4.1 – Title page

The following information should be included:

• Title of thesis
• Name of the student
• Type of work (Bachelor or Master Thesis)
• Time of project (Spring Semester/Autumn Semester, year)
• Name of the supervisor
• Institute name and professorship/laboratory, in which the work was carried out
• Number in the publication series of the hosting laboratory, if applicable.
• Introduction

4.2 – Task description

A task description (Aufgabenstellung) is provided by the supervisor before the start of the work. This project description has to be incorporated into the thesis.

4.3 – Declaration of Originality

Students have to follow the Citation Etiquette, and the signed Declaration of Originality (Eigenständigkeitserklärung) has to be incorporated into the thesis before the table of contents. Information and a template for this is available on the student portal (https://ethz.ch/studierende/de/studium/leistungskontrollen/plagiate.html).

4.4 – Table of contents

• Structure of the thesis (usually 2-3 levels).

4.5 – Abstract

• Brief overview of the subject (research question, methods, results, discussion)
• About 250 words, no citations

4.6 – List of abbreviations

If the thesis contains a significant number of non-standard abbreviations, these should all be listed under this section.

4.7 – Introduction

• Scientific background and relevance of the subject
• Focused review of the relevant literature
• Research gaps, divergent points of view
• Research question, aim(s) of the project, and precise hypothesis if applicable

Recommended tense: present (current knowledge), perfect (reference to research areas), past (reference to single studies).

4.8 – Materials and Methods

• Subjects, selection criteria, ethical approval
• Design of experiments
• Methods
• Equipment and instruments
• Data analysis and statistics

The methods section has to be written in such a way that the reader could replicate the experiments without any further information.

Recommended tense: past, passive form.

4.9 – Results

• Neutral presentation of the results in the order of their importance
• Presentation in text, table or diagram/illustration (with reference in the text)
• Statistical analysis (at least of the hypotheses)

Each result is presented only once, either in the text or in a figure or table. For each figure or table, there has to be a reference in the text.

Recommended tense: past.

4.10 – Discussion

• Precise answer to the research question, overview of main results
• Interpretation of own results (only of those which were presented in the result section!)
• Discussion/comparison of the results in the context of existing knowledge
• Possible weak points of the analyses and the data obtained should be acknowledged and discussed critically
• If there is no further elaboration to be made concerning discussion of a particular result, then it is not necessary to repeat it from the results section.

4.11 – Conclusions and Outlook

• Conclusions of the main findings summarised
• This section should only contain information, which has been discussed earlier, no new information should be introduced
• Conclusions generally do not contain literature references
• It is possible to lay also an outlook based on the findings (new research questions and future directions, which would bring the topic further)

If there are many results, they can be discussed in a combined chapter “Results and Discussion”, where each result is immediately discussed. At the end, a comprehensive discussion needs to be written in a separate subchapter, which does not repeat the discussion elements.

Recommended tense: present (interpretation), other tenses if applicable.

4.12 – References

All the references and information sources should be referenced in this section. The style of the presentation of in text references and bibliography is not fixed: one may, for example, select a  style from for a high quality journal of the field (See section 5.5). Important is to make sure that the style is used systematically, and that the information provided is complete. Reference lists generated automatically using reference management or word processing programs should be checked for completeness, as importing references often lead to discrepancies in capitalizations, abbreviations or journal names etc.

4.13 – Acknowledgements

This part is optional, but common practice, since a study can hardly be conducted without the help of other persons. Their support should be acknowledged.

4.14 – Appendix

This part is optional. Depending on the study, an appendix can show additional details from the methods (e.g. information sheet, questionnaire, important data outputs etc.) or from the results. All appendices should have an appropriate title, which explains the contents. The thesis must be understandable without reading the appendices. You should also consider, which information may be most necessary for the reader.