cranfield thesis template

Writing your thesis

Introduction.

We understand that writing your thesis can be a daunting process! This page will guide you through the process and help to get you started. Don't forget you can also always speak to your Librarian to discuss search strategies and resources you might use.  

For students undertaking a thesis in the Schools of Aerospace, Transport and Manufacturing; Water, Energy and Environment, and Defence and Security, read our guide and top tips for  getting started on your Master's thesis .  There is  separate advice for School of Management students . 

You will also find advice and support to help you develop a variety of skills on our  Study Skills Hub , including guidance on academic writing and being critical .  

Formatting and templates for your thesis 

There are set guidelines for the layout and submission of your thesis, depending on whether you are a taught or research student. University advice for conducting, writing, printing and submitting your thesis is published on the  Thesis submission site on the intranet . The library has also published Guidelines for the layout and submission of your thesis , this document provides guidance on the format and layout of Master's and PhD theses.  

Note: you can browse our collection of  theses and dissertations , not only for finding information, but also for looking at examples of the structure, methodology and referencing styles you should use. 

To help you focus on the writing rather than the formatting of your thesis, Cranfield IT provide thesis templates for both Microsoft Word and LaTeX. Using a template will help you to achieve a consistently formatted document and will allow you to automatically generate a table of contents and lists of figures and tables, with appropriately numbered pages throughout. Training and support for the thesis template are provided by the IT Training Team .  

Writing your literature review 

Most PhD and Master's theses contain some form of literature review to provide the background for the research. Your literature review is intended to show your understanding of a subject area and identifies different research methodologies and tools. Read  Writing a Literature review  for practical tips that cover searching our resources, creating the basic structure and refining the final document. 

Refer to our guide on Conducting a literature review  for further guidance, including carrying out a systematic literature review.  

Submitting your thesis 

When do I need to hand in my thesis? Where? What do I need to submit? How do I submit a copy to Turnitin? What happens next? When will I get my results? For answers to these questions and many, many more, visit the Thesis submission pages . 

And finally

Try to stay calm! We know it’s easy advice to give, but try to make time to relax, sleep and exercise. Eat well and be kind to yourself. If you find you are getting too stressed, please get in touch with Student Support and view the Wellbeing pages on the Intranet . You can either drop in during office hours, call them or email (no appointment necessary) and our Student Advisors will be happy to help you talk through your worries. 

• Last Updated: Jul 23, 2024 4:06 PM
• URL: https://library.cranfield.ac.uk/writing-your-thesis

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Accessing past Cranfield theses

You may find it helpful to look at examples of past Cranfield theses when you are writing your own. They may be valuable for reading previous research, and for looking at the structure, style and methodology.

Important note: Please do not use them for referencing advice as we have updated both our Author-Date and Numbered referencing styles in recent years.

Here are the top 3 places to find past Cranfield theses. Please note that some of these are accessible only to specific communities or currently-registered Cranfield staff and students.

1. Masters Theses Archive

The Masters Theses Archive contains online copies of Cranfield Master’s theses since 2006 (but also some older ones).  Search or browse by School, title, author, supervisor or date. The links allow you to download the full-text in PDF. (Access limited to Cranfield staff and students).

2. Shrivenham Repository

Access online theses from Cranfield Defence and Security and the Shrivenham site. (Access limited to CDS staff and students). 

3. CERES, the Cranfield Research Repository

CERES contains the full-text of Cranfield research output, including both DBA and PhD theses. The database is publicly accessible and can either be searched or browsed by community. 

These are only our top three. A full list can be found on the Theses page of our website  but, as always, if you have any questions please  contact us .

Feature image from Pixabay .

Karen Stokes

Written By: Karen Stokes

A Business Librarian since 2009, Karen leads support for the Cranfield MBA courses, both full-time and Executive.

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Cranfield (Unofficial) LaTeX Thesis Template

brandawg/Cranfield_Thesis_Template

Folders and files.

Repository files navigation

The purpose of this repository is to host the style files required for writing documents in LaTeX in accordance with Cranfield thesis template guidlines, along with all the documentation required on how to use it.

The motivation for updating the original sty file was to create a LaTeX style file that recreated (as best possible) the look, feel and structure of Cranfield's official Word thesis template, but still allowed for the flexibility, control and performance that LaTeX offers.

• Latest update to style file: 30/01/2020 .
• Latest update to example file: 30/01/2020 .
• Latest update to documentation: 30/01/2020 .

Installation

Installation of the style could not be easier:

• Download the cranfieldthesis.sty file from this repo.
• Place the file within your local working folder for your LaTeX document.
• In the preamble add:

And you're done.

Preamble Setup [Basic]

In its most basic form the preamble can be set up as follows:

The documentclass used as a base style is the standard LaTeX book class. In its current form, the document produced will default to double sided printing, hence blank pages which may appear at the end of some sections to guarantee that the Chapter headings appear always appear on a left hand page. To switch to a single sided document see below,

Compiling the Document

As with most latex documents, pdflatex is the recommended compiler to producing a pdf from your .tex script.

Recommended Build Orders:

• Basic Preamble Set Up: pdflatex .
• Basic Preamble + TOC: pdflatex -> pdflatex .
• Basic Preamble + TOC + Bibliography (Bibtex Backend): pdflatex -> bibtex -> pdflatex -> pdflatex .
• Basic Preamble + TOC + Bibliography (Biber Backend): pdflatex -> biber -> pdflatex -> pdflatex .

Title Page Set Up

Title page information required by the sty to generate the title pages is also added to the preamble.

This information is then run by the command \maketitlepages which is placed in the main document. See below for the complete setup.

The next section of text required in the document is an abstract. Add the following after \maketitlepages .

Your abstract can then be typed between the \begin and \end commands.

Contents Pages

Automatically generated lists.

Pregenerated contents page lists can easily be added and removed depending on your needs. The .sty contains 5 automatic lists:

• Contents - Lists section headings etc.
• Figures - Lists of Figures, including page numbers and captions.
• Table - List of Tables, including page numbers and captions.
• Algorithms - List of Algorithms, including page numbers and captions.
• Code - List of code snippets, including page numbers and captions.

Each is controlled through a seperate command and is placed after the abstract.

Manually Generated Lists

User manually created lists are used for symbols and abbreviations.

List of Abbreviations

Abbreviations are added line by line.

The command \abbrev has the following inputs:

List of Symbols

Symbols are added line by line.

The command \symb has the following inputs:

List of Publications

Publications are added line by line.

Example usage:

Line Spaceing

Cranfield does not set a mandatory line spacing size. They recommend that 1.5 is sometimes easier for reviewers, however we all know 1.25 looks much nicer.

Line spacing height needs to be set by the user in this template. This is done through the \setstretch{} function. Add the following line of code after you have added all you introductory pages (TOC, lists etc.) and therefore before the main content of the thesis starts.

Referencing

For in-document referencing of figures, sections, equations etc. The cleveref package has been loaded with all common names predefined in the sty file.

The cleveref package is used as it allows for automatically producing a label name and number. Unlike the standard \ref package which only produces the number. The package automatically identifies what object one is referencing and chooses the label accordingly. It is used in the sty file as follows,

cleveref is used though the \cref or \Cref command. Lower case \cref will generate a lower case label and an upper case \Cref will generate a capitalised label.

Examples of cleveref

Figure referencing:

Produces the output: Reference lowercase figure: figure 1.1. Reference uppercase figure: Figure 1.1

Reference Range of items:

Produces the output: Range example: equations (1.1) to (1.4)

Mixed References:

Produces the output: Mixed references example:equations (1.1), (1.3) and (1.4) and figure 1.1.

Bibliography

The Cranfield thesis template recommends either author-year style, with citations placed in (parentheses) or numeric references with citations placed in [parentheses].

In your preamble add the following,

Where style= refers to the in-text appearance of the citation and citestyle= is the bibligraphy citation.

Here, BibTexCollection.bib is your BibTeX collection of references. Mendeley exports this directly.

In your main text add the following where you would like your bibliography:

If you wish for your bibliography heading to be visible in the Table of Contents add the following to the printbibliography line:

For users who wish to organise the output files produced from running pdflatex , the bibtex backend used when setting up biblatex will no longer work. Instead we can user biber for the backend, Simply amend the \usepackage{} function for biblatex . All useage of biblatex remains the same:

If you wish to remove URL, doi and ISBN components from your citation apperance within the typset bibliography, use the following respectively within the \usepackage[...]{biblatex} command:

This technique can be expanded for all standard .bib database files that biblatex uses.

Citation Command Examples

Cheat sheet of cite commands for biblatex is avaliable here . ( Link to Source )

If numeric style is desired, change \parencite to \cite .

Single citation in parantheses:

Multiple citations:

Simple combined citations:

No authors displayed, just year citation:

Footnote citation:

Further exmaples can be found using in the biblatex documentation

Appendicies traditionally change the numeration of the chapter headings contained within the appenix to be latin characters (A,B,C,...) instead of numbers (1,2,3,...).

This can be done with the command \appendix . Place the command before you want to start your first Appendix chapter. In the case of Cranfield thesis guidlines, this usually this comes after you have printed your bibliography.

Font Selection

• Three font families can be used within the template: Roman, Sans Serif and Mono.
• Cranfield's offical template supports the use of Sans Serif (Arial style fonts).
• Use one of the following commands in your preamble to select your font:

Page Numbering

This is undefined in the Cranfield thesis template, but a nice addition which can be enabled in the LaTeX template is the usage of Roman numerals for page numbering of all pages before the main body of text. Therefore, the main body of text starts count from 1 .

To enable Roman numeral page numbering simply use the following line of code after the \maketitlepages command.

To switch back to Arabic numbering, use following after your first chapter has been defined.

This code was taken from the example.tex file within this repo.

• Quotation marks can be defined in two ways. The latex default: ``hello'' , and "hello" from csquotes.

Users are welcome to post issues/suggestions/comments on this repoistories Issues page. Pull requests are also welcome.

Thanks to all who have been involved in putting this template together, especially Akhil who has helped substantially in testing and organising the features this template required.