Thesis Preparation

1. The thesis should be prepared using a word processing system that produces portable Postscript output. One option is to use LaTeX on the Departmental Unix systems. A 12 point font with 1.5 line spacing is recommended.
2. Essential footnotes are normally placed at the foot of the page to which they refer. Footnotes should be used sparingly.
3. See References for details on the bibliography.
4. Margins must be at least: Spine: 40 mm; Top, bottom and fore-edges: 25mm.
5. Number pages consecutively, including pages displaying diagrams, photographs, maps, etc.
6. Photographs must be mounted with dry mounting tissue or spray adhesive, and, where possible, copied photographically as a whole page and included in the thesis in the normal manner.
7. The thesis should normally not exceed 80 pages, excluding appendices and bibliography. References must be referred to in the text, and listed in the bibliography following a standard and consistent format.
8. The title page must include the following details:
   • Your surname and full given names and degrees/or professional qualifications already held.
   • Full title of thesis.
   • An appropriate declaration selected from the following:

     Dissertation submitted by in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the Degree of Bachelor of Science with Honours in the School of Information Technology at James Cook University.

     or

     Dissertation submitted by in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the Degree of Bachelor of Information Technology with Honours in the Department of Computer Science at James Cook University.

      

   • Submission date (day, month and year).
9. The thesis must be preceded by a signed statement on sources (see next item) on a separate page, and a short abstract not exceeding 500 words on another separate page. The abstract is normally followed by acknowledgements, a table of contents, a list of figures, a list of tables, the main text, appendices and bibliography, in that order.
10. The statement of sources should contain the following wording:

    Declaration

    I declare that this thesis is my own work and has not been submitted in any form for another degree or diploma at any university or other institute of tertiary education. Information derived from the published and unpublished work of others has been acknowledged in the text and a list of references is given.

    (Your Name)
    Date (day, month and year)

11. The main text of the thesis should contain:
    1. A clear description of the problem you have tackled,
    2. A description of how your project is related to others' existing work,
    3. The approach you have taken to solve the problem, and
    4. The results and conclusions you have obtained and suggestions for future work.
12. Appendices are not intended as a means to `pad-out' a sparse thesis with peripheral material, or to circumvent the page limit in an `obese' thesis. They may serve as a repository for useful products of the research (e.g., program code or data) which are not an integral part of the main text of the thesis. Where the raw data of a thesis cannot be extracted directly from the test figures and tables, it is essential that they be tabulated in an appendix. In short, appendices preserve valuable information which might otherwise be lost, but the thesis should be able to stand without them.