Submitted Manuscript as Master Thesis

Submitted Manuscript as Master Th hesis

Students may also consider handing in a manuscript that has been submitted to a scientific journal, as Master Thesis. The manuscript needs to be submitted to a scientific journal b before handing in the thesis; the thesis will contain the submitted manuscript and additional documentation and chapters (see below). The format of the submitted manuscript needs to be an original publication. Editorials, comments, brief reports or other formats do generally not qualify.

The student has to seek the agreement of the supervisor beforehand. Ideally, the plan to hand in a submitted manuscript as thesis is already made at the stage of Master proposal writing. The supervisor has to provide funding if publication fees arise.

The student has to be the first or shared first author of the submitted manuscript. Only one student can use a given submitted manuscript for a MSc thesis.

It is advised, but not mandatory, that students do academic writing courses beforehand. One course is offered for MSc students enrolled in one of the MSc programs at Swiss TPH as part of the curriculum. Additional academic writing courses are offered at the Sprachenzentrumof the University of Basel.

In addition to the submitted manuscript, the student has to hand in the following chapters, annexes and materials:

1. Chapter: Critical appraisal of one’s own work and methods used. This section shall be about three to four pages. It shall discuss aspects of the overall method and operating procedures, suggest alternative, optimized approaches, list open questions that arose and that might be solved in further projects. This critical appraisal should not repeat the discussion of the submitted manuscript yet goes beyond the scope of the submitted manuscript. The critical appraisal should also provide an in-depth consideration of material, which is only presented in the annex (see below) and was not submitted for publication. For example, there might be additional results and findings that were not presented in the submitted manuscript. The specific results can be reported in an annex (see below) and discussed in the critical appraisal chapter. The critical appraisal chapter should also provide a contextualization of findings with regard to current literature that is more in-depth than the discussion presented in the submitted manuscript. 2. Annex(es) with complementary tables and illustrations beyond the scope of the submitted manuscript. 3. Annotated data set and program codes that were used for the analysis. The student needs to discuss with the supervisor, whether the data set needs to be compliant with FAIR principles. 4. Confirmation of the scientific journal, that the manuscript has been submitted.

The structure of the Master thesis should be as follows:

1. Title page 2. Table of contents 3. Abstract: Structured summary of maximum 400 words in length. 4. Submitted manuscript according to the journal's guidelines including all submitted appendices 5. Critical appraisal chapter 6. Annex(es) 7. Confirmation of the scientific journal, that the manuscript has been submitted 8. Information where data and programs codes are stored and persons having access rights