Prof. Dr. Fabian Woebbeking
Assistant Professor of Financial Economics
IWH - Leibniz Institute for Economic Research
MLU - Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg
fabian.woebbeking@iwh-halle.de
Link: https://github.com/cafawo/WritingGuidelines
WritingGuidelines/ # This repository
├── template.tex # Latex template
├── template.bib # Bibliography template
├── template.png # MLU template header
└── README.md # This fileThis document provides you some guidance on how to successfully write a thesis at our Chair. It documents content-related aspects of your thesis as well as the requirements for an adequate formal representation. Note, however, that it is NOT a rulebook. It is at the discretion of the researcher (you) to find the most appropriate way for presenting his work.
Please note that it is your responsibility to manage the registration and submission of your thesis. To this end, the primary source of information and final authority is the examination office and regulation, not this guideline. See: Information Examination Office
These notes are to give you some guidance on how to successfully write your master/bachelor/seminar thesis at our Chair. Before you start, you should clearly envisage what the purpose of writing a thesis is, namely to demonstrate that you are able to independently identify, narrow down, structure and develop an economic topic and present your results in a scientific way. This requires searching and processing the academic literature, as well as employing and deepening the already acquired economic and methodological expertise.
We first discuss the content-related aspects of the master/bachelor/seminar thesis. Although the content is of major importance for the evaluation of your thesis, the formal presentation of the thesis plays a role as well. Therefore, we also describe the formal requirements. Finally, we highlight some issues concerning time management.
We will provide you a topic for your seminar thesis during the first (kick-off) event.
The chair offers students the opportunity to write a bachelor or master thesis on current issues on the intersection of Financial Economics and Data Science. There are students are encouraged to propose their own topic. For this, a precise description of the topic wish and the research question is required to assess suitability and scientific feasibility. The thesis can be written in German or English.
Bachelor theses are assigned through the Examination Office. Please refer to the Examination Office for detatiled information (See: Information Examination Office).
Students enrolled in the M.Sc. programs are not required to participate in any allocation process. If interested, students can directly approach us.
Writing a scientific work means participating in a scientific discussion, i.e., engaging with academic literature and perhaps making a small contribution of your own. The intended audience for your thesis is a specialized one, i.e., people with a university education in economics. Imagine that you are communicating your topic to senior finance students, just as you would in a seminar. This entails explaining concepts that may already be known to your supervisor.
Furthermore, academic work requires the use of specific methods and adherence to particular methodological standards. You should demonstrate your capability to employ economic methods. This not only includes economic theory but might also encompass, for example, expertise in econometrics. Place great importance on the clarity of your presentation. Many terms are used ambiguously in the literature. To avoid confusion, explain how the concepts are understood within the context of your work.
The minimum requirement for a master's, bachelor's, or seminar thesis is that the relevant literature is competently summarized. Additionally, the arguments within the literature should be related to each other and critically assessed concerning the topic in question. A mere abbreviation of the original text, however, will not be considered independent work.
A well-structured thesis is characterized by thoughtful organization. For instance, serious consideration should be given to dividing the main question into suitable sub-questions. For empirical inquiries, you should first address the theoretical aspects that will later form the basis for testable hypotheses. For theoretical issues, it is also essential to highlight empirical implications and discuss the existing empirical literature.
A very good thesis distinguishes itself by making a modest personal contribution to the existing literature. For a theoretical thesis, this could mean a slight modification or extension of a model. The personal contribution of an empirical thesis might be, for instance, the re-estimation of results from a scientific paper based on a different dataset (e.g., data for the European Union instead of the United States; regional-level instead of national-level data; a different firm sample, etc.) or an examination of the robustness of the results of the original study.
It goes without saying that when you engage in any form of scientific or academic work, it is fundamental to strictly adhere to the ethical standards that govern such work. It is on you to protect the reliability, trustworthiness, and respectability of the scientific community. Specifically, a key aspect of these ethical standards is the absolute prohibition of plagiarism. Plagiarism, or the act of presenting someone else's work or ideas as your own without proper attribution, will not be tolerated!
The literature search and summary are important components of a paper. Independently searching for and processing the relevant literature for your topic is a central part of the thesis. You are expected to cover all important references on your topic. This does not mean that you have to cite all existing works on your topic, but rather that you have to choose and summarize the most important pieces of relevant research. Scientific journal articles should feature prominently in your thesis. Typically, it is not sufficient to rely solely on policy-related articles.
In general, the literature search begins on the internet (e.g., Google Scholar) and in electronic literature databases. For economic research, a highly recommended database is Econlit, which contains the most important international journals. Please note that this database contains literature references and not full-text articles. You can obtain electronic copies of the articles from full-text databases, like e.g., JSTOR and ScienceDirect. Current textbooks and journal review articles are often very useful.
Bear in mind that it's impossible to read all the literature in detail. Therefore, focus on the articles most closely related to your topic. Focus on articles from renowned journals! If you are unsure about the quality of a journal, have a look at a journal ranking, such as VHB-JOURQUAL. If a journal does not show up in a ranking, it is likely that it is not a renowned journal. The only exception are very recent working papers, which have not yet been published; here, you might consider the authors and their affiliation as a quality indicator. Articles only distantly related to your topic need not be followed in minute detail. Sometimes, reading just the introduction and conclusion of an article is enough to determine its importance for your work.
In economics, we adhere to the APA citation style. Particularly in monographs and edited volumes, inclusion of page numbers is vital for expediently locating citations. Conversely, for articles from academic journals, page numbers are typically unnecessary. Utilizing BibTeX or a literature database not only simplifies citation processes but also guarantees comprehensive inclusion of all referenced literature in the bibliography. Please note that literature databases, such as Google Scholar, often offer a convenient way to export references, e.g. in BibTeX format.
The master and bachelor thesis starts with a cover page. A table of content, a list of figures, tables, and abbreviations (if necessary), an abstract, the main text, a bibliography and possibly an appendix follow. The thesis ends with a "Statutory Declaration" ("Ehrenwörtliche Erklärung"), stating that you compiled the work yourself and that you quoted all used sources appropriately. The page numbering is with Arabic numbers, starting from the beginning of the main text.
It is expected that the text is linguistically correct (please use the spell-checking function of your text-inputting software and ask other people to proofread your work).
The cover page contains all essential information (see template). The design of the page is left up to you.
The outline contains no more than three levels. In Microsoft Word, use the option for automatic generation of a table of contents. Do not forget to update the table of contents again at the end of your writing.
Please include lists of figures, tables, and abbreviations.
Before you start with the main text, you should provide a 100-150 word abstract on a separate page, where you provide a complete but concise description of your work. It should contain the motivation of the problem that you are trying to solve, the approach how you go about solving the problem, your results as well as the conclusions from your finding.
The main text begins with an introduction and ends with a conclusion. The remaining sections should be balanced, meaning that they should not differ greatly in length. Additional sub-categorization is often useful. The thesis starts with an introduction describing and motivating the main economic question analyzed in the thesis. At the end of the introduction, you provide a short overview of how you will proceed in your thesis. The thesis has to include a review of the relevant literature. This is done either in the introduction or in a separate chapter. Moreover, you should define the central concepts used in your thesis early on. Make sure that your main sections relate to each other. Often it is useful to start each chapter with a small introduction and end it with a brief summary of results. The most important results of your thesis are concisely summarized and critically assessed at the end of the thesis. Eventually, you could provide an outlook of the future developments of the particular scientific discussion, discuss policy implications and point out open questions.
Illustrations and tables are integral components of the text when seamlessly integrated into the narrative. They are sequentially numbered, captioned, and optionally attributed to their respective sources. Additionally, each figure and table is referenced within the text, indicating some form of connection.
The length of the text depends on the type of the manuscript. As a rough guideline, a seminar paper should not exeed 20 pages (including figures), bachelor and master thesesis should have the length of a usual scientific paper in financial economics... your literature review should give you plenty guidance on what this means. The final authority on the length of your thesis is the supervisor, so you should explicitly communicate the scope your thesis before starting to write.
In general, if it looks like a proper paper, you're good to go... see the concluding remarks below. However, to give some guidance, you can find a template in this repository. The typesetting program used for the template is LaTeX, which we highly recommend. However, you are free to use Word, Pages or any other software that you like.
If you need precise measurements, you can refer to the following. The document should be written in DIN A4 format and justified.
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Page Format:
- Left Margin: 2 cm
- Right Margin: 3 cm
- Top Margin: 2.5 cm
- Bottom Margin: 2.5 cm
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Font:
- No script, symbol, or similar font styles.
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Font Size:
- Main Text: 11pt
- Footnotes: 9pt
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Line Spacing:
- Main Text: 1.5-line spacing
- Footnotes: Single line spacing
If you use the LaTeX template, you do not have to worry about page margins and formatting; it's all pre-configured. The template consists of three files:
- template.tex
- template.bib
- template.png
If you save these three files into a folder, you can open template.tex in a TeX editor and get started. If you have not used LaTeX so far, consider the following options:
The conditional integration of artificial intelligence (AI) into the scientific process aims to equip students with the necessary competencies for the effective, responsible, and secure employment of these technologies. The overarching goal is to cultivate a heightened understanding of AI's capabilities and limitations within both scientific and commercial domains. Transparency, a cornerstone of scientific inquiry, mandates that the deployment of AI tools be thoroughly documented. This includes a rigorous assessment of the advantages these tools confer upon the research process. For instance, while AI provides great support for coding, it is not capable to observe the most current state of academic literature (not least because this data might not be available to the system). AI generated literature reviews are therefore often incomplete.
The selection and application of AI tools are considered integral to the students' academic performance and must be transparently declared. Academic theses will be assessed based on the content quality and the judicious use of AI, recognizing that the responsibility for any potential inaccuracies in information, sources, or analytical outcomes rests with the students.
In adherence to principles of academic integrity, the use of AI must be explicitly documented in the declaration of independence accompanying academic submissions.
We recommend that you prepare a time schedule for your thesis from registration to submission. Through regular reviews of your schedule, you will get an idea, for example, of when you should stop researching your topic and start writing.
As already mentioned above, you should intensively search for relevant literature even before registering your thesis. You should not register for an empirical thesis before the needed data are available, or at least not before you know for sure what the data sources are and how you can acquire them. Empirical work entails risks even when the data are already available. For example, it may turn out that the acquired data are of poor quality. In the course of your work, you might also find that you need additional data that are hard to obtain.
Normally, you spend the first days or weeks focusing on literature, literature, and more literature. By the end of this process, you should have a clear vision of the structure of your thesis. It goes far beyond a mere outline, as each section contains concrete ideas and lines of reasoning. You should then bring your outline to life and start formulating parts of your thesis.
In these guidelines, we described what a good thesis should look like, both in terms of form and contents. Some points may seem self-evident, while others hopefully remove some doubts and uncertainty.
Note that you are the author of the manuscript and many questions of taste and style are at your own discretion. There exists ways of representing research that are widely accepted by the scientific community. Good journals are a perfect source for inspiration and guidance on adequate writing. For example, the Journal of Finance is a good address to find guidance on how a good scientific article looks like. If any other questions remain open, please feel free to contact us.