Thesis Templates

The thesis templates and usage guide are provided to help students write a thesis more easily by providing a template and set of instructions for using the features of Word and Zotero which are useful for writing large documents. It is our hope that it should be significantly easier to work on a template that is completed with many of the format requirements of the thesis than to start fresh.

Templates are provided for MS Word and for LaTeX.  Most students will use the Word templates. However, most students in Math and Computer Science will use the LaTeX templates. LaTeX has a significant degree of strength in writing documents with a significant amount of mathematics content and other content with very fine formatting requirements, and may be of interest to some other students with those needs. The Word template has been used with LibreOffice/OpenOffice; however, it does not do many of the automated tasks when used in LibreOffice/OpenOffice, but it does save time in that many initial formatting tasks and preliminary pages have already been done.

Note: although the templates are prepared with some care, not all requirements can be perfectly replicated in a template, and your department and supervisor(s) may have different requirements. Please make sure to consult your supervisor and the Research and Graduate Studies regulations about specific requirements.

If your discipline is listed in the table below, please use the templates and guide appropriate to the discipline. Otherwise, use the 'General' template.

Discipline Format Guide Honours Masters Zotero Citation and Reference Style
Psychology Word Download Guide Download TBD APA Style already comes with Zotero
Sociology Word Download Guide Download Download ASA Style (last updated: Sept 22, 2014)
General Word Download Guide Download Download Use a style specific to your discipline.  
The repository for Zotero styles can be found here.
General LaTeX

Honours Guide

Masters Guide

Download Download Normally, with LaTeX, you will use the BibTeX for your reference list and bibliography generation.  

If using Zotero to manage your references, you can save your references to a bibtex file (in the templates, this is thesisbib.bib) before building your pdf file.  MIT has produced a good guide on using Zotero with BibTeX/LaTeX.

 

Other related resources: