DISSERTATION GUIDELINES FOR STUDENTS

Transcription

1 DISSERTATION GUIDELINES FOR STUDENTS Index: A. Guidelines for Mundus Dissertation Report Choosing and registering a subject Dissertation Report: Conception and Pattern of Work Layout and Presentation...4 B. Dissertation Progress...5 C. Guidelines for Mundus Final Dissertation Submission and Assessment Requirements on submission General Presentation Supervision Structure Writing Style Quotations Acknowledgment and Academic Fraud Footnotes or Endnotes and References Books 9.2 Articles in periodicals 9.3 Articles in edited collections 9.4 Classical literary works 9.5 Manuscript sources 9.6 Illustrations 9.7 Use of material from the Internet 10. Checking your work

2 A. Guidelines for Mundus Dissertation Report The Semester 2 Dissertation Report is an extended scholarly essay of approximately 5,000 words (5 ECTS) or 10,000 words (10 ECTS, if no internship), reviewing the critical material available and outlining a first approach to the research topic to be addressed in the Masters Dissertation. Its topic must normally be agreed by March 20 th in the Home Institution. The Semester 2 Dissertation Report will be submitted by the 20 th June to the supervisor of University B, and will be assessed by your main supervisor ( Home University ). 1 Choosing and registering a subject 1.1 The student discusses the project with tutor(s) and/or potential supervisor(s) during semester 2. You should have a fair notion of what you mean to do by March, using the core modules to test your vocation and/or the potential of a promising area of study. All course tutors and members of staff will be prepared to assist you, providing you make clear requests with due warning. 1.2 You need to give precise thought during the first semester to what will interest and inspire you. While you are free to draw on interests pursued during your first degree in your own country, try to think forwards and not simply backwards; avoid subjects which retreat towards local concerns or will be likely to cut you off from the thought and preoccupations of your current programme. What would be profitable to help you move towards a PhD or a career? Where will you find the most opportunities for drawing on stimulating support supervision? 1.3 You MUST, before the 20 th March, write a 100-word description of the agreed project on the form provided and submit it for approval to your (provisional) supervisor and the local dissertation co-ordinator, who will liaise with his opposite number in University C with a view to finding you an appropriate support supervisor in that institution. Only then are you free to pursue your mobility track. 2

3 2 Dissertation Report: Conception and Pattern of Work 2.1 During Semester 2 spent at University B of the mobility track, the student collects the necessary data and performs the following specified operations towards the preparation of the Semester 4 (20 ECTS) Dissertation: (i) determination and evaluation of a corpus of primary material, together with a first effort of analysis designed to explore and demonstrate the potential of the subject ; (ii) bibliographical survey of secondary sources, analysing and evaluating all critical material to be used; (iii) definition of perspectives of approach and methodology to be followed by the 20 ECTS Dissertation; (iv) delimitation of the subject and determination of title, together with a proposed plan this latter being the recapitulative symbol of your work to date and the agenda for your work to come. You may, optionally, submit one specimen chapter, which you will be allowed to carry forward to the 20 ECTS dissertation. This first-stage labor is thus in the nature of a Dissertation Report, using the headings or sections detailed above. The Dissertation Report should be written up in an agreed format, complete with bibliography and other required attestations to gain the 5 or 10 ECTS credits. 2.2 Students should take care to spread their work fairly evenly across the semester. Assuming a 36-hour working week, you should devote roughly 6 hours per week to your dissertation. However, you should also be careful not to allow your Dissertation project to squeeze out work for other modules. 2.3 You may expect four hours, but not more than five, of attention from your principal supervisor (normally located University B). Remember: your supervisor has many other concerns besides your work; you will get far more from her/him if you take care to submit well-prepared work, with due warning, and a precise agenda, in advance of any agreed meeting or set exchange Supervisor will see specific aspects or sections of the Dissertation Report during its preparation by the student, but will not normally see drafts of the whole Report before its final submission. 2.4 The submission deadline is the 20 th June (or as otherwise specified in each institution). Only in very exceptional circumstances may an extension of one month be granted by the Consortium's Dissertations Co-ordinator in St Andrews, after consultation with the supervisor. 3

4 2.5 Your work will be assessed by your main supervisor. 3 - Layout and Presentation 3.1 Candidates must submit ONE bound copy of their dissertation report, and send one electronic copy to the dissertations co-ordinator at St Andrews The Dissertation Report should be in one of the languages of the Consortium as agreed with the supervisor(s), word-processed in 1.5 or double line spacing on one side only of A4 paper. The left-hand margin should be at least 30mm. 3.3 Dissertation Reports should be bound. On the cover should appear the name of the author, the name of the supervisor, the title of the Dissertation Report and the year and place of presentation. 3.4 Within the covers the various elements of the Dissertation Report should appear in the following order: title page; table of contents; the text of the dissertation report divided into chapters; the bibliography. 3.5 Quotations for Dissertation Reports. Conventions differ from language to language. Make sure you adopt those prevailing in the language you have chosen to write in. 3.6 Students should follow the practice of scrupulously referencing their sources by author, date and page. References are not meant to be either decorative or impressive. In academic writing they are absolutely necessary for several reasons: (a) to enable the reader to consult the original either to judge its aptness, or to see whether you have quoted fairly and accurately, or to follow up his/her own particular interest; (b) to acknowledge the source of existing ideas on the topic, which you wish to endorse, extend, modify or refute; (c) to avoid any suspicion of plagiarism. You should carefully read the chapter on Academic Misconduct in the Student Handbook! For the conventions governing the presentation of footnotes and the bibliography candidates should follow the conventions prevailing in the language they have chosen to write in. Those writing in English should follow the MHRA style book: notes for 4

5 authors, editors, and writers of theses. 4th ed., 1991, which may be consulted online. B. Dissertation Progress Over the course of the third semester, you will be required to make regular appointments with your dissertation supervisor, and provide him or her with proof that your final dissertation is progressing. Failure to meet this requirement will jeopardize the award of 10 ECTS for the 3 rd semester dissertation module. N.B. Although no grade will be given for this module, you must still obtain the corresponding 10 ECTS in order to be able to submit your final dissertation in the 4 th semester. C. Guidelines for Mundus Final Dissertation The Mundus Masters Dissertation is a substantial piece of scholarly research of approximately 20,000 words, which will normally follow on from the Semester 2 Dissertation Report. The broad topic will be decided in agreement with academic staff and will normally be approved by the Head of Programme in the Home Institution before the end of the second semester of study. The topic will be refined if necessary and approved definitively by the latter in concertation with the named supervisor as soon as possible following successful completion of the Semester 2 Dissertation Report. Students will be supervised by two supervisors (a principal supervisor and a cosupervisor), one in their Home institution and one the University where the Dissertation is written. Both supervisors will be competent to supervise the subject area selected. The principal supervisor will be fluent in the language in which the dissertation is to be written. You must be in regular contact with your supervisors until the dissertation is submitted. 5

6 1 - Submission and Assessment 1.1 The Mundus Masters Final Dissertation will be assessed by the Main Supervisor (semesters 2 and 3) and the S4 supervisor. In case of disagreement, the dissertations co-ordinator at St Andrews will be called upon to adjudicate. 1.2 The deadline for the submission of the Mundus Masters Final Dissertation is the 20 th June. Only in very exceptional circumstances may an extension of one month be granted by the Consortium's Dissertations Co-ordinator in St Andrews, after consultation with both supervisors. 1.3 The Mundus Masters Dissertation will in addition normally be the subject of a short oral presentation and discussion, involving two members of academic staff from the Semester 4 institution, to take place not more than 3 weeks after the deadline for submission of the Dissertation. This element will not be assessed separately from the written Dissertation and will not normally affect substantially the grade awarded, but is an opportunity for students to demonstrate that they have developed their ability to discuss a substantial piece of independent work. 1.4 All Dissertations should be submitted word-processed, in one of the languages of the consortium, as agreed with the supervisors. The number of copies required for the 20 ECTS Dissertation will be determined by the institution in which the dissertation is submitted. You must send an electronic copy to the Dissertations Co-ordinator in St Andrews. 2 - Requirements on submission 2.1 The 20,000 word length includes text, notes and appendices, but excludes the bibliography. 2.2 The dissertation should be in one of the languages of the Consortium, wordprocessed in 1.5 or double line spacing on one side only of A4 paper. The left-hand margin should be at least 30mm. 2.3 Dissertations should be bound. On the cover should appear the name of the author, the names of the supervisors, the title of the Dissertation Report and the year and place of presentation. 2.4 A declaration should be included as follows: 6

7 I,...(your name)..., hereby certify that this dissertation, which is... words in length, has been written by me, that it is a record of work carried out by me, and that it has not been submitted in any previous application for a higher degree. All sentences or passages quoted in this dissertation from other people's work (with or without trivial changes) have been placed within quotation marks, and specifically acknowledged by reference to author, work and page. I understand that plagiarism the unacknowledged use of such passages will be considered grounds for failure in this dissertation and, if serious, in the degree programme as a whole. I also affirm that, with the exception of the specific acknowledgements, these answers are entirely my own work." Signature of candidate A Contents page should list chapters or sections and give page numbers (see any good book for an example). A synopsis of no more than 300 words should give a summary of the subject and argument of the dissertation. 3 - General Presentation Make sure you understand the ground rules at the beginning, and establish the conventions you will be using for footnotes or endnotes and bibliography, to save time making alterations at a later stage. Allow plenty of time for final corrections and improvements. It is easier to be self-critical if you have the time to take a break from the material for a few weeks, and come back to it fresh. This helps you to read it as others will. Alternatively, let a sympathetic (but honest) fellow student read and comment upon it, in addition to your supervisor. Always remember that the purpose of both your text and any illustrations is to convey your argument accurately and convincingly. Clarity of expression is the keynote, especially if the concepts under consideration are difficult and the evidence complex. Clear, objective and direct writing has to be worked at patiently and demands considerable understanding, powers of logic and skills of expression. 4 - Supervision 7

8 Supervisors and students should ensure that a series of meetings is phased over the semester 4 period. Students should be provided with at least one supervision meeting/exchange a month, with adjustments agreed with the student to accommodate a supervisor s holiday periods. No extension will be given to cover delays arising from commitments outside the University during the summer period. Students are encouraged to keep a log of supervisory meetings/ exchanges, recording dates and times and summarizing what was discussed. 5 - Structure You need to think carefully about the structure of your dissertation so that the reader can see your argument clearly. A good general rule is that you should introduce your topic at the beginning (in an Introduction, or in Chap. 1), describe and analyse your research material in the middle, and provide a Conclusion or final chapter which brings together your argument. Each chapter, too, should have its problematised introduction, signposted and methodic progress through the material analysed or discussed, and its concluding statement of progress achieved in the framework of the overall argument of the Dissertation. 6 - Writing Style The basic purpose of academic writing is to present arguments clearly and persuasively. This is crucial and must always be borne in mind. Establish your personal house style and stick to it. Consistency is extremely important. The conventions you are following should be indicated at the beginning of your thesis. Whereas an essay should be written as a continuous text, a dissertation must be divided into chapters, and the use of sub-headings may be helpful in certain circumstances. Bullet points, however, and other such devices designed for writing reports, should not normally be used in academic writing. Similarly you should not use bold type or italics for emphasis, and should avoid the use of exclamation marks or slang. Italics would generally be employed, however, for individual foreign words or phrases used in the text of your thesis (e.g. bas-de-page, sinopia, 8

9 Gesamtkunstwerk) - e.g. Arnolfo di Cambio was capomaestro at the cathedral of Florence around Aim for precision and conciseness in your writing. The first person should normally be avoided in any thesis as unnecessary, since if it is not your opinion you should not be expressing it. It may be appropriate in the Introduction, where your working method is being explained, but not otherwise. Varying sentence and paragraph lengths will make for a more readable text. Each paragraph should address a single point in your argument, and a new paragraph should begin when you move on to the next point. The recognition of where paragraph breaks should come is important. Finally, remember that correct grammar is not pedantic. It means no more, and no less, than writing in a precise and unambiguous manner. Plan the structure of your topic and progress logically through it, establishing and building upon arguments as you go along. 7 - Quotations Quotations, from original sources or from the work of other scholars, may be included in your text in order to make a point more effectively or succinctly than you can. But be sparing in the number of occasions on which you quote, and do so only where the quotation makes a point with particular effect. It will often be appropriate to analyse the material quoted, so that the justification for quoting is fully apparent. Quotations of four lines or fewer should be incorporated within the main text, using inverted commas. Quotations of more than four lines should be separated from the main text by being further indented, and usually single-spaced if the text is doublespaced. In this case, do not include quotation marks. If you choose to omit words from within the block of text that you are quoting, then the missing words should be represented by three dots, separated from the adjacent words by a space. You may also need to add one or more words in square brackets to make your new sentence grammatically correct. For example: If you choose to omit words... [they] should be represented by three dots. 9

10 The question of quotations in foreign languages can cause difficulties. Here there are no hard-and-fast rules. One established solution is to provide a direct translation or paraphrase in the text, with the foreign language quotation in a footnote or endnote. Once again, the key is consistency throughout the dissertation. Both in quotations from foreign languages and in citing books and articles in foreign languages, it is essential to include all accents and to follow any specific rules of capitalization in these languages. 8 - Acknowledgment and Academic Fraud Academic Fraud as defined by the Consortium means deliberate deception in an academic context. Plagiarism is the act of deliberately taking another s ideas and representing them as one s own. Where you wish to reproduce material you have read, you can either paraphrase it in your own words, or quote it directly (using quotation marks - see below). In either case, you must acknowledge your use of it by employing a footnote or endnote or other form of reference to indicate the source of the information. Failure to acknowledge someone else s words or ideas is plagiarism, whether this omission is accidental or deliberate. In order to be sure you are never guilty of plagiarism, even by accident, you need to be aware of the potential problem when you are taking notes, and make it clear to yourself where you have summarised material and where you have directly copied text. The laws of copyright, particularly where they concern illustrative and manuscript material, may be relevant to your dissertation. In every case you should ensure you have the permission to reproduce such material. Do not forget to acknowledge formally any help you have received from others, or any permission granted to make use of copyright material in your thesis. 9 - Footnotes or Endnotes and References The purpose of any referencing system is to support your argument by referring to relevant sources and secondary literature. The guiding principles are clarity and user-friendliness. You must aim always to provide sufficient information to allow the reader to find the original source accurately and quickly. Only cite sources 10

11 which you have actually consulted. Never cite references you have not actually consulted, unless you make this quite clear, for example: as cited in R. Muir Wright, Art and Antichrist in Medieval Europe, Manchester 1995, 57. Keep precise notes of all your references as you are doing your research, otherwise you will waste a great deal of time subsequently, tracking down missing citations or page numbers. One of the advantages of using a word processor is that you can build up a bibliography and/or insert your footnotes or endnotes as you go along. This is a valuable facility - use it. But you should note that you will have to be careful to keep track of where, in the finished thesis, you make first use of a work (see below). Footnotes or endnotes are the referencing system normally employed by literary critics and culture theorists. In addition to providing references to your sources or secondary literature, they also enable you to include supporting material or critical source analysis, or to add comments relevant to the subject but inappropriate to the flow of the text. Be careful not to use such asides to excess. Footnotes should normally be located at the bottom of the page of the text to which they refer, something which modern word-processing has made much easier, and not at the end of the chapter or dissertation. They should be numbered consecutively throughout the chapter. There are several different conventions governing the presentation of footnotes or endnotes: that given here is one of several possible conventions currently employed within the Consortium. The golden rule is that you should be consistent, using the same form of referencing in every chapter of your dissertation. In what follows, examples are given of the most common type of material you will need to cite. 9.1 Books On the first mention in each chapter, a book might be cited as follows: T. Normand, The Modern Scot: Modernism and Nationalism in Scottish Art , London 2000, Where there is a sub-title, as in this example, it is separated from the main title by a colon (:), or more rarely by a semi-colon (;). On second and subsequent occasions in 11

12 each chapter, this reference could be cited as: Normand, The Modern Scot, or alternatively as: Normand (as in n. 16), Book titles should be italicized (as above). Books which have been translated from their original language should include the name of the translator: J. Poeschke, Donatello and His World: Sculpture of the Italian Renaissance, trans. R. Stockman, New York 1993, 125. Books by more than one author are dealt with in exactly the same way: I. Carradice, J. Cribb and B. Cook, The Coin Atlas, London and Sydney And on subsequent occasions in the same chapter as: Carradice, Cribb and Cook, Coin Atlas, 142, or: Carradice, Cribb and Cook (as in n. 15), Articles in periodicals There are several ways in current use to cite articles in periodicals. Choose one you prefer and make sure you employ it consistently throughout your dissertation. The convention employed in the examples below is economical in key strokes and should be unambiguous to most people. The title of the article is placed within inverted commas; the title of the periodical is italicised (or underlined) exactly as for book titles, and is followed directly by its volume number, its year of publication and page numbers: G. Smith, Talbot and Botany: The Bertoloni Album, History of Photography 17, 1993, In subsequent mentions in any chapter; this would be abbreviated to: Smith, Talbot and Botany, 14; or, Smith (as in n. 29), 14. If a journal has been produced in several series, the series number should also be included: B. de Montgolfier, Charles Le Brun et les confréries parisiennes, Gazette des Beaux-Arts, 6th ser., 55, 1960, And if an article runs over two issues of a journal: R. Spencer, Whistler s Early Relations with Britain and the Significance of Industry and Commerce for his Art, Parts I and II, Burlington Magazine 136, 1994, ;

13 9.3 Articles in edited collections D. Walker, The Country Houses and Larger Villas of Sir John James Burnet, in A. J. Rowan and I. Gow (eds), Scottish Country Houses : Essays Presented to Catherine Holway Cruft, Edinburgh 1995, Subsequent mentions in a chapter: Walker, Country Houses, 300; or, Walker (as in n. 25), Classical literary works Standard texts should be cited by their accepted system of text division: Ovid, Metamorphoses, IV, 28; Dante, Inferno, XIII, Use the established spellings for books of the Bible, for which standard abbreviations may also be employed: II Chronicles 9: Manuscript sources Here it is conventional to give the name of the town and the archive where the manuscript is located (often identified by an abbreviation e.g. BL for British Library, ASP for Archivio di Stato di Pisa, BN for Bibliothèque Nationale), followed by the archival reference to the document and relevant folio numbers. If a letter in manuscript is being cited it is usual also to give the names of the sender and recipient, together with as precise a date as is known. Primary sources should be listed alphabetically by archive, and alphabetically or numerically within each archive. For example: London, British Library Add Ms. 235 Harley Ms. 452 Paris, Bibliotheque nationale Ms. fr. 289 Ms. lat Illustrations Illustrations should be carefully selected to elucidate the salient points of your argument. You may direct the reader s attention to relevant illustrations using the standard abbreviations (e.g. pl. 1, pls 2-4, or fig. 4, figs 6-7). Captioning is particularly important but again may take various forms. The kind of information 13

14 required very often depends on the type of object and the period in which it was made. Choose a convention that is current in your area of study. A general rule is to give enough information to make the image uniquely identifiable. Acknowledge and provide a source of the illustration and ensure you have permission from the copyright holder before you reproduce it. Copyright holders often charge (hefty) fees for permission to use their images in articles or books. They may or may not choose to waive their usual fees if you explain that the illustration will appear in an academic dissertation. 9.7 Use of material from the Internet If you do refer to a website in a footnote or bibliography, always remember that, as with any printed information, the point is to allow your reader to check it, if he or she wishes, and refer to it accordingly. Anything really ephemeral is of limited use, and should be avoided. And always remember that material on the internet, just like printed material, is the copyright of the author Checking your work This vital process will almost certainly take more time than you expect. A dissertation should go through several drafts, each improving both the tightness and flow of the argument and its presentation. The spell checker is an excellent tool and you should make use of it. But it cannot tell you, for example, whether a word makes sense in its context or deal with words in foreign languages; indeed it may render them incorrectly. If in doubt, consult a standard dictionary. 14