3  Writing

So, the time has come to write your thesis or report! How do you do this?

3.1 Introduction and Literature Review

Your introduction should follow this general outline1:

  1. What is the big-picture problem? (e.g., “Flooding is a major global problem.”)
  2. What is the specific problem we are interested in? (e.g., “We need better flooding models.”)
  3. What has been done already? (e.g., “The National Water Model and GEOGLOWS model flooding in these ways:”)
  4. What are the gaps in the science? (e.g., “The National Water Model under-predicts in snow-driven landscapes.”)
  5. What is our research plan? (e.g., “We will build and test a snow model to integrate into the National Water Model.”)

The first three bullets generally comprise the “literature review” of the paper. This is done by including ~15 important references to “back up” your assertions (Ames et al. 2012). Do not provide an annotated bibliography where you summarize the papers you cite; instead, you will make your assertions and use the references to give you credibility and validate your statements  (Gilbert 1977). Read the papers before citing them (Simkin and Roychowdhury 2002). Use the latest version of Zotero (www.zotero.org)  to add your citations. Finally, remember to cite several papers from the journal to which you are submitting this paper. Editors appreciate this because it improves their citation indices (Garfield 2006). Also, your reviewers are likely working in the same field and will appreciate their work being recognized. If you cannot find any relevant papers from the target journal, it is a good sign that you should submit to a different journal.

3.1.1 Citations

Use Zotero

3.2 Methodology

3.3 Results

3.4 Discussion and Limitations

3.5 Conclusion

  1. This is advice from Dan Ames↩︎