Research paper
A good abstract has the following qualities:
- uses one or more well developed paragraphs: these are unified coherent, concise,
- uses an introduction/body/conclusion structure which presents the purpose, results, conclusions, and recommendations,
- follows the chronology of the thesis,
- provides logical connections between the information included.
Suggested structure for research based abstracts:
Motivation: Why do we care?
Problem statement: What problem are you trying to solve? What is the scope of your work (a generalized approach, or for a specific situation)?
Approach: How did you go about solving or making progress on the problem? Did you use simulation, analytic models, prototype construction, or analysis of field data for an actual product? What was the extent of your work?
Results: What’s the answer/findings/results? Try to be as specific as possible and avoid vague interpretations.
Conclusions: What are the implications of your answer? Is it going to change the world (unlikely), be a significant “win”, be a nice hack, or simply serve as a road sign indicating that this path is a waste of time (all of the previous results are useful). Are your results general, potentially generalizable, or specific to a particular case?
Keywords
The author describes the contents of the Diploma’s thesis with keywords that make the work easy for readers to find. Keyword should present both the recommended forms of the words and parallel and synonymous expressions. Try using such keywords that make the topic more specific when read together with headline. (3 – 6 keywords)
Introduction (1st Chapter)
Includes an analysis of recent developments in the field of the chosen topic and reasons for choosing the topic. A Diploma thesis should show how a given student has the ability to apply theoretical knowledge gained during their studies and therefore the goal of the thesis should have specific applications in practice. The goal relates directly to the topic of the Diploma thesis. The idea of a Diploma thesis is not to describe things which are obvious and trivial but to clarify the relationship between phenomena, explain them on the basis of various theories and methods and to comment on them on the basis of one’s own knowledge and experience.
Literature Review (Chapter 2)
Chapter 2 typically presents a synthesis and critical analysis of research, theory, and literature relevant to your research problem. The purpose of the “literature review” is to set the context of your study: Discover what your topic means to others and to yourself, what the forces behind your topic are, why they impact your topic the way they do, and how your topic fits into the larger landscape of theories and ideas relevant to your topic. While it is expected that your review will be a comprehensive representation of your understanding of the state of the problem, you should be certain that all of the literature you review clearly relates to the research problem you are examining. The literature review should build in a logically organized way so that your readers understand all perspectives of the problem, its history, current status, and importance. It is the fundament on which you build your own research.
Methods (Chapter 3)
Chapter 3 typically describes in detail how the study will be conducted, how evidence will be collected, recorded, analysed, organized, and how meaning will be interpreted. These methods are the tools you used to answer the questions you set out in Chapter 1. The details you provide here will display your knowledge of qualitative, quantitative, and mixed methods and research design. This includes discussion of the rationale and utility of the investigative tools you chose to use, such as surveys, unstructured or structured interviews, statistical analyses, etc. It also includes discussion of your research design components: why was this site and/or this specific population selected, why were participants included or not in data analysis, what kind of controls did you impose on the setting of your study? How did you organize your data and interpret meaning from it? This chapter also sets forth the way that you will present the data in Chapter 4.
