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Dissertations and research projects

General advice and resources to support you throughout your research-based dissertation or project.

This is a general resource to help you with the basics of organising and writing a research-based dissertation or project.  The Go further section at the end includes advice on work-based dissertations and signposts other resources.

You should consult your course or programme information, including online sources, and project supervisor or programme director for subject-specific guidance.

Dissertations and research projects are an opportunity to focus on particular question, and plan and undertake your own research to explore it further.  Many students really enjoy being an independent researcher and becoming the expert on their work.  The format varies depending on the disciplinary context, subject area, your research questions and the project.  You may be reviewing the literature, analysing a novel, developing and testing a new method or doing a work-based project.  However there are some common factors:

• They are an independent piece of work.  You will be working under supervision to some extent and may be collaborating with others, but ultimately you are submitting a piece of independent thought and writing.
• They tend to have a large word count.  This is to allow you to do sufficient in-depth analysis and discussion of the topic.
• They require a large investment of time, thought and energy throughout the process.  As a significant body of academic work, you need to maintain effort whilst reading, researching, thinking, writing and redrafting it.

Choosing your dissertation or project

Whether you are choosing your dissertation from a selection of topics or you are proposing your own, there are a range of factors to consider.  For example:

• What is the starting point for your work, i.e. previous or related research?
• How feasible is your project / proposal?
• Do you have enough time and resources to complete it?
• Will it be of an appropriate academic level?

A key questions to ask is “How interested am I in this topic?”  You will be working on your dissertation or project for some time, so having a genuine interest in the topic will help to keep you motivated.  If you have any questions specific to your topic or project, you should ask your supervisor, programme director or another member of staff who teaches you.

Planning your dissertation or research project

A research-based dissertation or project is a large piece of work requiring a high level of critical analysis.  To achieve this you will have to allow time, not just for the researching phase, but also for the writing and editing stages.  You will need to give yourself plenty of time to:

• Read around your topic and undertake background research;
• Digest and think about what you are learning and writing;
• Complete experiments, fieldwork, interviews or project placements;
• Analyse data, findings or results, and interpret them;
• Think about and decide on your conclusions.

Taking a project management approach to your dissertation or research project might be a more effective way to successfully complete it.  The Time management page has tips and tools for organising your time.

Time management webpage and tools

The dissertation and project planner can be used to think about the different stages and help give you an overall view of the process.  There are some general points and questions to act as prompts, spaces you can add your own notes in and some useful tips and resources.

Dissertation and project planner (pdf)                     Dissertation and project planner (rtf)

Writing your dissertation

You should not underestimate the time that should be allocated to writing your dissertation.  Writing will involve planning, background research, drafting, redrafting, and proof-reading and editing.

First draft : Your first draft is about getting words on the page.  For example, it may sketch out your first thoughts, arguments and potential structure.  You can review these and use them to check: are you focussed on the right topics and questions?  Is your structure and line of thought sensible?  This is also a good time to set up your format requirements (e.g. page layouts, references).

Redrafts : Redrafting is where you expand and refine your ideas and argument.  You may also find that as you are writing the direction of your argument changes; for example this could be due to your literature research producing new avenues of thought or your experiments turning up unexpected results.  This is a good time to review the focus of your initial question, and whether your arguments or conclusions are still sensible.

Final draft(s) : Your final draft(s) is where you cast a critical eye over your work and assess how effective it is in communicating your argument and conclusions - does it answer the question?  You should also check that your presentation, spelling and grammar are appropriate and polished, all your references are included, and your are following the appropriate format guidance.

It is a good idea to take a break between writing and reviewing your work.  Try to leave at least a day between writing before you pick it up again, the longer the better.  This allows you to look at your work with an analytical eye, looking for ways to improve.  Imagine you are reading your work as someone who is not so familiar with the topic: would a reader be able to follow and understand your argument?  Do your ideas link?  Have you signposted on from one section to the next?  Remember also to look back at your question/title, does your dissertation address it?  Does it follow a logical structure?

To check the flow of your argument or line of reasoning you can test pieces of your text using set criteria.  To help revise and restructure your text you can make a reverse outline.  Both of these techniques are available on our Editing and proofreading page.

Editing and proofreading

Producing a professional document

Information Services provide information and guidance about how to produce a thesis or dissertation using Microsoft Word.

Producing a thesis or dissertation using Microsoft Word (EASE log in required)

Thesis Hub: Producing your thesis or dissertation in Word

Choosing a reference manager

A referencing management tool can help you to collect and organise and your source material to produce a bibliography or reference list.

Referencing and reference management

Data Mindfulness

As part of your research you will produce and use research data in a variety of forms from quantitative and/or qualitative research.  This may be data you generate yourself or obtained from other researchers, data repositories or public records.  You need to make choices about what you use, handle your data correctly and document all of this process.

The University’s Research Data Service helps staff and students be effective with their research data before, during and after their project.   They have created an introductory handbook on Data Mindfulness for taught students writing a dissertation.  This handbook is accompanied by a set of short videos.  Together these cover topics including what data is, how to store it, file organisation and dealing with your data after your hand-in.  There is advice in the handbook on working with sensitive data and issues such as privacy, confidentiality and disclosure.

Data Mindfulness handbook

Data Mindfulness videos

Work-based dissertations

Many courses and programmes, particularly at Postgraduate level, offer the opportunity to carry out a work-based dissertation.  These opportunities vary between Schools and Programmes but will typically involve students tackling a research question identified by an organisation such as a business, a public sector organisation or a charity.  A work based dissertation project can be invaluable for your employability and for career development.

If you are interested in carrying out a work-based dissertation you may need to start planning earlier than you would for a more traditional academic dissertation.  If your Programme offers this opportunity, you will be given this information at the start of Semester 1.  If you would like to source and set up a dissertation project with an external organisation yourself, you will need to speak with your Programme Director or Course Organiser first.

You can draw on resources developed by the Making the Most of Masters project.

Making the Most of Masters

Work-based projects – advice for students

There are a variety of study guides available on dissertation and project writing.  Books aimed at postgraduate students can also be useful for undergraduates.  Our IAD Resource List has a selection available in University libraries.

Study Skills Guides

This article was published on 2024-02-26

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Edinburgh Research Archive

Digital repository of research produced at The University of Edinburgh. It presents a selection of research, including full-text digital theses and dissertations, book chapters, working papers, technical reports, journal pre-prints and peer-reviewed journal reprints.

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Edinburgh DataShare is a digital repository of research data produced at the University of Edinburgh, hosted by the Research Data Service in Information Services. Edinburgh University researchers who have produced research data associated with an existing or forthcoming publication, or which has potential use for other researchers, are invited to upload their dataset for sharing and safekeeping. A persistent identifier and suggested citation will be provided.

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SUBMITTING YOUR THESIS

All students producing theses/dissertations in the School of Informatics are asked to produce an electronic archive of their thesis. These theses are an extremely valuable resource for other researchers and for students doing projects in the future. The electronic archive enables them to make a stronger contribution, building on work that has gone before, and appropriately putting their work in context and acknowledging previous contributions.

The list of archived MSC theses can be viewed at http://www.informatics.ed.ac.uk/publications/thesis/msc.html.

For this reason, you are asked to also submit a PDF document electronically.

There may be some people who have good reasons why their theses cannot or should not be made part of an electronic archive. Those people should ensure that their supervisor knows the reasons and tick the appropriate box on the submission page. Nevertheless they must still submit the thesis electronically so that it is available in that form for the external examiners.

You are asked to make an submit of your thesis in pdf format as follows:

1. Create the PDF file

Most word processing packages have the option to save a file as pdf, so generating your thesis in pdf format should be straightforward. For example, if you are using LaTeX, on a DICE machine you can use pdflatex to convert your thesis directly from latex to pdf as follows:

This will produce a file <thesis>.pdf in the same directory.

Take care to ensure that all figures, tables and listings are correctly incorporated into the pdf file you plan to submit.

2. Submit the PDF

Use the online form to submit the PDF form of your thesis. You will need to specify the name of your PDF file on this web form.

This form requires you to nominate a "project directory" that contains appropriate supporting evidence for the project examiners, as well as to provide the location of a pdf file containing your project report. The project directory should contain sufficient additional material to allow the project examiners to come to a decision on matters such as: level of completion of the project, the quality of the project and the amount of work required to complete the project.

The marking guidelines and form used to grade projects are based entirely on the content of the report. The additional material will be used to assess the accuracy of claims in the report.

Projects often build on work previously carried out, in some cases re-using code and data from earlier projects. We would like your project materials to be available for further use in research, private study or education, if requested. However, if you decide that you do not want your project materials re-used, please tick the relevant box.

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This guide to Library and information resources for TESOL has been compiled by the Academic Support Librarian for Moray House School of Education & Sport.

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Some Key Databases for TESOL

• Linguistic & Language Behavior Abstracts (LLBA) Abstracts 2000 journals worldwide with coverage of books, papers. technical reports, dissertations, book reviews from 1973 onwards.
• MLA International Bibliography Citations to critical documents on literature, language, linguistics and folklore from over 4,400 journals and series and over 1000 book publishers. Also covers monographs, reference works and collections, including working papers, conference papers and proceedings.
• TESOL Encyclopedia of English Language Teaching Over 750 entries written by leading practitioners and scholars from around the world. The Encyclopedia is arranged thematically and entries are ordered A-Z within each of these themes.
• Education Source This database is a merger of databases from EBSCO and H.W. Wilson. It covers all levels of education - from early childhood to higher education - as well as all educational specialties, such as multilingual education, health education and testing.
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Moray House Library

Moray House Library holds an extensive collection of books and journals mainly on the subject of Education , with specialities including Language Education and Teaching English as a Second Language .

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Using Google Scholar to find scholarly literature

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Google Scholar provides a simple way to broadly search for scholarly literature. From one place, you can search across many disciplines and sources: articles, theses, books, abstracts and court opinions, from academic publishers, professional societies, online repositories, universities and other web sites. Like DiscoverEd, Google Scholar can be a good place to start your search but it does not allow for advanced or complex searching as in the databases.

Google Scholar may not provide access to full-text, however, by linking to the Library you can access full-text where there is a University subscription.

• Select  Settings from the top of the Google Scholar Home Page
• Select  Library Links
• Search for University of Edinburgh . Select it from the list and Save your settings

You will now see FindIt@Edinburgh links next to items in your Google Scholar results that you can use to access the full-text.

This short video below demonstrates how to do this.

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Resource Lists are online reading lists that can signpost you to key reading materials. Some of your courses may have a Resource List embedded in the Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) but you can also access them directly. Full details are available on the Resource Lists: Information for Students webpage.

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Environmental Science: Water Research & Technology

Fabrication of fe 3 o 4 based cellulose acetate mixed matrix membranes for as( iii ) removal from wastewater.

* Corresponding authors

a Department of Chemical Engineering, School of Chemical and Materials Engineering (SCME), National University of Sciences and Technology (NUST), Islamabad, Pakistan

b Institute of Materials and Processes. School of Engineering, The University of Edinburgh, Scotland, UK

Water poisoning due to arsenic is getting worse worldwide because of its serious health hazards and carcinogenic nature. A productive method is required to remove it from water to protect the environment and human life. In this direction, iron oxide (Fe 3 O 4 )/cellulose acetate (CA)-based mixed matrix membranes (MMMs) were fabricated by varying the concentration of Fe 3 O 4 nanoparticles from 0–2 wt% using the phase inversion method for efficient As( III ) removal. The impact of Fe 3 O 4 on the membranes' surface morphology and mechanical properties was analyzed through scanning electron microscopy (SEM) and ultimate tensile strength (UTS). Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR) and X-ray diffraction (XRD) were performed for chemical functionalities and phase structure analysis. Atomic Adsorption Spectrophotometry (AAS) is used to detect the As( III ) concentration in water samples. The As( III ) adsorption experiments were performed at different concentrations with varying time intervals, and the coefficient of determination and sum of square error function were used to conduct the analysis. The results were best fitted into the Langmuir isotherm model ( R 2 > 0.99) with a maximum adsorption capacity of 90.3 mg g −1 . The pseudo-second-order and Weber-Morris models were used to examine intra-particle diffusion as a rate-limiting step. According to membrane performance tests, the nanoparticles' addition increased the hydrophilicity and water flux, improving the membranes' permeability, wettability, and porosity. It was found that a 2 wt% loading of Fe 3 O 4 nanoparticles in the MMM achieved a maximum percentage As( III ) removal efficiency of 93%. This study shows that these membranes can efficiently remove As( III ) from contaminated water because of their adsorption and filtration properties.

Article information

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Fabrication of Fe 3 O 4 based cellulose acetate mixed matrix membranes for As( III ) removal from wastewater

S. Liaquat, S. Farrukh, N. Ahmad, S. S. Karim, E. Pervaiz, A. Sultan and S. Ali, Environ. Sci.: Water Res. Technol. , 2024, Advance Article , DOI: 10.1039/D4EW00080C

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