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Thesis Template

A LaTeX template and some utilities for your Bachelor/Master thesis. The template is specialized for Cognitive Science at Osnabrück University, but could easily be adapted.

Usage

Click Use this template on the upper right and create your own working copy of the repository. Clone and work with your own repository instead of this one. Finally, give your supervisor access to the newly created repository under Settings > Collaborators.

Installation

To use this template you first of all need to install Visual Studio Code.

Using Devcontainer

If you have docker on your machine, you can easily write your thesis inside a container that has all the necessary software already installed. Install the Remove Development Extension for VSCode. Then type F1 > Remote-Containers: Reopen in Container. A new instance of VSCode should open. Open thesis.txt and press Ctrl + Alt + b to build the latex document.

Using Native Installation

First you will need to install LaTeX. Assuming that your machine is running an Ubuntu based distro run in your terminal

sudo apt install texlive-full biber

If you are on a different distro or operating system you will need to install LaTeX in a different way.

Install the following extensions into VSCode to enable processing of LaTeX documents and spell checking

James-Yu.latex-workshop
tecosaur.latex-utilities
streetsidesoftware.code-spell-checker

General Guidelines

  • Use American English. Cognitive Science is a discipline originating from the States. Also most research papers are written in American English.
  • Use Latex and to make your life easier this template.
  • Write one sentence per line in your editor. While synctex is able to establish correspondence between the .tex document and the compiled PDF, it can only to so on the level of lines. If you rely on word wrapping in your editor and write entire paragraphs in a single line, you make the process of going from errors found in PDF back to the source unnecessarily hard. Writing only a single sentence per line also makes diffs more readable.
  • Avoid errors early. Spellcheck your writing and put references where they belong.
  • Keep your glossary up to date. Whenever you use and acronym add it to the acronyms.txt file.
  • Use a citation manager. See Managing Literature for more information.
  • Use booktabs style for your tables. Tables can be conveniently generated using Tables Generator. The style should then be set to Booktabs table style.
  • Get familiar with VSCode. https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode-tips-and-tricks is a good starting point.
  • Use git and GitHub to manage your versions. Since .tex files are just text documents you can easily use git to manage your version and even sync them back to GitHub to back them up.

Managing Literature

A citation manager is key to keep your literature references and citations manageable. I personally prefer Mendeley. If you have experience with it and want to stay open source you can also use Zotero.

Mendeley

Mendeley has a desktop app, but also a mobile app, which is very useful if you want to read papers on mobile device.

Importing Literature

Use the Mendeley Web Importer to add papers to your library. Once added you need to review the bibliographic metadata in the desktop app.

Reading papers

When reading a paper you should at least summarize it in three to four key points in the notes section. Moreover, you should highlight important sections in the paper itself. You can use color coding to signify different purposes:

  • yellow: important points
  • red: terms you don't understand
  • pink: references you want to add to your collection
  • grey: references you wanted and have added your collection

Contributing

Did you find any other resources, practices, instructions, LaTeX macros or VSCode extensions that you found helpful for writing a thesis? Feel free to add them and make a pull request.