How Should I Structure My Skripsi/Thesis?

How Should I Structure My Skripsi/Thesis?

Written by Adrian Wallwork in English for Writing Research Papers. 2011. New York. Springer.


To write a well-structured paper in good clear English you need to have a method.If you don’t have a good method you may waste a lot of time having to re-plan and re-write entire sections of your paper. Your answers for the following questions will decide the well-structured of your skripsi/thesis.

I. Title
Think about the following questions:
a. What have I found that will attract attention?
b. What is new, different and interesting about my findings?
c. What are the 3–5 key words that highlight what makes my research and my findings unique?

On the basis of your answers you should be able to formulate a title.

2. Abstract
An Abstract generally answers at least the first three of the following questions, and generally in the following order. You can use the answers to these questions to structure your Abstract.
a. Why did I carry out this project? Why am I writing this paper?
b. What did I do, and how?
c. What were my results? What was new compared to previous research?
d. What are the implications of my findings? What are my conclusions and/or recommendations?

However chemists, physicists, biologists etc. who are presenting some new instrumentation may want to focus not on what they found, but on what the benefits of their apparatus are and how well it performs.

To decide what to include it may help you to go through your paper and highlight what you consider to be the most important points in each section. The order in which you answer the questions above can make a very different impression on readers. 

3.Introduction
An Introduction generally answers the following questions. You can use the answers to these questions to structure your Introduction.
a. What is the problem?
b. Are there any existing solutions (i.e. in the literature)?
c. Which solution is the best?
d. What is its main limitation? (i.e. What gap am I hoping to fill?)
e. What do I hope to achieve?
f. Have I achieved what I set out to do?

4.Review of the Literature
A Literature Review generally answers the following questions, and generally in the following order. You can use the answers to these questions to structure your Literature Review.
a. What are the seminal works on my topic? Do I need to mention these?
b. What progress has been made since these seminal works?
c. What are the most relevant recent works? What is the best order to mention these works?
d. What are the achievements and limitations of these recent works?
e. What gap do these limitations reveal?
f. How does my work intend to fill this gap?

5.Methods
The Methods section should answer most of the following questions, obviously depending on your discipline:
a What / Who did I study? What hypotheses was I testing?
b Where did I carry out this study and what characteristics did this location have?
c. How did I design my experiment / sampling and what assumptions did I make?
d. What variable was I measuring and why?
e. How did I handle / house / treat my materials / subjects? What kind of care / precautions
were taken?
f. What equipment did I use (plus modifications) and where did this equipment come from (vendor source)?
g. What protocol did I use for collecting my data?
h. How did I analyze the data? Statistical procedures? Mathematical equations? Software?
i. What probability did I use to decide significance?
j. What references to the literature could I give to save me having to describe something in
detail?
k. What difficulties did I encounter?
l. How does my methodology compare with previously reported methods, and what significant advances does it make?

You should provide enough quantitative information (concentration, temperature,weight, size, length, time, duration etc.) so that other researchers can replicate what you did. Describe everything in a logical order to enable readers to easily follow what you did. This will usually be chronological. It may also help the reader if you use subheadings to explain the various stages of the procedure, which you can then
use again (perhaps with modifications) in the Results.

Your experiments, sampling procedures, selection criteria etc. may have more than one step. It helps your readers if your description of each step follows the same logical order.
Ensure that you cover every step required. Because you are very familiar with your method, you may leave out key information either thinking that it is implicit (and thus not worth mentioning) or simply because you forget.

6.Results
The Results should answer the following questions.
a. What did I find?
b. What did I not find?
c. What did I find that I was not expecting to find? (e.g. that contradicts my hypotheses)

A typical structure is to follow the order you used for the protocols or procedures in your Methods. You then use figures and tables to sequence the answers to the above questions.

7.Discussion
The Discussion should answer the following questions, and possibly in the following order. You can thus use the answers to structure your Discussion. This gives you a relatively easy template to follow.
a. Do my data support what I set out to demonstrate at the beginning of the paper?
b. How do my findings compare with what others have found? How consistent are they?
c. What is my personal interpretation of my findings?
d. What other possible interpretations are there?
e. What are the limitations of my study? What other factors could have influenced my findings?
Have I reported everything that could make my findings invalid?
f. Do any of the interpretations reveal a possible flaw (i.e. defect, error) in my experiment?
g. Do my interpretations contribute some new understanding of the problem that I have investigated? In which case do they suggest a shortcoming in, or an advance on, the work of others?
h. What external validity do my findings have? How could my findings be generalized to other areas?
i. What possible implications or applications do my findings have? What support can I give for such implications?
j. What further research would be needed to explain the issues raised by my findings? Will I do this research myself or do I want to throw it open to the community?

Whatever your discipline you will need to answer all the questions above, with the possible exception of question 8 (your findings may only be very preliminary). Whether you answer questions 8–10 will depend on whether you have a separate Conclusions section, if so, the Conclusions may be a more appropriate place.

8. Conclusions
The Conclusions section is not just a summary. Don’t merely repeat what you said in the Abstract and Introduction. It is generally not more than one or two paragraphs long. A Conclusions section typically incorporates one or more of the following:
a. a very brief revisit of the most important findings pointing out how these advance your field from the present state of knowledge
b. a final judgment on the importance and significance those findings in term of their implications and impact, along with possible applications to other areas
c. an indication of the limitations of your study (though the Discussion may be a more appropriate place to do this)
d. suggestions for improvements (perhaps in relation to the limitations)
e. recommendations for future work (either for the author, and/or the community)
f. recommendations for policy changes

The order these items appear is likely to be the same as suggested above.