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UCL support for dissertations and research projects

• UCL support for dissertations and research projects This visual tool draws together support from across UCL to help you with writing your dissertation or research project.

Academic communication skills resources

• Academic communication skills resources This list includes useful resources for academic communication skills including academic writing, research methods, critical thinking, skills for literature reviews and systematic reviews, referencing, presentation skills, writing for publication, statistics and general study skills.
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• Last Updated: Apr 18, 2024 6:08 PM
• URL: https://library-guides.ucl.ac.uk/dissertations

Library Services

UCL LIBRARY SERVICES

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How do i submit my thesis.

See our  web page  which includes contact details for our Open Access Team who can help with any queries. 

• Research Support
• Open Access
• Last Updated Nov 09, 2021
• Answered By Debs Furness

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We're here to help. See below our e-mail address for enquiries generally, as well as a link to find contact details for specific libraries

Language + Writing Workshop - Writing a Dissertation

• Darwin Building B15

Our  Language + Writing Support Programme  is here to help non-native English speaking students with their academic writing and speaking.

Come and join the Language + Writing Peer Tutors to discuss dissertation writing!

We'll cover how to work on longer academic essays, how to balance time between research and writing, and talk tips and tricks for organising your summer project.

This workshop will be repeated on Wednesday 3rd July for anyone who is unable to attend on this date. If you would like attend the second workshop on 3rd July, please book a place here .

• Language + Writing Support Programme
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UCL Discovery download statistics are currently being regenerated.

We estimate that this process will complete on or before Mon 06-Jul-2020. Until then, reported statistics will be incomplete.

Browse by UCL Theses

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Thesis Template for University College London

UCL Thesis LaTeX Template © Ian Kirker, 2014

This is a template/skeleton for PhD/MPhil/MRes theses. It uses a rather split-up file structure because this tends to work well for large, complex documents. We suggest using one file per chapter, but you may wish to use more or fewer separate files than that. We've also separated out various bits of configuration into their own files, to keep everything neat.

Downloaded from https://github.com/UCL/ucl-latex-thesis-templates

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Open@UCL Blog

Open Access theses

By Kirsty, on 31 March 2021

Among the many things that can be made Open Access; publications, data, software, and so many more, it is now increasingly more common for PhD theses to be made Open Access. This can be a great resource when you are undertaking your own PhD to get an idea of scope, structure and can be a great source of ideas.

Finding Open Access theses

UCL Library Services manages the DART-Europe service, the premier European portal for the discovery of open access research theses.  At the time of writing, this service provides access to over one million research theses from 564 Universities in 29 European countries.  It was founded in 2005 as a partnership of national and university libraries and consortia to improve global access to European research theses.  It does this by harvesting data from thesis repositories at contributing institutions, including from UCL Discovery (see below), and providing a link to at least one open access electronic copy of each thesis.  The theses themselves are located on the websites of the contributing institutions.

Users of the DART-Europe portal can search this vast database by keyword, or browse by country or institution, and view the research theses in full, without charge.  New theses are added every day, from doctoral and research masters programmes in every academic discipline.  For more information about the service, please contact the DART-Europe team .  Institutions not currently represented in the portal can view information on how to contribute to DART-Europe .

In normal times, the digitisation of doctoral theses can also be requested on an individual basis through the British Library’s e-theses online service (EThOS) .  This is a database of all UK doctoral theses held in university library collections, with links to open access copies in institutional repositories, and hosted directly in EThOS, where available.  If an electronic copy is not available, you can create an account with the service to request digitisation of the print copy: this prompts the institution where the thesis is held to find and check the print thesis, and then send it to the British Library’s facility at Boston Spa for digitisation.  Please note that this process incurs a charge (which is indicated during the requesting process) and is currently suspended due to COVID-19 restrictions.

Your thesis – UCL Discovery

Since the 2008-09 academic year, UCL students studying for doctoral and research master’s degrees have been required to submit an electronic copy of their thesis to the Library as a mandatory condition of the award of their degree.  Students are encouraged to make their theses openly available in UCL Discovery , our open access institutional repository, although in practice access can be restricted for a number of reasons if necessary.  A citation of the thesis appears in UCL Discovery even if access to the full text is restricted.

Older theses have also been digitised and added to UCL Discovery retrospectively.  The bulk of this work has been carried out as part of a specific project covering over 10,000 theses from 1990 to 2008.  This project is ongoing but mostly complete: over 7,000 digitised theses have been added to UCL Discovery during the last twelve months alone by Library Services staff who have not been able to carry out their normal work due to COVID-19 restrictions.

If you cannot access a UCL thesis which is listed online through these methods, please contact the Open Access Team , who will be able to provide advice on options for obtaining access.

Filed under Advocacy , UCL Discovery

Tags: Doctoral theses , open access , Thesis

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MAPS Faculty ECR Forum Awards 2024 Winners Announcement

14 August 2024

The MAPS Faculty Early Career Researcher Forum is pleased to announce the winners of the MAPS Faculty ECR Forum Awards 2024. The Awards recognise and reward the outstanding achievements and contributions made by the ECRs in the faculty. Many congratulations!

The MAPS Faculty ECR Forum Awards 2024 celebrates the extraordinary success achieved in the five areas, including research, teaching, community work, EDI, outreach and communications, by ECRs in departments across the faculty. The panel were amazed by the high-quality applications received from PhDs, PDRAs, Research Fellows and other early career researchers. It was a tough task for them to decide the eleven winners across the five categories, and the winners are:

Research Excellence Award

• Alec Owens, Research Fellow, Dept of Physics and Astronomy
• Gao Xuan, PhD, Dept of Chemistry
• Gianluca Pescaroli, Associate Professor, Dept of Risk and Disaster Reduction
• Thaisa Comelli, Research Fellow, Dept of Risk and Disaster Reduction

Teaching Excellence Award

• Lucy Maun, PhD, Dept of Science and Technology Studies

Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) Award

• Deborah Tangunan, Research Fellow, Dept of Earth Sciences
• Louisa Acciari, Research Fellow, Dept of Risk and Disaster Reduction

Outreach and Communication Award

• Fern Pannell, PhD, Dept of Physics and Astronomy
• Megan Joseph, PhD, London Centre for Nanotechnology

Community Work Award

• Catherine Lucas, Antonia Belli and Scott Keir, PhDs, Dept of Science and Technology Studies
• Ina Bradic, PhD, Dept of Chemistry

Many congratulations to the above winners!

Dr Michael Booth, the Forum Co-Chair, said “We are delighted to recognise the major impact of these early career researchers in such a variety of However, it was a difficult task to decide the winners due to the fantastic quality of the applications.”

Upon receiving the great news of winning the Outreach and Communication Award, Fern Pannell, a PhD from the department of Physics and Astronomy, responded, “I am delighted to receive the MAPS ECR Forum award for Outreach and Communication this year. Working on the AWAKE experiment for my PhD has been a privilege, and creating a movie to explain the fascinating plasma and accelerator physics was a very rewarding project. I am grateful for the recognition from UCL and for my colleagues who supported the project!”

All the winners will be invited to attend the MAPS faculty awards ceremony that is being planned to take place in December. Prof Andrew Wills, MAPS Faculty Vice Dean for Research, thanked the MAPS ECR Forum for organising the Awards and commented, “Looking through this year’s applications for the MAPS ECR Forum Awards, I was struck by the extraordinary passion our ECRs have, not only for advancing scientific knowledge, but also in teaching, outreach, sustainability, and research culture initiatives. It is great to see how this community is building support within itself, as well as inspiring the next generation of researchers. Many congratulations to the award winners and all involved!”

The Forum Co-Chairs would like to thank MAPS Research and the Faculty for their financial and organisational support and the help from the Forum members.

More on the winners and their amazing work…

Alec Owens, Research Fellow, Dept of Physics and Astronomy Winner of Research Excellence Award Alec has been a longstanding contributor to the internationally-renowned UCL ExoMol molecular spectroscopic database, which provides essential molecular data for the global exoplanet community and supports significant scientific discoveries. His work has resulted in extensive data on 15 molecules, with notable contributions on carbonyl sulphide being submitted to the HITRAN database for use in climate change monitoring. He also developed the LiDB database to model low-temperature plasmas, enhancing the efficiency of various scientific and industrial applications.

Gao Xuan, PhD, Dept of Chemistry Winner of Research Excellence Award Gao’s groundbreaking research in system optimization for aqueous zinc-ion batteries (AZIBs) has resulted in over 30 publications, including 10 high-impact papers as first/co-first author, including cover stories. His name is included in the Top Downloaded Article Author in Angewandte Chemie International Edition. His innovative strategies for "kinetics optimization" in electrolytes and "decoupling enhancement" in cathode materials have enabled AZIBs to achieve record-breaking specific capacity, addressing the "Trilemma" of specific capacity, cycle stability, and electrode mass loading.

Gianluca Pescaroli, Associate Professor, Dept of Risk and Disaster Reduction Winner of Research Excellence Award Gianluca completed his PhD at UCL in 2018 and has since made significant contributions to the field of cascading risk, including co-founding and leading the Research Group on Cascading Disasters. He has published three seminal papers and secured over £1M funding for 2023/24. He leads the Horizon AGILE project and is co-PI for ESA MULTIHAZARD and CIRCLE projects and has contributed to UN strategic documents, supporting a network of Chief Resilience Officers, and being featured on the BBC.

Thaisa Comelli, Research Fellow, Dept of Risk and Disaster Reduction Winner of Research Excellence Award Thaisa has significantly advanced global understandings of inclusive, future-oriented, risk-sensitive urban planning, influencing policy and practice in disaster risk reduction. She developed a people-centred methodology that integrates diverse marginalised perspectives and her work has led to significant professional advancements, capacity-strengthening engagements in multiple countries in the Global South.

Lucy Maun, PhD, Dept of Science and Technology Studies Winner of Teaching Excellence Award As a former MSc student and current PhD and PGTA, Lucy developed an Science and technology Studies-themed board game called "Thesis Quest: Escape to the Ivory Tower," for her department. This innovative teaching method encourages interdisciplinarity and familiarizes students with the dissertation-writing process in a fun and inclusive way. The game has been well-received, integrated into the curriculum, and accepted as a workshop at the EASST/4S 2024 conference to promote its use beyond UCL.

Louisa Acciari, Research Fellow, Dept of Risk and Disaster Reduction Winner of Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) Award As Women and Marginalised Genders’ Officer for Independent Workers of Great Britain at the University of London, Louisa launched a women's group for discussing workplace violence and harassment, particularly aiding migrant and racialised workers in outsourced roles.  In collaboration with United Voices of the World, the group provided collective training on the causes of violence and harassment, women's rights, and addressing gender-based discrimination. Following positive feedback, an inter-branch Women and Marginalised Genders committee was established to extend this support across various sectors.

Deborah Tangunan, Research Fellow, Dept of Earth Sciences Winner of Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) Award Deborah demonstrated her commitment to promoting EDI principles through organizing the first-ever Culture Day in the Department of Earth Sciences. As the new Ethnic Diversity Network Lead, she facilitated an inclusive event that celebrated diverse cultural backgrounds, receiving enthusiastic participation and positive feedback from approximately 50 attendees. The event's success has inspired the department to make it an annual tradition, further fostering an inclusive academic environment.

Megan Joseph, PhD, London Centre for Nanotechnology Winner of Outreach and Communication Award During her PhD, Megan engaged in various outreach activities, notably through the Orbyts initiative, where she led an A-level research project, securing funding and resulting in publishable findings. she now manages other PhD students' Orbyts projects. As a Life Sciences Widening Participation Assistant, she created lesson plans integrating science and art. Additionally, during a PhD internship with MedCity, she analyzed education and training in Life Sciences, facilitating connections and influencing policy through a published report.

Fern Pannell, PhD, Dept of Physics and Astronomy Winner of Outreach and Communication Award Fern is currently working on the AWAKE Experiment at CERN, which explores accelerating electrons using plasma. Recognizing the public's concerns about particle physics, she created a 15-minute documentary titled "Plasma Wakefield Acceleration with AWAKE" to explain the science and benefits of their research. She wrote, presented, directed, and edited the video, which will be shared by CERN's Press Office with their 4.7 million followers. Additionally, she has promoted AWAKE within UCL and given talks to undergraduate physicists. She also won the 2024 IOP Particle Accelerator and Beams Early Career Poster Prize for her work.

The HoSCos Team: Catherine Lucas, Antonia Belli and Scott Keir, PhDs, Dept of Science and Technology Studies Winners of Community Work Award Cathyerine, Antonia and Scott devised and launched at the beginning of the academic year the History of Science Conversations (HoSCos), a regular series of lunchtime conversations  fostering connections among PhD students, staff, and the broader academic and non-academic history community. Launched to enhance networks post-Covid, HoSCos supports PhD students in exploring career pathways and building community. Over two terms, six lunchtime conversations featured diverse guests from academia, governments and other sectors. The series received positive feedback for its high-quality seminars and networking opportunities. Cathy, Antonia and Scott aim to recruit more PhD students to continue and embed HoSCos in the department culture, benefiting the STS community and students' professional networks.

Ina Bradic, PhD, Dept of Chemistry Winner of Community Work Award Ina took the initiative in successfully leading her lab group’s application for the Laboratory Efficiency Assessment Framework (LEAF) Bronze Award, driving and managing this project from inception to completion. Her work resulted in streamlined equipment booking, reduction of cold storage needs and energy consumption, improved understanding of waste segregation and decreasing the overutilisation of clinical waste. She also fostered collaboration with the Sustainability department and inspired neighboring labs to adopt sustainable practices.

• MAPS ECR Forum  Awards 2024
• MAPS Faculty ECR Forum
• MAPS ECR Newsletters