Thesis Howto-Guide Part 1for yourMasterthesis at the SRH Hochschule Heidelberg

What do i need for a thesis?Basics Also recommended How can i keep my citations in order?. To finish your thesis successfully you must produce: I A proper scientific document of over 80

Writing your thesis professionally with

BIBTEX

Thesis Howto-Guide Part 1

for yourMasterthesis at the SRH Hochschule Heidelberg

Benjamin Fritz

What do i need for a thesis?

What do i need for a thesis?

Basics

Also recommended

How can i keep my citations in order?

BIBTEX

To finish your thesis successfully you must produce:

I A proper scientific document of over 80 pages written

by you personally

I Correct citations of all literature used

I Professional layout for the entire document

This means

You will need

I A professional Editor for publishing formats

I A way to keep control over the increasing number of

literature sources online and offline that you are using inyour research

What do i need for a thesis?

Also recommended

I A good backup strategy Don’t lose all your files to

some freak disk-failure 5 days before deadline!

I get a library user account for the library of the UniversityHeidelberg for your research-phase

I Concentrate on just writing plaintext for most of thetime, so you have least possible distraction from writing.You can take care of layouting during the finishing-part orchoose an editor that will take care of the issue for you.(like TeXMaker)

Backup Strategy

Try using an online repository to synchronize your files

between multiple machines

Easiest to implement with SVN on our fh-project-server:

projects.fh-heidelberg.deAll you need for that is:

I An own project on the project-server (just create one, ialso use one specifically for my thesis-work)

I Install a SVN-client on your computer (i recommend

”tortoise-SVN” for Windows-machines)

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I get a printout of your current immatriculation-report

(”Immatrikulationsbescheinigung”)

I Also get a form of personal ID (like a Visa-permit or

Personalausweis or Drivers’ Licence)

I go to the Registration-desk of the UB with the above two.(location can be found online:

http://www.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/Englisch/)

What do i need for a thesis?

The following works for any operating-system and is fully

compatible with any document-editor(So it even works on MS-word)

I Easy editing in a comfortable graphical user-interface

I Availability of complete reference-entries (save yourselfthe massive typing orgies)

I The resulting bibliography-file is usable in all availabledocument-editors

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What do i need for a thesis?

Basics

Also recommended

How can i keep my citations in order?

BIBTEX

One solution: BIBTEX(Part I)

BIBTEXwas created as a bibliography standard to complementthe professional document-preparation-system LATEXwhich isbasd on the professional typesetting-system TEX Today it can

be utilized by a wide range of document-editors

BTW: The ”X” is not an X but the greek letter ”Chi”, soit’s spelled ”bibtech” Likewise TEXand LATEXare spelled

”tech” and ”latech”

A BIBTEX-file is a normal text-file that contains the

reference-entries

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One solution: BIBTEX(Part II)

An entry in a BIBTEX-file looks like this:

@INPROCEEDINGS{YarandiJahankhani2012,

author = {Yarandi, M and Jahankhani, H and Tawil, A.},title = {An ontology-based adaptive mobile learning

system based on learners’ abilities},

booktitle = {Global Engineering Education Conference

One solution: BIBTEX(Part III)

There are many different types of entries like article,

inproceedings or book

For more Info turn to http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/LaTeX/

Bibliography_Management#Standard_templates

You can get complete entries in BIBTEX-style for your

bibliography on any site for scientific literature-research like:

I google scholar - http://scholar.google.de

I ACM Digital library - http://dl.acm.org/

I sciencedirect - http://www.sciencedirect.com/

I IEEE Xplore - http://ieeexplore.ieee.org

I and basically all others

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What do i need for a thesis?

Basics

Also recommended

How can i keep my citations in order?

BIBTEX

Basic Comfort

Some amount of comfort comes from BIBTEX itself:

I getting reference-data from the reference-sources directlyinstead of endless typing

I usable with any document-editor:

I use cool automated-literature-handling-features of youreditors

I keep your bibliographies even when you change yourediting-environment

I exchange bibliographies with your peers

I also it’s a nice way to organize your notes on literatureusing the ”review”-field in BIBTEX-entries

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Does it get better?

YES

JabRef is a powerful desktop-based editor for BIBTEX-files

This means:

I since it runs on Java, it is plattform-independent

Windows, Linux, Mac - who cares?

I excellent Bibliography-overview

I well designed graphical user-interface

I available plaintext-editing just a tab away

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And now for a little Demo!

Sources referred to in this work

I Wikibook on BIBTEXusage

http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/LaTeX/

Bibliography_Management#Standard_templates

I google scholar http://scholar.google.de

I ACM Digital library http://dl.acm.org/

Thanks for your attention and enjoy working on your thesis