The use of templates to create structured electronic dissertations in the biomedical sciences field

The use of templates to create structured electronic dissertations in the biomedical sciences field

Revathi Sellappan

This paper explores the use of templates to make the writing of dissertations more efficient and more effective for the doctoral students of The Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences (GSBS) at the University of Texas Medical Branch. Since we are dealing with students in the specialized field of biomedical sciences, we were able to create a uniform set of template for the authors to utilize. Through the years, we have realized that the students and faculty in the biomedical sciences field prefer to have specific form and structure to their dissertations and the templates are designed to provide them with that. By using the templates, the doctoral students can focus their concentration on the content of the document and leave the formatting up to the template. We currently offer students a set of templates created in Microsoft Word. The templates are divided into "Front Matter", "Chapter Template" and "Back Matter." They contain formatting, style, boilerplate text, headers, footers, and macros in addition to toolbars, preset margins and AutoText entries. The embedded instructions within the template and the preset formatting have proven to save the authors a significant amount of time in writing their dissertations. Using the templates, authors are able to generate the "Table of Contents" and "Table of Figures" with corresponding page numbers in 30 seconds. The templates work well with reference/bibliographical software like Reference Manager and EndNote that harvest, manage and use bibliographic citations and are particularly popular among scholars and researchers in the science and medical fields. In an effort to continually provide our students with effective ways to create their electronic dissertations, we are currently researching the possible use of LaTeX. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LaTeX"" \l ""_note-0"" \o ""LaTeX is a powerful typesetting system used for producing scientific and mathematical documents of high typographic quality. Unlike word processors, it uses plain text files that contain formatting commands. This encourages authors to concentrate on the content of the document and not to worry too much about the appearance. This paper reports on the benefits of using templates to create dissertations in the scientific field, the steps taken in assisting doctoral students with using the templates effectively, future plans on improving the efficiency of the templates and the possibility of creating and publishing templates in LaTeX .

2008