Thesis Template

Credits to this go mostly to Flori F. The original version was adapted to fit the requirements of a B.A. or M.A. thesis at the Department for Political Science and Administration @ Uni Konstanz.

In general, this template can be used for any thesis or large report, based on .Rmd-files and is with some technical knowledge highly adaptable.

Basic Usage

Main usage

1. Define the sections of your thesis in the main file, thesis.Rmd.
2. Add the content of each page in the content folder. For every main section, there exists a separate .Rmd-file.
3. You can directly include scripts to run in R (or if you know how to use python in RMarkDown, also that). The data of the example is stored in the data folder. Using the settings print_analysis and print_analysis_results you can decide if you want your analyses printed in your document. I found this useful for testing.
4. At any place in the document, you can access the variables from any other codeblock.
5. To create the final output, knit thesis.Rmd.

Citing

1. To cite a source, you add the BibTex entry to the references.bib file
2. The citing syntax is straightforward. Use @key or [@key, p. 1] for in-text citations, the reference list will be created automatically accordingly.
3. The citing style is APA in general. You can get consistent and good looking citations mostly by using the BibTex types article, book and report.

Styling the title page

Styling of the title page happens in style/title.sty.

Notes

Since knitting/using RMarkDown requires you to have a LaTeX-Distribution installed, I recommend MikTex. It allows you to install every package you may need (and that you do not yet have installed) to be downloaded and installed automatically, and it can even ask you to decide on each package on its own.

You might want to add/remove some \newpage commands at the beginning to correctly position the pages.

You can edit anything. You can add/remove sections, title pages, appendices, (with some knowledge of LaTeX) have two table of contents, ...

Should be able to be knitted via the 'Knit' button in RStudio or using rmarkdown::render('thesis.Rmd', output_format = 'pdf_document', encoding = 'UTF-8').

Please try this before you start using this template!