of the work. Does the title, seen in isolation, give a full yet concise and specific indication of the work reported?

 Do not mention results or conclusions in the title.

 Avoid: overly clever or punny titles that will not fare well with search engines or international audiences; titles that are too short to be descriptive or too long to be read; jargon, acronyms, or trademarked terms. 

• Whenever possible, use a declarative rather than a neutral title
• Don't end your title with a question mark?
• Begin with the keywords
• Use verbs instead of abstract nouns
• Avoid abbrev. in the title

From: How to Write and Illustrate a Scientific Paper (2008)

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Harvard University Theses, Dissertations, and Prize Papers

The Harvard University Archives ’ collection of theses, dissertations, and prize papers document the wide range of academic research undertaken by Harvard students over the course of the University’s history.

Beyond their value as pieces of original research, these collections document the history of American higher education, chronicling both the growth of Harvard as a major research institution as well as the development of numerous academic fields. They are also an important source of biographical information, offering insight into the academic careers of the authors.

Spanning from the ‘theses and quaestiones’ of the 17th and 18th centuries to the current yearly output of student research, they include both the first Harvard Ph.D. dissertation (by William Byerly, Ph.D . 1873) and the dissertation of the first woman to earn a doctorate from Harvard ( Lorna Myrtle Hodgkinson , Ed.D. 1922).

Other highlights include:

• The collection of Mathematical theses, 1782-1839
• The 1895 Ph.D. dissertation of W.E.B. Du Bois, The suppression of the African slave trade in the United States, 1638-1871
• Ph.D. dissertations of astronomer Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin (Ph.D. 1925) and physicist John Hasbrouck Van Vleck (Ph.D. 1922)
• Undergraduate honors theses of novelist John Updike (A.B. 1954), filmmaker Terrence Malick (A.B. 1966),  and U.S. poet laureate Tracy Smith (A.B. 1994)
• Undergraduate prize papers and dissertations of philosophers Ralph Waldo Emerson (A.B. 1821), George Santayana (Ph.D. 1889), and W.V. Quine (Ph.D. 1932)
• Undergraduate honors theses of U.S. President John F. Kennedy (A.B. 1940) and Chief Justice John Roberts (A.B. 1976)

What does a prize-winning thesis look like?

If you're a Harvard undergraduate writing your own thesis, it can be helpful to review recent prize-winning theses. The Harvard University Archives has made available for digital lending all of the Thomas Hoopes Prize winners from the 2019-2021 academic years.

Accessing These Materials

How to access materials at the Harvard University Archives

How to find and request dissertations, in person or virtually

How to find and request undergraduate honors theses

How to find and request Thomas Temple Hoopes Prize papers

How to find and request Bowdoin Prize papers

• email: Email
• Phone number 617-495-2461

Related Collections

Harvard faculty personal and professional archives, harvard student life collections: arts, sports, politics and social life, access materials at the harvard university archives.

BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES MAJOR

Senior thesis examples.

Graduating seniors in Biological Sciences have the option of submitting a senior thesis for consideration for Honors and Research Prizes .  Below are some examples of particularly outstanding theses from recent years (pdf):

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Thesis Format – Templates and Samples

Table of contents.

Thesis Format

Thesis format refers to the structure and layout of a research thesis or dissertation. It typically includes several chapters, each of which focuses on a particular aspect of the research topic .

The exact format of a thesis can vary depending on the academic discipline and the institution, but some common elements include:

Introduction

Literature review, methodology.

The title page is the first page of a thesis that provides essential information about the document, such as the title, author’s name, degree program, university, and the date of submission. It is considered as an important component of a thesis as it gives the reader an initial impression of the document’s content and quality.

The typical contents of a title page in a thesis include:

• The title of the thesis: It should be concise, informative, and accurately represent the main topic of the research.
• Author’s name: This should be written in full and should be the same as it appears on official university records.
• Degree program and department: This should specify the type of degree (e.g., Bachelor’s, Master’s, or Doctoral) and the field of study (e.g., Computer Science, Psychology, etc.).
• University: The name of the university where the thesis is being submitted.
• Date of submission : The month and year of submission of the thesis.
• Other details that can be included on the title page include the name of the advisor, the name of the committee members, and any acknowledgments.

In terms of formatting, the title page should be centered horizontally and vertically on the page, with a consistent font size and style. The page margin for the title page should be at least 1 inch (2.54 cm) on all sides. Additionally, it is common practice to include the university logo or crest on the title page, and this should be placed appropriately.

Title of the Thesis in Title Case by Author’s Full Name in Title Case

A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science in Department Name at the University Name

Month Year of Submission

An abstract is a brief summary of a thesis or research paper that provides an overview of the main points, methodology, and findings of the study. It is typically placed at the beginning of the document, after the title page and before the introduction.

The purpose of an abstract is to provide readers with a quick and concise overview of the research paper or thesis. It should be written in a clear and concise language, and should not contain any jargon or technical terms that are not easily understood by the general public.

Here’s an example of an abstract for a thesis:

Title: The Impact of Social Media on Mental Health among Adolescents

This study examines the impact of social media on mental health among adolescents. The research utilized a survey methodology and collected data from a sample of 500 adolescents aged between 13 and 18 years. The findings reveal that social media has a significant impact on mental health among adolescents, with frequent use of social media associated with higher levels of anxiety, depression, and low self-esteem. The study concludes that there is a need for increased awareness and education on the risks associated with excessive use of social media, and recommends strategies for promoting healthy social media habits among adolescents.

In this example, the abstract provides a concise summary of the thesis by highlighting the main points, methodology, and findings of the study. It also provides a clear indication of the significance of the study and its implications for future research and practice.

A table of contents is an essential part of a thesis as it provides the reader with an overview of the entire document’s structure and organization.

Here’s an example of how a table of contents might look in a thesis:

TABLE OF CONTENTS

I. INTRODUCTION ……………………………………………………..1

A. Background of the Study………………………………………..1

B. Statement of the Problem……………………………………….2

C. Objectives of the Study………………………………………..3

D. Research Questions…………………………………………….4

E. Significance of the Study………………………………………5

F. Scope and Limitations………………………………………….6

G. Definition of Terms……………………………………………7

II. LITERATURE REVIEW. ………………………………………………8

A. Overview of the Literature……………………………………..8

B. Key Themes and Concepts………………………………………..9

C. Gaps in the Literature………………………………………..10

D. Theoretical Framework………………………………………….11

III. METHODOLOGY ……………………………………………………12

A. Research Design………………………………………………12

B. Participants and Sampling……………………………………..13

C. Data Collection Procedures…………………………………….14

D. Data Analysis Procedures………………………………………15

IV. RESULTS …………………………………………………………16

A. Descriptive Statistics…………………………………………16

B. Inferential Statistics…………………………………………17

V. DISCUSSION ………………………………………………………18

A. Interpretation of Results………………………………………18

B. Discussion of Finding s …………………………………………19

C. Implications of the Study………………………………………20

VI. CONCLUSION ………………………………………………………21

A. Summary of the Study…………………………………………..21

B. Limitations of the Study……………………………………….22

C. Recommendations for Future Research……………………………..23

REFERENCES …………………………………………………………….24

APPENDICES …………………………………………………………….26

As you can see, the table of contents is organized by chapters and sections. Each chapter and section is listed with its corresponding page number, making it easy for the reader to navigate the thesis.

The introduction is a critical part of a thesis as it provides an overview of the research problem, sets the context for the study, and outlines the research objectives and questions. The introduction is typically the first chapter of a thesis and serves as a roadmap for the reader.

Here’s an example of how an introduction in a thesis might look:

Introduction:

The prevalence of obesity has increased rapidly in recent decades, with more than one-third of adults in the United States being classified as obese. Obesity is associated with numerous adverse health outcomes, including cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and certain cancers. Despite significant efforts to address this issue, the rates of obesity continue to rise. The purpose of this study is to investigate the relationship between lifestyle behaviors and obesity in young adults.

The study will be conducted using a mixed-methods approach, with both qualitative and quantitative data collection methods. The research objectives are to:

• Examine the relationship between lifestyle behaviors and obesity in young adults.
• Identify the key lifestyle factors that contribute to obesity in young adults.
• Evaluate the effectiveness of current interventions aimed at preventing and reducing obesity in young adults.

The research questions that will guide this study are:

• What is the relationship between lifestyle behaviors and obesity in young adults?
• Which lifestyle factors are most strongly associated with obesity in young adults?
• How effective are current interventions aimed at preventing and reducing obesity in young adults?

By addressing these research questions, this study aims to contribute to the understanding of the factors that contribute to obesity in young adults and to inform the development of effective interventions to prevent and reduce obesity in this population.

A literature review is a critical analysis and evaluation of existing literature on a specific topic or research question. It is an essential part of any thesis, as it provides a comprehensive overview of the existing research on the topic and helps to establish the theoretical framework for the study. The literature review allows the researcher to identify gaps in the current research, highlight areas that need further exploration, and demonstrate the importance of their research question.

April 9, 2023:

A search on Google Scholar for “Effectiveness of Online Learning during the COVID-19 Pandemic” yielded 1,540 results. Upon reviewing the first few pages of results, it is evident that there is a significant amount of literature on the topic. A majority of the studies focus on the experiences and perspectives of students and educators during the transition to online learning due to the pandemic.

One recent study published in the Journal of Educational Technology & Society (Liu et al., 2023) found that students who were already familiar with online learning tools and platforms had an easier time adapting to online learning than those who were not. However, the study also found that students who were not familiar with online learning tools were able to adapt with proper support from their teachers and institutions.

Another study published in Computers & Education (Tang et al., 2023) compared the academic performance of students in online and traditional classroom settings during the pandemic. The study found that while there were no significant differences in the grades of students in the two settings, students in online classes reported higher levels of stress and lower levels of satisfaction with their learning experience.

Methodology in a thesis refers to the overall approach and systematic process that a researcher follows to collect and analyze data in order to answer their research question(s) or achieve their research objectives. It includes the research design, data collection methods, sampling techniques, data analysis procedures, and any other relevant procedures that the researcher uses to conduct their research.

For example, let’s consider a thesis on the impact of social media on mental health among teenagers. The methodology for this thesis might involve the following steps:

Research Design:

The researcher may choose to conduct a quantitative study using a survey questionnaire to collect data on social media usage and mental health among teenagers. Alternatively, they may conduct a qualitative study using focus group discussions or interviews to gain a deeper understanding of the experiences and perspectives of teenagers regarding social media and mental health.

Sampling Techniques:

The researcher may use random sampling to select a representative sample of teenagers from a specific geographic location or demographic group, or they may use purposive sampling to select participants who meet specific criteria such as age, gender, or mental health status.

Data Collection Methods:

The researcher may use an online survey tool to collect data on social media usage and mental health, or they may conduct face-to-face interviews or focus group discussions to gather qualitative data. They may also use existing data sources such as medical records or social media posts.

Data Analysis Procedures:

The researcher may use statistical analysis techniques such as regression analysis to examine the relationship between social media usage and mental health, or they may use thematic analysis to identify key themes and patterns in the qualitative data.

Ethical Considerations: The researcher must ensure that their research is conducted in an ethical manner, which may involve obtaining informed consent from participants, protecting their confidentiality, and ensuring that their rights and welfare are respected.

In a thesis, the “Results” section typically presents the findings of the research conducted by the author. This section typically includes both quantitative and qualitative data, such as statistical analyses, tables, figures, and other relevant data.

Here are some examples of how the “Results” section of a thesis might look:

Example 1: A quantitative study on the effects of exercise on cardiovascular health

In this study, the author conducts a randomized controlled trial to investigate the effects of exercise on cardiovascular health in a group of sedentary adults. The “Results” section might include tables showing the changes in blood pressure, cholesterol levels, and other relevant indicators in the exercise and control groups over the course of the study. The section might also include statistical analyses, such as t-tests or ANOVA, to demonstrate the significance of the results.

Example 2: A qualitative study on the experiences of immigrant families in a new country

In this study, the author conducts in-depth interviews with immigrant families to explore their experiences of adapting to a new country. The “Results” section might include quotes from the interviews that illustrate the participants’ experiences, as well as a thematic analysis that identifies common themes and patterns in the data. The section might also include a discussion of the implications of the findings for policy and practice.

A thesis discussion section is an opportunity for the author to present their interpretation and analysis of the research results. In this section, the author can provide their opinion on the findings, compare them with other literature, and suggest future research directions.

For example, let’s say the thesis topic is about the impact of social media on mental health. The author has conducted a survey among 500 individuals and has found that there is a significant correlation between excessive social media use and poor mental health.

In the discussion section, the author can start by summarizing the main findings and stating their interpretation of the results. For instance, the author may argue that excessive social media use is likely to cause mental health problems due to the pressure of constantly comparing oneself to others, fear of missing out, and cyberbullying.

Next, the author can compare their results with other studies and point out similarities and differences. They can also identify any limitations in their research design and suggest future directions for research.

For example, the author may point out that their study only measured social media use and mental health at one point in time, and it is unclear whether one caused the other or whether there are other confounding factors. Therefore, they may suggest longitudinal studies that follow individuals over time to better understand the causal relationship.

Writing a conclusion for a thesis is an essential part of the overall writing process. The conclusion should summarize the main points of the thesis and provide a sense of closure to the reader. It is also an opportunity to reflect on the research process and offer suggestions for further study.

Here is an example of a conclusion for a thesis:

After an extensive analysis of the data collected, it is evident that the implementation of a new curriculum has had a significant impact on student achievement. The findings suggest that the new curriculum has improved student performance in all subject areas, and this improvement is particularly notable in math and science. The results of this study provide empirical evidence to support the notion that curriculum reform can positively impact student learning outcomes.

In addition to the positive results, this study has also identified areas for future research. One limitation of the current study is that it only examines the short-term effects of the new curriculum. Future studies should explore the long-term effects of the new curriculum on student performance, as well as investigate the impact of the curriculum on students with different learning styles and abilities.

Overall, the findings of this study have important implications for educators and policymakers who are interested in improving student outcomes. The results of this study suggest that the implementation of a new curriculum can have a positive impact on student achievement, and it is recommended that schools and districts consider curriculum reform as a means of improving student learning outcomes.

References in a thesis typically follow a specific format depending on the citation style required by your academic institution or publisher.

Below are some examples of different citation styles and how to reference different types of sources in your thesis:

In-text citation format: (Author, Year)

Reference list format for a book: Author, A. A. (Year of publication). Title of work: Capital letter also for subtitle. Publisher.

Example: In-text citation: (Smith, 2010) Reference list entry: Smith, J. D. (2010). The art of writing a thesis. Cambridge University Press.

Reference list format for a journal article: Author, A. A., Author, B. B., & Author, C. C. (Year of publication). Title of article. Title of Journal, volume number(issue number), page range.

Example: In-text citation: (Brown, 2015) Reference list entry: Brown, E., Smith, J., & Johnson, L. (2015). The impact of social media on academic performance. Journal of Educational Psychology, 108(3), 393-407.

In-text citation format: (Author page number)

Works Cited list format for a book: Author. Title of Book. Publisher, Year of publication.

Example: In-text citation: (Smith 75) Works Cited entry: Smith, John D. The Art of Writing a Thesis. Cambridge University Press, 2010.

Works Cited list format for a journal article: Author(s). “Title of Article.” Title of Journal, volume number, issue number, date, pages.

Example: In-text citation: (Brown 394) Works Cited entry: Brown, Elizabeth, et al. “The Impact of Social Media on Academic Performance.” Journal of Educational Psychology, vol. 108, no. 3, 2015, pp. 393-407.

Chicago Style

In-text citation format: (Author year, page number)

Bibliography list format for a book: Author. Title of Book. Place of publication: Publisher, Year of publication.

Example: In-text citation: (Smith 2010, 75) Bibliography entry: Smith, John D. The Art of Writing a Thesis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010.

Bibliography list format for a journal article: Author. “Title of Article.” Title of Journal volume number, no. issue number (date): page numbers.

Example: In-text citation: (Brown 2015, 394) Bibliography entry: Brown, Elizabeth, John Smith, and Laura Johnson. “The Impact of Social Media on Academic Performance.” Journal of Educational Psychology 108, no. 3 (2015): 393-407.

Reference list format for a book: [1] A. A. Author, Title of Book. City of Publisher, Abbrev. of State: Publisher, year.

Example: In-text citation: [1] Reference list entry: A. J. Smith, The Art of Writing a Thesis. New York, NY: Academic Press, 2010.

Reference list format for a journal article: [1] A. A. Author, “Title of Article,” Title of Journal, vol. x, no. x, pp. xxx-xxx, Month year.

Example: In-text citation: [1] Reference list entry: E. Brown, J. D. Smith, and L. Johnson, “The Impact of Social Media on Academic Performance,” Journal of Educational Psychology, vol. 108, no. 3, pp. 393-407, Mar. 2015.

An appendix in a thesis is a section that contains additional information that is not included in the main body of the document but is still relevant to the topic being discussed. It can include figures, tables, graphs, data sets, sample questionnaires, or any other supplementary material that supports your thesis.

Here is an example of how you can format appendices in your thesis:

• Title page: The appendix should have a separate title page that lists the title, author’s name, the date, and the document type (i.e., thesis or dissertation). The title page should be numbered as the first page of the appendix section.
• Table of contents: If you have more than one appendix, you should include a separate table of contents that lists each appendix and its page number. The table of contents should come after the title page.
• Appendix sections: Each appendix should have its own section with a clear and concise title that describes the contents of the appendix. Each section should be numbered with Arabic numerals (e.g., Appendix 1, Appendix 2, etc.). The sections should be listed in the table of contents.
• Formatting: The formatting of the appendices should be consistent with the rest of the thesis. This includes font size, font style, line spacing, and margins.
• Example: Here is an example of what an appendix might look like in a thesis on the topic of climate change:

Appendix 1: Data Sources

This appendix includes a list of the primary data sources used in this thesis, including their URLs and a brief description of the data they provide.

Appendix 2: Survey Questionnaire

This appendix includes the survey questionnaire used to collect data from participants in the study.

Appendix 3: Additional Figures

This appendix includes additional figures that were not included in the main body of the thesis due to space limitations. These figures provide additional support for the findings presented in the thesis.

About the author

Muhammad Hassan

Researcher, Academic Writer, Web developer

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The Effects of Climate Change

The effects of human-caused global warming are happening now, are irreversible for people alive today, and will worsen as long as humans add greenhouse gases to the atmosphere.

• We already see effects scientists predicted, such as the loss of sea ice, melting glaciers and ice sheets, sea level rise, and more intense heat waves.
• Scientists predict global temperature increases from human-made greenhouse gases will continue. Severe weather damage will also increase and intensify.

Earth Will Continue to Warm and the Effects Will Be Profound

Global climate change is not a future problem. Changes to Earth’s climate driven by increased human emissions of heat-trapping greenhouse gases are already having widespread effects on the environment: glaciers and ice sheets are shrinking, river and lake ice is breaking up earlier, plant and animal geographic ranges are shifting, and plants and trees are blooming sooner.

Effects that scientists had long predicted would result from global climate change are now occurring, such as sea ice loss, accelerated sea level rise, and longer, more intense heat waves.

The magnitude and rate of climate change and associated risks depend strongly on near-term mitigation and adaptation actions, and projected adverse impacts and related losses and damages escalate with every increment of global warming.

Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change

Some changes (such as droughts, wildfires, and extreme rainfall) are happening faster than scientists previously assessed. In fact, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) — the United Nations body established to assess the science related to climate change — modern humans have never before seen the observed changes in our global climate, and some of these changes are irreversible over the next hundreds to thousands of years.

Scientists have high confidence that global temperatures will continue to rise for many decades, mainly due to greenhouse gases produced by human activities.

The IPCC’s Sixth Assessment report, published in 2021, found that human emissions of heat-trapping gases have already warmed the climate by nearly 2 degrees Fahrenheit (1.1 degrees Celsius) since 1850-1900. 1 The global average temperature is expected to reach or exceed 1.5 degrees C (about 3 degrees F) within the next few decades. These changes will affect all regions of Earth.

The severity of effects caused by climate change will depend on the path of future human activities. More greenhouse gas emissions will lead to more climate extremes and widespread damaging effects across our planet. However, those future effects depend on the total amount of carbon dioxide we emit. So, if we can reduce emissions, we may avoid some of the worst effects.

The scientific evidence is unequivocal: climate change is a threat to human wellbeing and the health of the planet. Any further delay in concerted global action will miss the brief, rapidly closing window to secure a liveable future.

Here are some of the expected effects of global climate change on the United States, according to the Third and Fourth National Climate Assessment Reports:

Future effects of global climate change in the United States:

U.S. Sea Level Likely to Rise 1 to 6.6 Feet by 2100

Global sea level has risen about 8 inches (0.2 meters) since reliable record-keeping began in 1880. By 2100, scientists project that it will rise at least another foot (0.3 meters), but possibly as high as 6.6 feet (2 meters) in a high-emissions scenario. Sea level is rising because of added water from melting land ice and the expansion of seawater as it warms. Image credit: Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0

Climate Changes Will Continue Through This Century and Beyond

Global climate is projected to continue warming over this century and beyond. Image credit: Khagani Hasanov, Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0

Hurricanes Will Become Stronger and More Intense

Scientists project that hurricane-associated storm intensity and rainfall rates will increase as the climate continues to warm. Image credit: NASA

More Droughts and Heat Waves

Droughts in the Southwest and heat waves (periods of abnormally hot weather lasting days to weeks) are projected to become more intense, and cold waves less intense and less frequent. Image credit: NOAA

Longer Wildfire Season

Warming temperatures have extended and intensified wildfire season in the West, where long-term drought in the region has heightened the risk of fires. Scientists estimate that human-caused climate change has already doubled the area of forest burned in recent decades. By around 2050, the amount of land consumed by wildfires in Western states is projected to further increase by two to six times. Even in traditionally rainy regions like the Southeast, wildfires are projected to increase by about 30%.

Changes in Precipitation Patterns

Climate change is having an uneven effect on precipitation (rain and snow) in the United States, with some locations experiencing increased precipitation and flooding, while others suffer from drought. On average, more winter and spring precipitation is projected for the northern United States, and less for the Southwest, over this century. Image credit: Marvin Nauman/FEMA

Frost-Free Season (and Growing Season) will Lengthen

The length of the frost-free season, and the corresponding growing season, has been increasing since the 1980s, with the largest increases occurring in the western United States. Across the United States, the growing season is projected to continue to lengthen, which will affect ecosystems and agriculture.

Global Temperatures Will Continue to Rise

Summer of 2023 was Earth's hottest summer on record, 0.41 degrees Fahrenheit (F) (0.23 degrees Celsius (C)) warmer than any other summer in NASA’s record and 2.1 degrees F (1.2 C) warmer than the average summer between 1951 and 1980. Image credit: NASA

Arctic Is Very Likely to Become Ice-Free

Sea ice cover in the Arctic Ocean is expected to continue decreasing, and the Arctic Ocean will very likely become essentially ice-free in late summer if current projections hold. This change is expected to occur before mid-century.

U.S. Regional Effects

Climate change is bringing different types of challenges to each region of the country. Some of the current and future impacts are summarized below. These findings are from the Third 3 and Fourth 4 National Climate Assessment Reports, released by the U.S. Global Change Research Program .

• Northeast. Heat waves, heavy downpours, and sea level rise pose increasing challenges to many aspects of life in the Northeast. Infrastructure, agriculture, fisheries, and ecosystems will be increasingly compromised. Farmers can explore new crop options, but these adaptations are not cost- or risk-free. Moreover, adaptive capacity , which varies throughout the region, could be overwhelmed by a changing climate. Many states and cities are beginning to incorporate climate change into their planning.
• Northwest. Changes in the timing of peak flows in rivers and streams are reducing water supplies and worsening competing demands for water. Sea level rise, erosion, flooding, risks to infrastructure, and increasing ocean acidity pose major threats. Increasing wildfire incidence and severity, heat waves, insect outbreaks, and tree diseases are causing widespread forest die-off.
• Southeast. Sea level rise poses widespread and continuing threats to the region’s economy and environment. Extreme heat will affect health, energy, agriculture, and more. Decreased water availability will have economic and environmental impacts.
• Midwest. Extreme heat, heavy downpours, and flooding will affect infrastructure, health, agriculture, forestry, transportation, air and water quality, and more. Climate change will also worsen a range of risks to the Great Lakes.
• Southwest. Climate change has caused increased heat, drought, and insect outbreaks. In turn, these changes have made wildfires more numerous and severe. The warming climate has also caused a decline in water supplies, reduced agricultural yields, and triggered heat-related health impacts in cities. In coastal areas, flooding and erosion are additional concerns.

1. IPCC 2021, Climate Change 2021: The Physical Science Basis , the Working Group I contribution to the Sixth Assessment Report, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK.

2. IPCC, 2013: Summary for Policymakers. In: Climate Change 2013: The Physical Science Basis. Contribution of Working Group I to the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [Stocker, T.F., D. Qin, G.-K. Plattner, M. Tignor, S.K. Allen, J. Boschung, A. Nauels, Y. Xia, V. Bex and P.M. Midgley (eds.)]. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, United Kingdom and New York, NY, USA.

3. USGCRP 2014, Third Climate Assessment .

4. USGCRP 2017, Fourth Climate Assessment .

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A Degree of Difference

So, the Earth's average temperature has increased about 2 degrees Fahrenheit during the 20th century. What's the big deal?

What’s the difference between climate change and global warming?

“Global warming” refers to the long-term warming of the planet. “Climate change” encompasses global warming, but refers to the broader range of changes that are happening to our planet, including rising sea levels; shrinking mountain glaciers; accelerating ice melt in Greenland, Antarctica and the Arctic; and shifts in flower/plant blooming times.

Is it too late to prevent climate change?

Humans have caused major climate changes to happen already, and we have set in motion more changes still. However, if we stopped emitting greenhouse gases today, the rise in global temperatures would begin to flatten within a few years. Temperatures would then plateau but remain well-elevated for many, many centuries.

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Science News

Climate change is changing how we keep time.

Melting ice sheets are slowing Earth's rotation speed, complicating global timekeeping

The rapidly accelerating melting of Earth’s polar ice sheets — including ice atop Greenland (shown here) — is slowing the planet’s spin, which affects global timekeeping.

EREM YUCEL/AFP via Getty Images

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By Carolyn Gramling

March 27, 2024 at 1:34 pm

Climate change may be making it harder to know exactly what time it is.

The rapid melting of the ice sheets atop Greenland and Antarctica, as measured by satellite-based gravitational measurements, is shifting more mass toward Earth’s waistline. And that extra bulge is slowing the planet’s rotation , geophysicist Duncan Agnew reports online March 27 in Nature . That climate change–driven mass shift is throwing a new wrench into international timekeeping standards.

The internationally agreed-upon coordinated universal time, or UTC, is set by atomic clocks, but that time is regularly adjusted to match Earth’s actual spin. Earth’s rotation isn’t always smooth sailing — the speed of the planet’s spin changes depending on a variety of factors, including gravitational drag from the sun and the moon, changes to the rotation speed of Earth’s core, friction between ocean waters and the seafloor, and shifts in the planet’s distribution of mass around its surface. Even earthquakes can affect the spin: The magnitude 9.1 earthquake in Indonesia in 2004, for example, altered the land surface in such a way that it caused Earth to rotate a tiny bit faster, says Agnew, of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, Calif.

But the impact of that quake is much smaller than that of the ice sheets’ melting — a point that Agnew says he finds particularly startling. Humankind “has done something that affects, measurably, the rotation rate of the entire Earth.”

The need for occasional tweaks to the synchronization of atomic clocks and Earth’s rotation gave birth in 1972 to the “leap second ,” an extra tick that international timekeepers agreed to add to UTC as needed ( SN: 1/19/24 ). Timekeepers have added 27 leap seconds to the clock since the idea was introduced.

Still, metrologists — measurement scientists — aren’t overly fond of this system. For one thing, it doesn’t happen on a regular schedule, but only whenever it seems to be needed. And financial markets and satellite navigation systems, which rely on precise timing, each have their own methodologies for incorporating a leap second. Those inconsistencies can, counterproductively, make it more challenging to have a universal time. So in 2022, an international consortium of metrologists voted to do away with leap seconds in favor of adding larger chunks of time, perhaps a minute, less frequently. The group resolved to settle those details at its next meeting, in 2026.

That may not come a second too soon. The slightly slower rotation has actually delayed the need for timekeeping adjustments by a few years, Agnew says — in fact, as a result of this change, the last time a leap second was required to be inserted was in 2016. At the moment, in fact, Earth’s rotation and atomic clocks are nearly in sync.

But that’s just a brief respite, Agnew’s calculations show. The biggest changes to Earth’s rotation right now are coming from its heart: slowing rotation of Earth’s core is actually speeding up the spin of the outer layers ( SN: 1/23/23 ). That slowdown will ultimately mean that timekeepers, under the current system, must begin removing leap seconds from the UTC, rather than inserting them, to keep things in sync.

That shift in strategy might have begun as soon as in 2026. But the study suggests that, thanks to climate change, global timekeepers now have an extra two or three years before they need to adjust, notes geophysicist Jerry Mitrovica of Harvard University. But no realistic projections of future melting can forestall the inevitable beyond 2030, Mitrovica adds: One way or another, the world is going to have to start losing time — or international timekeeping guidelines will need to change.

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Title: long-form factuality in large language models.

Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) often generate content that contains factual errors when responding to fact-seeking prompts on open-ended topics. To benchmark a model's long-form factuality in open domains, we first use GPT-4 to generate LongFact, a prompt set comprising thousands of questions spanning 38 topics. We then propose that LLM agents can be used as automated evaluators for long-form factuality through a method which we call Search-Augmented Factuality Evaluator (SAFE). SAFE utilizes an LLM to break down a long-form response into a set of individual facts and to evaluate the accuracy of each fact using a multi-step reasoning process comprising sending search queries to Google Search and determining whether a fact is supported by the search results. Furthermore, we propose extending F1 score as an aggregated metric for long-form factuality. To do so, we balance the percentage of supported facts in a response (precision) with the percentage of provided facts relative to a hyperparameter representing a user's preferred response length (recall). Empirically, we demonstrate that LLM agents can achieve superhuman rating performance - on a set of ~16k individual facts, SAFE agrees with crowdsourced human annotators 72% of the time, and on a random subset of 100 disagreement cases, SAFE wins 76% of the time. At the same time, SAFE is more than 20 times cheaper than human annotators. We also benchmark thirteen language models on LongFact across four model families (Gemini, GPT, Claude, and PaLM-2), finding that larger language models generally achieve better long-form factuality. LongFact, SAFE, and all experimental code are available at this https URL .

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How to Write a Thesis or Dissertation Conclusion

Published on September 6, 2022 by Tegan George and Shona McCombes. Revised on November 20, 2023.

The conclusion is the very last part of your thesis or dissertation . It should be concise and engaging, leaving your reader with a clear understanding of your main findings, as well as the answer to your research question .

In it, you should:

• Clearly state the answer to your main research question
• Summarize and reflect on your research process
• Make recommendations for future work on your thesis or dissertation topic
• Show what new knowledge you have contributed to your field
• Wrap up your thesis or dissertation

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Discussion vs. conclusion, how long should your conclusion be, step 1: answer your research question, step 2: summarize and reflect on your research, step 3: make future recommendations, step 4: emphasize your contributions to your field, step 5: wrap up your thesis or dissertation, full conclusion example, conclusion checklist, other interesting articles, frequently asked questions about conclusion sections.

While your conclusion contains similar elements to your discussion section , they are not the same thing.

Your conclusion should be shorter and more general than your discussion. Instead of repeating literature from your literature review , discussing specific research results , or interpreting your data in detail, concentrate on making broad statements that sum up the most important insights of your research.

As a rule of thumb, your conclusion should not introduce new data, interpretations, or arguments.

Prevent plagiarism. Run a free check.

Depending on whether you are writing a thesis or dissertation, your length will vary. Generally, a conclusion should make up around 5–7% of your overall word count.

An empirical scientific study will often have a short conclusion, concisely stating the main findings and recommendations for future research. A humanities dissertation topic or systematic review , on the other hand, might require more space to conclude its analysis, tying all the previous sections together in an overall argument.

Your conclusion should begin with the main question that your thesis or dissertation aimed to address. This is your final chance to show that you’ve done what you set out to do, so make sure to formulate a clear, concise answer.

• Don’t repeat a list of all the results that you already discussed
• Do synthesize them into a final takeaway that the reader will remember.

An empirical thesis or dissertation conclusion may begin like this:

A case study –based thesis or dissertation conclusion may begin like this:

In the second example, the research aim is not directly restated, but rather added implicitly to the statement. To avoid repeating yourself, it is helpful to reformulate your aims and questions into an overall statement of what you did and how you did it.

Your conclusion is an opportunity to remind your reader why you took the approach you did, what you expected to find, and how well the results matched your expectations.

To avoid repetition , consider writing more reflectively here, rather than just writing a summary of each preceding section. Consider mentioning the effectiveness of your methodology , or perhaps any new questions or unexpected insights that arose in the process.

You can also mention any limitations of your research, but only if you haven’t already included these in the discussion. Don’t dwell on them at length, though—focus on the positives of your work.

• While x limits the generalizability of the results, this approach provides new insight into y .
• This research clearly illustrates x , but it also raises the question of y .

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You may already have made a few recommendations for future research in your discussion section, but the conclusion is a good place to elaborate and look ahead, considering the implications of your findings in both theoretical and practical terms.

• Based on these conclusions, practitioners should consider …
• To better understand the implications of these results, future studies could address …
• Further research is needed to determine the causes of/effects of/relationship between …

When making recommendations for further research, be sure not to undermine your own work. Relatedly, while future studies might confirm, build on, or enrich your conclusions, they shouldn’t be required for your argument to feel complete. Your work should stand alone on its own merits.

Just as you should avoid too much self-criticism, you should also avoid exaggerating the applicability of your research. If you’re making recommendations for policy, business, or other practical implementations, it’s generally best to frame them as “shoulds” rather than “musts.” All in all, the purpose of academic research is to inform, explain, and explore—not to demand.

Make sure your reader is left with a strong impression of what your research has contributed to the state of your field.

Some strategies to achieve this include:

• Returning to your problem statement to explain how your research helps solve the problem
• Referring back to the literature review and showing how you have addressed a gap in knowledge
• Discussing how your findings confirm or challenge an existing theory or assumption

Again, avoid simply repeating what you’ve already covered in the discussion in your conclusion. Instead, pick out the most important points and sum them up succinctly, situating your project in a broader context.

The end is near! Once you’ve finished writing your conclusion, it’s time to wrap up your thesis or dissertation with a few final steps:

• It’s a good idea to write your abstract next, while the research is still fresh in your mind.
• Next, make sure your reference list is complete and correctly formatted. To speed up the process, you can use our free APA citation generator .
• Once you’ve added any appendices , you can create a table of contents and title page .
• Finally, read through the whole document again to make sure your thesis is clearly written and free from language errors. You can proofread it yourself , ask a friend, or consider Scribbr’s proofreading and editing service .

Here is an example of how you can write your conclusion section. Notice how it includes everything mentioned above:

V. Conclusion

The current research aimed to identify acoustic speech characteristics which mark the beginning of an exacerbation in COPD patients.

The central questions for this research were as follows: 1. Which acoustic measures extracted from read speech differ between COPD speakers in stable condition and healthy speakers? 2. In what ways does the speech of COPD patients during an exacerbation differ from speech of COPD patients during stable periods?

All recordings were aligned using a script. Subsequently, they were manually annotated to indicate respiratory actions such as inhaling and exhaling. The recordings of 9 stable COPD patients reading aloud were then compared with the recordings of 5 healthy control subjects reading aloud. The results showed a significant effect of condition on the number of in- and exhalations per syllable, the number of non-linguistic in- and exhalations per syllable, and the ratio of voiced and silence intervals. The number of in- and exhalations per syllable and the number of non-linguistic in- and exhalations per syllable were higher for COPD patients than for healthy controls, which confirmed both hypotheses.

However, the higher ratio of voiced and silence intervals for COPD patients compared to healthy controls was not in line with the hypotheses. This unpredicted result might have been caused by the different reading materials or recording procedures for both groups, or by a difference in reading skills. Moreover, there was a trend regarding the effect of condition on the number of syllables per breath group. The number of syllables per breath group was higher for healthy controls than for COPD patients, which was in line with the hypothesis. There was no effect of condition on pitch, intensity, center of gravity, pitch variability, speaking rate, or articulation rate.

This research has shown that the speech of COPD patients in exacerbation differs from the speech of COPD patients in stable condition. This might have potential for the detection of exacerbations. However, sustained vowels rarely occur in spontaneous speech. Therefore, the last two outcome measures might have greater potential for the detection of beginning exacerbations, but further research on the different outcome measures and their potential for the detection of exacerbations is needed due to the limitations of the current study.

Checklist: Conclusion

I have clearly and concisely answered the main research question .

I have summarized my overall argument or key takeaways.

I have mentioned any important limitations of the research.

I have given relevant recommendations .

I have clearly explained what my research has contributed to my field.

I have  not introduced any new data or arguments.

You've written a great conclusion! Use the other checklists to further improve your dissertation.

If you want to know more about AI for academic writing, AI tools, or research bias, make sure to check out some of our other articles with explanations and examples or go directly to our tools!

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In a thesis or dissertation, the discussion is an in-depth exploration of the results, going into detail about the meaning of your findings and citing relevant sources to put them in context.

The conclusion is more shorter and more general: it concisely answers your main research question and makes recommendations based on your overall findings.

While it may be tempting to present new arguments or evidence in your thesis or disseration conclusion , especially if you have a particularly striking argument you’d like to finish your analysis with, you shouldn’t. Theses and dissertations follow a more formal structure than this.

All your findings and arguments should be presented in the body of the text (more specifically in the discussion section and results section .) The conclusion is meant to summarize and reflect on the evidence and arguments you have already presented, not introduce new ones.

For a stronger dissertation conclusion , avoid including:

• Important evidence or analysis that wasn’t mentioned in the discussion section and results section
• Generic concluding phrases (e.g. “In conclusion …”)
• Weak statements that undermine your argument (e.g., “There are good points on both sides of this issue.”)

Your conclusion should leave the reader with a strong, decisive impression of your work.

The conclusion of your thesis or dissertation shouldn’t take up more than 5–7% of your overall word count.

The conclusion of your thesis or dissertation should include the following:

• A restatement of your research question
• A summary of your key arguments and/or results
• A short discussion of the implications of your research

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George, T. & McCombes, S. (2023, November 20). How to Write a Thesis or Dissertation Conclusion. Scribbr. Retrieved March 25, 2024, from https://www.scribbr.com/dissertation/write-conclusion/

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Melting polar ice is slowing the Earth's rotation, with possible consequences for timekeeping

Global warming has slightly slowed the Earth’s rotation — and it could affect how we measure time. 

A study published Wednesday found that the melting of polar ice — an accelerating trend driven primarily by human-caused climate change — has caused the Earth to spin less quickly than it would otherwise. 

The author of the study, Duncan Agnew, a geophysicist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California San Diego, said that as ice at the poles melts, it changes where the Earth’s mass is concentrated. The change, in turn, affects the planet’s angular velocity. 

Agnew compared the dynamic to a figure skater twirling on ice: “If you have a skater who starts spinning, if she lowers her arms or stretches out her legs, she will slow down,” he said. But if a skater’s arms are drawn inward, the skater will twirl faster. 

Less solid ice at the poles, then, means more mass around the equator — Earth’s waist.

“What you’re doing with the ice melt is you’re taking water that’s frozen solid in places like Antarctica and Greenland, and that frozen water is melting, and you move the fluids to other places on the planet,” said Thomas Herring, a professor of geophysics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who was not involved in the new study. “The water flows off towards the equator.” 

The study suggests, in other words, that human influence has monkeyed with a force that scholars, stargazers and scientists have puzzled over for millennia — something long considered a constant that was out of humanity’s control.

“It’s kind of impressive, even to me, we’ve done something that measurably changes how fast the Earth rotates,” Agnew said. “Things are happening that are unprecedented.”

His study, which was published in the journal Nature, suggests that climate change is playing a significant enough role in the Earth’s rotation to counteract an opposing trend. Because of a combination of factors, the Earth has begun to spin faster in recent decades, a temporary trend that has prompted scientists for the first time to consider subtracting a single “negative leap second” from clocks worldwide as soon as 2026. But the melting of polar ice has delayed that possibility by about three years, according to Agnew.

If timekeeping organizations do eventually decide to add a negative leap second, the adjustment could disrupt computer networks.

The reason leap second adjustments have historically been needed is that even without climate change, Earth’s daily rotation has trended slower over millions of years, even though it may seem constant. 

About 70 million years ago, days were shorter and lasted roughly 23.5 hours, a study in Paleoceanography and Paleoclimatology suggests . That means Cretaceous dinosaurs experienced a planet with 372 days in each year.  

Several key factors affect the planet’s spin — sometimes working in opposition. 

The friction of ocean tides, due in part to the moon’s gravitational pull, slows the Earth’s rotation. Meanwhile, since the last Ice Age, the Earth’s crust has been uplifting in some regions as it responds to the removal of ice sheets’ weight. That effect shifts where mass is distributed and speeds up the planet’s spin. Both of those processes are fairly constant and have predictable rates. 

Yet another factor is the movement of fluid within the Earth’s liquid inner core — a wild card that can either speed or slow how fast the Earth rotates, Agnew said.   Fluctuations in Earth's core are a primary reason that the planet has rotated faster than would be otherwise expected in recent decades.

That faster spin has led timekeepers to consider — for the first time since Coordinated Universal Time was officially adopted in the 1960s — whether it might make sense to subtract a leap second to keep universal time in lockstep with Earth’s rotation.  

But polar ice melt is counteracting that trend and has forestalled any decision point about whether to add a negative leap second. According to Agnew’s estimates, it has delayed that possibility from 2026 to 2029 —  if the current pace of Earth’s rotation holds. 

As climate change intensifies, researchers expect ice melt to have an even more profound effect on how the planet spins. 

“It will have a bigger contribution as time goes on and as melt accelerates, as we expect it’s likely to do,” Herring said. He added that the new study was a thorough, solid analysis that combined research from several disciplines of science.

The need for timekeepers to adjust universal time to stay in line with the Earth’s rotation is not a new phenomenon. But historically, that has involved adding leap seconds to the common standard for clocks when Earth’s slowing spin causes astronomical time to fall behind atomic time (which is measured by the vibration of atoms in atomic clocks). 

Adding or subtracting leap seconds is a pain, because they have the potential to disrupt satellite, financial and energy transmission systems that rely on extremely precise timing. Because of that, global timekeepers voted in 2022 to do away with the leap second additions and subtractions by 2035 and let universal time drift away from the pace of the Earth’s rotation. 

“There’s been a push since about 2000 to get rid of leap seconds,” Agnew said. 

Regardless of whether clocks wind up changing, the notion that melting polar ice is affecting the Earth’s rotation speaks to how significant an issue it has become. Research has already described the profound impact that ice loss will have on coastal communities.  

Scientists expect sea level rise to accelerate as the climate warms, a process that will continue for hundreds of years. Last year, top polar researchers warned in a report that parts of key ice sheets could collapse and that coastal communities should prepare for many feet of sea level rise. If humanity allows average global temperatures to rise by 2 degrees Celsius, the planet could be committed to more than 40 feet of sea level rise .

Evan Bush is a science reporter for NBC News. He can be reached at [email protected].

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Daniel Kahneman, Who Plumbed the Psychology of Economics, Dies at 90

He helped pioneer a branch of the field that exposed hard-wired mental biases in people’s economic behavior. The work led to a Nobel.

By Robert D. Hershey Jr.

Daniel Kahneman, who never took an economics course but who pioneered a psychologically based branch of that field that led to a Nobel in economic science in 2002, died on Wednesday. He was 90.

His death was confirmed by his partner, Barbara Tversky. She declined to say where he died.

Professor Kahneman, who was long associated with Princeton University and lived in Manhattan, employed his training as a psychologist to advance what came to be called behavioral economics. The work, done largely in the 1970s, led to a rethinking of issues as far-flung as medical malpractice, international political negotiations and the evaluation of baseball talent, all of which he analyzed, mostly in collaboration with Amos Tversky , a Stanford cognitive psychologist who did groundbreaking work on human judgment and decision-making. (Ms. Tversky, also a professor of psychology at Stanford , had been married to Professor Tversky, who died in 1996. She and Professor Kahneman became partners several years ago.)

As opposed to traditional economics, which assumes that human beings generally act in fully rational ways and that any exceptions tend to disappear as the stakes are raised, the behavioral school is based on exposing hard-wired mental biases that can warp judgment, often with counterintuitive results.

“His central message could not be more important,” the Harvard psychologist and author Steven Pinker told The Guardian in 2014, “namely, that human reason left to its own devices is apt to engage in a number of fallacies and systematic errors, so if we want to make better decisions in our personal lives and as a society, we ought to be aware of these biases and seek workarounds. That’s a powerful and important discovery.”

Professor Kahneman delighted in pointing out and explaining what he called universal brain “kinks.” The most important of these, the behaviorists hold, is loss-aversion: Why, for example, does the loss of $100 hurt about twice as much as the gaining of $100 brings pleasure?

Among its myriad implications, loss-aversion theory suggests that it is foolish to check one’s stock portfolio frequently, since the predominance of pain experienced in the stock market will most likely lead to excessive and possibly self-defeating caution.

Loss-aversion also explains why golfers have been found to putt better when going for par on a given hole than for a stroke-gaining birdie. They try harder on a par putt because they dearly want to avoid a bogey, or a loss of a stroke.

Mild-mannered and self-effacing, Professor Kahneman not only welcomed debate on his ideas; he also enlisted the help of adversaries as well as colleagues to perfect them. When asked who should be considered the “father” of behavioral economics, Professor Kahneman pointed to the University of Chicago economist Richard H. Thaler , a younger scholar (by 11 years) whom he described in his Nobel autobiography as his second most important professional friend, after Professor Tversky.

“I’m the grandfather of behavioral economics,” Professor Kahneman allowed in a 2016 interview for this obituary, in a restaurant near his home in Lower Manhattan.

This new school of thought did not get its first major public airing until 1985, in a conference at the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business, a bastion of traditional economics.

Professor Kahneman’s public reputation rested heavily on his 2011 book “Thinking, Fast and Slow,” which appeared on best-seller lists in science and business. One commentator, the essayist, mathematical statistician and former option trader Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of the influential book on improbability “The Black Swan,” placed “Thinking” in the same league as Adam Smith’s “The Wealth of Nations” and Sigmund Freud’s “The Interpretation of Dreams.”

The author Jim Holt, writing in The New York Times Book Review , called “Thinking” “an astonishingly rich book: lucid, profound, full of intellectual surprises and self-help value.”

Shane Frederick, a professor at the Yale School of Management and a Kahneman protégé, said by email in 2016 that Professor Kahneman had “helped transform economics into a true behavioral science rather than a mere mathematical exercise in outlining the logical entailments of a set of often wildly untenable assumptions.”

An Accessible Writer

Professor Kahneman propagated his findings with an appealing writing style, using illustrative vignettes with which even lay readers could engage.

Professor Kahneman wrote, for example, that Professor Thaler had inspired him to study, as an experiment, the so-called mental accounting of someone who arrives at the theater and realizes that he has lost either his ticket or the cash equivalent. Professor Kahneman found that people who lost the cash would still buy a ticket by some means, while those who lost an already purchased ticket would more likely go home.

Professor Thaler won the 2017 Nobel in economic science — officially the Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel. Professor Kahneman shared his 2002 Nobel with Vernon L. Smith of George Mason University in Virginia. “Had Tversky lived, he would certainly have shared the Nobel with Kahneman, his longtime collaborator and dear friend,” Professor Holt wrote in his 2011 Times review . Professor Tversky died in 1996 at 59.

Much of Professor Kahneman’s work is grounded in the notion — which he did not originate but organized and advanced — that the mind operates in two modes: fast and intuitive (mental activities that we’re more or less born with, called System One), or slow and analytical, a more complex mode involving experience and requiring effort (System Two).

Others have personified these mental modes as Econs (rational, analytical people) and Humans (emotional, impulsive and prone to exhibit unconscious mental biases and an unwise reliance on dubious rules of thumb). Professor Kahneman and Professor Tversky used the word “heuristics” to describe these rules of thumb. One is the “halo effect,” where in observing a positive attribute of another person one perceives other strengths that aren’t really there.

“Before Kahneman and Tversky, people who thought about social problems and human behavior tended to assume that we are mostly rational agents,” the Times columnist David Brooks wrote in 2011 . “They assumed that people have control over the most important parts of their own thinking. They assumed that people are basically sensible utility-maximizers, and that when they depart from reason it’s because some passion like fear or love has distorted their judgment.”

But Professors Kahneman and Tversky, he went on, “yielded a different vision of human nature.”

As Mr. Brooks described it: “We are players in a game we don’t understand. Most of our own thinking is below awareness.” He added: “Our biases frequently cause us to want the wrong things. Our perceptions and memories are slippery, especially about our own mental states. Our free will is bounded. We have much less control over ourselves than we thought.”

The work of Professor Kahneman and Professor Tversky, he concluded, “will be remembered hundreds of years from now.”

In the Shadow of Nazis

Daniel Kahneman was born on March 5, 1934, into a family of Lithuanian Jews who had emigrated to France to the early 1920s. After France fell to Nazi Germany in World War II, Daniel, like other Jews, was forced to wear a Star of David on the outside of his clothing. His father, the research chief in a chemical factory, was seized and interned at a way station before deportation to an extermination camp, but he was then released under mysterious circumstances. The family escaped to the Riviera and then to central France, where they lived in a converted chicken coop.

Daniel’s father died just before D-Day, in June 1944, and Daniel, by then an eighth-grader, and his sister, Ruth, wound up in British-controlled Palestine with their mother, Rachel. (Daniel had been born in Tel Aviv during an extended visit with relatives by his mother.)

He graduated from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem with a major in psychology, completing his college studies in two years. In 1954, after the founding of the state of Israel, he was drafted into the Israeli Defense Forces as a second lieutenant.

After a year as a platoon leader, he was transferred to the psychology branch, where he was given occasional assignments to assess candidates for officer training.

The unit’s ability to predict performance, however, was so poor that he coined the term “illusion of validity,” meaning a cognitive bias in which one displays overconfidence in the accuracy of one’s judgments. Two decades later this “illusion” became one of the most frequently cited elements in psychology literature.

He married Irah Kahan in Israel, and they soon set off for the University of California, Berkeley, where he had been granted a fellowship. He earned his Ph.D. in psychology there. He returned to Israel to teach at Hebrew University from 1961 to 1977. The marriage ended in divorce. (Professor Kahneman held dual citizenships, in the United States and Israel.)

In 1978, Professor Kahneman married Anne Treisman, a noted British psychologist who shared his interest in the study of attention, which was the chief subject of his early work. The two of them ran a lab and wrote papers together. In 2013 she received the National Medal of Science from President Barack Obama. She died in 2018. He and Ms. Treisman had long been friends with the Tverskys.

In addition to Ms. Tversky, he is survived by a son and daughter from his first marriage, Michael Kahneman and Lenore Shoham; two stepdaughters from his second marriage, Jessica and Deborah Treisman; two stepsons from the same marriage, Daniel and Stephen Treisman; three grandchildren; and four step-granddaughters. He lived in Greenwich Village for many years.

It was in Jerusalem, while developing a training course for Air Force flight instructors, that Professor Kahneman had “the most satisfying Eureka experience of my career,” as he wrote in an autobiographical sketch for the Nobel committee.

He had started to preach the traditional view that to promote learning, praise is more effective than punishment. But a seasoned colleague insisted otherwise, telling him, as Professor Kahneman recalled:

“On many occasions I have praised flight cadets for clean execution of some aerobatic maneuver, and in general when they try it again, they do worse. On the other hand, I have often screamed at cadets for bad execution, and in general they do better the next time. So please don’t tell us that reinforcement works and punishment does not, because the opposite is the case.”

The colleague had insisted — and convinced Professor Kahneman — that statistically people may do very well in something in one instance or very poorly in another, but that in the end they tend to regress to the mean, or average.

“This was a joyous moment, in which I learned an important truth about the world,” Professor Kahneman wrote. “Because we tend to reward others when they do well and punish them when they do badly, and because there is regression to the mean, it is part of the human condition that we are statistically punished for rewarding others and rewarded for punishing them.”

His collaboration with Professor Tversky — their peak productive years were 1971 to 1981 — was exceptionally close, so much so that it inspired the author Michael Lewis to write a book about them, “The Undoing Project : A Friendship That Changed Our Minds” (2016).

“Amos and I shared the wonder of together owning a goose that could lay golden eggs — a joint mind that was better than our separate minds,” Professor Kahneman wrote in his Nobel autobiography. Later, in “Thinking,” he wrote, “The pleasure we found in working together made us exceptionally patient; it is much easier to strive for perfection when you are never bored.”

Mr. Lewis reported that the two men worked on a single typewriter, often amid uproarious laughter and shouts in Hebrew and English, and that they had sometimes flipped a coin to determine whose name would be listed first on a paper.

But they also feuded, particularly when Professor Kahneman thought he was being denied proper credit. One falling-out lasted years, ending finally with a reconciliation. Professor Kahneman was solicitous during his colleague’s final illness (he died of metastatic melanoma) and was his main eulogist at his funeral in 1996.

One product of their collaboration was a finding that overconfidence in conjunction with optimism is an extremely common bias, which leads people to think that wars are quickly winnable and that building projects will be completed on budget. But Professor Kahneman and Professor Tversky considered such bias necessary in the end for capitalism to function.

Professor Kahneman’s North American career included teaching posts at the University of British Columbia and Berkeley before he joined the Princeton University faculty in 1993.

His most recent book is “Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment” (2021), written with Cass Sunstein and Olivier Sibony. In The Times Book Review, Steven Brill called it a “tour de force of scholarship and clear writing.”

The book looks at how human judgment often varies wildly even among specialists, as reflected in judicial decisions, insurance premiums, medical diagnoses and corporate decisions, as well as in many other aspects of life.

And it distinguishes between predictable biases — a judge, for example, who consistently sentences Black defendants more harshly — and what the authors call “noise”: less explainable decisions resulting from what they define as “unwanted variability in judgments.” In one example, the authors report that doctors are more likely to order cancer screenings for patients they see early in the morning than late in the afternoon.

The book, like his others, was an outgrowth of Professor Kahneman’s lifelong quest to understand how the human mind works — what thought processes lead people to make the kinds of decisions and judgments they do as they navigate a complex world. And toward the end of his life he acknowledged that so much more was to be known.

In an interview with Kara Swisher on her Times podcast “Sway” in 2021, he said, “If I were starting my career now, I would be choosing between artificial intelligence and neuroscience, because those are now particularly exciting ways of looking at human nature.”

Robert D. Hershey Jr. , a longtime reporter who wrote about finance and economics for The Times, died in January. Alex Traub contributed reporting.

An Everest-size volcano hiding in plain sight on Mars? New research make waves in the science community

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Scientists may have pinpointed a massive, oddly shaped volcano taller than Mount Everest on the surface of Mars — and it has been hiding in plain sight for decades, according to new research.

The possible identification of a previously unknown Martian volcano has made waves across the planetary sciences community since Mars Institute Chairman Dr. Pascal Lee, lead author of an abstract about the formation, presented   the findings on March 13 at the 55th Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in The Woodlands, Texas.

The research has drummed up excitement — and attracted some skeptics.

Lee said he and Sourabh Shubham, a doctoral student of geology at the University of Maryland, College Park, have identified a volcano within Mars’ Noctis Labyrinthus region — a gnarled patch of terrain near the equator with a web of canyons. The volcano in the “Labyrinth of Night” may have eluded scientists despite years of satellite observation because it does not tower over its surrounding landscape, Lee said.

“It’s also deeply eroded, eaten up and collapsed by erosion to the point that unless you’re really looking for a volcano, you would be really hard-pressed to spot it very quickly,” he told CNN.

If the team is correct, the revelation could have broad implications for scientists’ understanding of Martian geology. And, Lee said, he hopes the discovery could help lure future exploratory missions to the area to search for water ice or even signs of life .

The smoking gun

Initially, the research team’s efforts led to a study presented in March 2023 that suggested the Noctis Labyrinthus region may be home to a massive glacier covered in salt deposits.

Since then, Lee and Shubham have pored through data collected by NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, trying to determine whether water might still be frozen beneath the salt.

The hunt for water ice is key — it’s a resource that could be used to sustain human exploration on Mars or even converted into rocket fuel. While scouring the landscape, however, Lee said he was struck by “this little lava flow next to the glacier.”

The lava hadn’t yet been fully oxidized, a process that would turn it the same muddy orange hue as the surrounding surface, Lee said.

That indicated the lava might be relatively fresh — the first hint that an undetected volcano might be lurking nearby.

“We started looking at the landscape carefully,” Lee said. “And sure enough, when we examined the high points of this region, we noticed that they formed an arc.”

That arc is reminiscent of a shield volcano, Lee added, a type of volcano that also exists on Earth. Shield volcanoes are characterized by their broad, gently sloping sides — appearing wider than they are tall.

That finding led Lee and Shubham to gather more evidence, eventually determining that a 29,600-foot (9,022-meter) peak was actually the tip of a Martian volcano.

That’s a few hundred feet taller than Mount Everest , which rises 29,029 feet (8,848 meters) above sea level.

Mapping Mars

Scientists have already cataloged and named more than a dozen volcanoes on Mars, including Olympus Mons , the tallest known volcano in our solar system.

Lee said he and Shubham are working to spell out the findings in a peer-reviewed paper, a more detailed work that could lend more credence to the idea across the scientific community.

But the hypothesis of the volcano’s existence is already attracting attention.

“It’s a big thing,” said Dr. Adrien Broquet, a Humboldt Research Fellow at the German Aerospace Center who has studied Martian volcanoes. “It’s as tall as the tallest mountain we have on the Earth. So, it’s not a small feature on Mars for which we’ve had a question mark. And we have plenty of question marks (about the surface of Mars.)”

A search for life in the Labyrinth of Night

The journey to identifying this volcano — which the team has provisionally named “Noctis volcano” — began in 2015, Lee said, when NASA asked the planetary science community to propose intriguing locations on Mars where the US space agency might land future human exploration missions.

Lee proposed a site just east of Noctis Labyrinthus, which was dubbed “Noctis landing.”

The location could be an ideal place to search for alien life on Mars, said Lee, who is also a planetary scientist at the SETI Institute, a nonprofit dedicated to searching for evidence of extraterrestrial life.

“Of course, we’re not looking for a little green man with antennae,” Lee said. “But we’re looking for microbes that would not fit into the tree of life on Earth.”

Noctis Labyrinthus could be ideally situated for this hunt, according to Lee.

“If you want to look for ancient life, you drive east (from Noctis Labyrinthus) into the canyons,” Lee said, referring to Valles Marineris , the largest canyon in our solar system.

There, explorers could “sift through the rock layers” to scour for fossils, he said.

Or, Lee suggested, a mission could venture west to a volcanic region called the Tharsis plateau, where warm caves may harbor living microbes.

With such tantalizing potential, Lee has committed to studying Noctis Labyrinthus to build a case for sending exploratory missions there.

A volcano, a glacier and the history of Mars

The existence of a volcano in Noctis Labyrinthus could also help explain the creation of this bizarre landscape.

Scientists suspect magma bubbling up from Mars’ interior formed the labyrinthian valleys, but the details are up for debate.

One theory is that when the magma pushed up on the Martian crust, it cracked and splintered, leaving behind a maze of branching canyons.

Lee favors an alternative theory: This model suggests that the Martian crust in Noctis Labyrinthus is full of ice. And when magma seeped in, it melted or vaporized ice and rock beneath the surface, causing swaths of the terrain to cave in.

The existence of a volcano in the region, Lee said, might offer more support for the latter theory.

The science of certainty

Three scientists who were not involved in the research told CNN that they would not be surprised if a volcano were hidden near Noctis Labyrinthus.

Volcanoes of all shapes and sizes riddle the surface of the broader region, including the Tharsis plateau to the west of Noctis Labyrinthus.

However, Dr. Ernst Hauber, a staff scientist at the German Aerospace Center’s Institute of Planetary Research, is one geologist in the community who would like to see a peer-reviewed paper before he accepts Lee and Shubham’s version of events.

“They are very vague about chronology, about the timing of events,” Hauber told CNN, referring to the brief abstract Lee and Shubham published.

Among Hauber’s questions: If the volcano could still be active, as Lee suggests, why hasn’t it poured lava into the surrounding canyons? Why aren’t there more visible signs of lava near the peak? Could this actually be an impact crater Lee is looking at?

“I’m a bit skeptical for several reasons,” Hauber said.

Broquet of the German Aerospace Center and Dr. David Horvath — a research scientist at the nonprofit Planetary Science Institute in Tucson, Arizona — both said in separate interviews they would like to see additional data supporting the ideas Lee and Shubham presented.

But Broquet and Horvath said they find the abstract intriguing.

“This does look like a really good candidate (for a volcano),” Horvath said.

Lee said he is welcoming input from other scientists, anxious for additional evidence to support his research. But he also expresses confidence.

“In this case, my sense is that there’s really no room for plausible alternate hypotheses,” Lee said, adding that he’s 85% to 90% certain he has located a new Martian volcano.

“But extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence,” Lee added, quoting the late astronomer Carl Sagan, for whom he once worked as a teaching assistant.

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