Advanced Topics

Academic Journal Policy

Many academic journals impose policies that disallow publication of works that have already been published. If you intend to publish your thesis or portion of your thesis in such a journal, you may wish to research its policy toward works that have been previously published. The University of Cincinnati maintains an Academy Journal Policy Database that may help you in researching this topic.

UNESCO ETD Student Guide

"The [UNESCO ETD STUDENT] Guide is an international, "living" document, written by ETD (electronic thesis and dissertation) scholars throughout the world (see About the Authors). The Guide will be updated regularly based on submissions by ETD authors and NDLTD members."

-from http://www.etdguide.org/

ETD Style Recommendations

It is the responsibility of your committee to judge your thesis or dissertation from all standpoints, including neatness, mechanics, and technical and professional competency. Therefore, continuing current practice, it is important that you provide them a copy of your ETD before your defense.

In the past, the printed thesis or dissertation was the public display of the quality of work acceptable to the student's department and to the graduate school for meeting graduate degree requirements. The ETD will assume the same role.

Formal Style

Each department should specify or develop an acceptable formal style or styles for ETDs prepared by its graduate students. Generally, the style should conform to the professional journals or style manuals in the student's area of study. The department may wish to specify a style directly, or the department may develop its own or suggest a journal whose style is acceptable. The student should learn the accepted style and how it applies to various word processors before preparing the ETD.

For additional reference, many books deal specifically with writing style. Among those with general applicability are:

A Manual for Writers of Term Papers, Theses, and Dissertations

Form & Style

The Elements of Style

Multimedia

Including complex multimedia objects in an ETD is a relatively new possibility. Those attempting this are pioneers. You are encouraged to work with those on your committee interested in incorporating these tools to gain their approval and assistance. Ultimately, they should check your final submission, including the multimedia portion. If this proves to be challenging, then you may want to think about saving your multimedia work into some other document (e.g., report, WWW site).

It is likely that complex multimedia objects will each reside in a different file, located in the same directory as the rest of your ETD. You may wish to add some icon or thumbnail or other small form of the complex multimedia object in the body of your ETD, and to have that linked to the complex multimedia object.

Archiving

Be careful to consider issues of long-term archiving.

Always include the highest resolution version of your object, not just a version suitable for today's devices, since technology may improve. You can include several versions, to help those with a variety of devices, particularly if the media itself is not scalable. For example, scan a slide at 2700 dpi, but have 640x480 and 320x240 versions as well.

If you can, include a version using a well-accepted international standard. Thus, for video, MPEG is encouraged.

If you use some proprietary software, include a viewer if it is allowed by the vendor. This will enable people to view your object without buying the software. You should also remember that in a few years this object may not be readily usable due to changes in versions and technology.

Acceptable File Formats

As an overall rule, UC and OhioLINK recommend file formats that are:

• Platform-independent
• Vendor-independent
• Non-proprietary
• Stable
• Widely Supported

For some kinds of formats, it is not yet possible to make specific recommendations, as "cutting edge" file types by definition have not yet established which competing formats will survive. In these cases, we ask you to exercise your own best judgment in meeting the criteria above.

Formatted Documents - OhioLINK only accepts Adobe Acrobat Portable Document Format (PDF). PDF captures formatting information from a variety of desktop publishing applications, making it possible to send formatted documents and have them appear on the recipient's monitor or printer as they were intended. To view a file in PDF format, you need Adobe Acrobat Reader, a free application distributed by Adobe Systems. more info...

For reasons of long-term accessibility and preservation, OhioLINK will not accept documents in proprietary word processing formats such as Microsoft Word or Corel WordPerfect.

Note that we discourage the use of HTML unless authors take considerable care in ensuring that their markup conforms to published standards and that their use of links and inline images can stand alone in the ETD Center i.e. no absolute links and no relative links to higher directories).

Images

Portable Network Graphics format (PNG) - PNG (Portable Network Graphics) is an extensible file format for the lossless, portable, well-compressed storage of raster images. PNG provides a patent-free replacement for GIF and can also replace many common uses of TIFF. Indexed-color, grayscale, and truecolor images are supported, plus an optional alpha channel. Sample depths range from 1 to 16 bits. more info...

Tag(ged) Image File Format (TIFF) - TIFF is primarily designed for raster data interchange. Its main strengths are a highly flexible and platform-independent format which is supported by numerous image processing applications. Since it was designed by developers of printers, scanners and monitors, it has a very rich space of information elements for colorimetry calibration, gamut tables, etc.. more info... 

Joint Photographic Experts Group (JPEG) - JPEG is designed for compressing either full-color or gray-scale images of natural, real-world scenes. It works well on photographs, naturalistic artwork, and similar material; however, it does not work as well on lettering, simple cartoons, or line drawings. JPEG handles only still images. A related standard called MPEG may be used for motion pictures. more info...

Sound

MPEG Layer 3 (MP3) - This is the file extension for MPEG, audio layer 3. Layer 3 uses perceptual audio coding and psychoacoustic compression to remove all superfluous information (more specifically, the redundant and irrelevant parts of a sound signal that the human ear doesn't hear anyway). The result in real terms is layer 3 shrinks the original sound data from a CD by a factor of 12 without sacrificing sound quality. more info...

Video

MPEG - This is the family of digital video compression standards and file formats developed by the Moving Picture Experts Group. MPEG generally produces better-quality video than competing formats, such as Video for Windows, Indeo and QuickTime.

Spreadsheets

Spreadsheets should be included only as comma-separated values or other delimited text.

For reasons of long-term accessibility and preservation, OhioLINK will not accept documents in proprietary spreadsheet formats such as Microsoft Excel.

Program Code

Program code should be included only as raw, uncompiled text code. If you compile your code, it can become machine and operating system dependent. Consider adding program code as text files (.txt) linked from your PDF file. This way, people who would like to run your code can compile it on their local computers directly from the source files.

Useful Books

Link to Useful Books