• Working time: Your topic should be substantial enough to require the full allocated working time (3 months for a Bachelor's and 6 months for a Master's thesis) for a very good grade. Early submission is technically possible, but think thoroughly about your topic's scope!

• Submission format: Electronic submission in PDF format to the School office is sufficient. There is no need for a printed copy.

• Page limits: Your thesis should not exceed 80 pages for Master's and 60 pages for Bachelor's, including all sections. Remember that this is an upper limit, and there is nothing at all wrong with staying well below this limit.

• Related to the previous point, there is no need to include everything you have done during the time you were working on your thesis in the final document. Only include what is relevant to understand your analysis. An unfortunate but extremely common part of academic research work is that not everything turns out as planned. A good quality to have as a researcher is to easily let go of such work and focus on the next agenda item. (Or, as colleagues from behavioral economics would put it, not to fall victim to the sunk cost fallacy.) Of course, consult with me before deciding that a major part of your work hasn't "worked out" and should be discarded.

• We offer a separate guide focusing on the formalities of thesis writing here: https://www.ep.mgt.tum.de/en/eoi/teaching/theses/. To get you started, we also offer pre-formatted templates for use in Latex/Overleaf and MS Word.

• In your final PDF document, please include PDF bookmarks to allow easy navigation for the reader.

• Some formatting advice: I usually focus on the content rather than formatting issues when grading theses, but clearly a well-formatted thesis makes the reader's job much easier. For broad formal formatting guidelines see the link above. A few comments on issues that may be less common:

  • if you want to include tables with a lot of content, including longer portions of text, consider rotating the tables (or rotate the page they're on to landscape mode). Nobody enjoys reading sentences in columns so narrow that each word is on a separate line.

  • if you include a figure that you created yourself, you don't have to attribute it to anyone; absence of an attribution implies that the author is the creator. You may add a statement like "illustration by the author" for additional clarity to a figure you created yourself. You should mention the software you have used while working on your thesis, but the software itself cannot be cited as a "source" for results, graphs etc.

• While supervision meetings are not technically required to pass your thesis examination, I consider three meetings as the viable minimum: one to agree on the topic, one around the halfway mark, and one a few weeks before submitting. Based on previous supervision experience, a good target mark seems to be one meeting per month. This target is meant to serve as an orientation rather than a hard criterion. If there is nothing to discuss and you feel things work out as planned, no need to prepare a meeting. If you run into a major issue shortly after a meeting, surely it is better to schedule another one soon than to wait a month in uncertainty.

• Topics we should definitely discuss in a meeting at some point:

  • your extended exposé (see the writing process section below);

  • the outline of your thesis document;

  • the collection of main references for the literature review and any other major references you will build your thesis on;

  • the introduction section (here it is usually most convenient for me to provide written feedback).

• Maintain open and regular communication with me. Inform me of your progress and any challenges you encounter, and feel encouraged to ask for advice on how to overcome these obstacles. Proactively seek out supervision meetings, prepare specific questions or topics for discussion, and demonstrate openness to feedback. The same holds with regard to communication with a practice partner, such as an industry professional, if you have one. Show that you value their expertise and their time.

• Carefully consider the feedback you obtain on your draft. Reflect on each point made and systematically integrate the changes into your final version. If you disagree with certain feedback, discuss it with me (or whoever gave it) rather than ignoring it.

• At the same time, also demonstrate your ability to work independently and take the initiative. Supervisors and practice partners are there to guide, not to lead your research. Show that you can drive your project forward, using their feedback as a "compass" rather than a "map". In the end, the grade for your thesis is supposed to show how well you are able to complete a piece of research work, of course considering that it is only your first or second time you approach this type of work. This limits the amount of detailed input I can give even if I find your topic personally very interesting.

• Choose something that genuinely interests you. Realize that you will spend a significant amount of time on this topic!

• Your thesis topic might come up in job interviews, so pick something that showcases your interests and skills.

• A classic source for a topic (inspiration) is something from a course you have taken, and passed reasonably well, at our group, or a comparable group with an economics background. In my innovation economics class, for instance, I usually provide references to for further reading. You might also have read something in the news that you believe connects to class content or my supervision interests.

• Remember that no matter your topic, your thesis must be a piece of academic work, and hence it should aim to make a contribution to the body of academic knowledge. At a business school, many topics will have aspects that make them of interest to business practitioners or policymakers. It is great and outright desirable if, based on your analysis, you manage to identify conclusions and recommendations of relevance to one or both of these non-academic audiences. (In fact, it is even considered in the grading rubric.) Nonetheless, this is not your primary audience. If your topic is only of interest to business practitioners or policymakers, it is something for a consulting piece with little academic value.

• Use the library's resources for literature searches and discuss your (main) choices with me for insights on the reliability and fit of the literature. This is especially true if you plan to use a single article as a main (or exclusive) source for a large part of your dissertation.

• A good if not perfect first test for the appropriateness of an academic reference is to check if the journal in which a reference appears is included in this ranking: https://ideas.repec.org/top/top.journals.simple.html. If your topic is in Economics, the reference should appear in the top 1000 (rule of thumb!). If it doesn't appear there, please discuss with me before relying heavily on it. A raking covering journals from all academic areas relevant to a business school is available here. Unless your thesis topic is speaking to a niche audience, your main references should be from journals ranked A or A*.

  • For interdisciplinary topics, there will also be references from journals outside of this list. A similar aim for journal quality applies, though I don't know the relevant lists, if these exist.

• The easiest way to find relevant references is by using citations between articles. Once you have one relevant article, look at (I) what this article cites (and what for) and (ii) who cites this article.

  • For (i), all the information should be in the article itself and its references/bibliography section. Just copy-paste the bibliography entry into Google Scholar and you should find it.

  • For (ii), find the article you're reading on Google Scholar. It will show a link with the number of citations. Click that link and you will find a list of all work that cites the article.

  • Google Scholar also has a link finding "Related work". This, I believe, works with text similarity, so it will find articles on a similar topic. Give it a try; it works better for some topics than others.

• search  in scholar

• use other search engines

• use standard google search to find news articles, reports (from governments, int'l organizations, consulting firms, industry organizations, etc.)

• Please understand that your core literature must be from economics and/or management science. Many topics that interest me (and possibly you) touch upon other streams of literature, such as law, computer science, or geography. However, your contribution to the literature will be an analysis from the perspective of economics or management science, hence this is the literature you will contribute to.

• It is quite challenging to give general advice on the research process that applies equally to every thesis. The details, intricacies, and best practices inevitably vary widely depending on your topic, question, and approach.

• One piece of advice for students writing qualitative (e.g., interview-based) theses seems most appropriate: conducting high-quality qualitative research is not per se "easier" than conducting quantitative research, and the same is true for planning and for describing qualitative research. It might seem at first sight that all one needs to do to conduct a qualitative study is to find a few people willing to chat about a topic, take notes, and then write them up. However, this approach will yield mediocre results at best, and with a good probability, the results obtained will be close to useless. That would be a real shame, given all the effort you have put in!

• Instead, qualitative research requires careful planning and thinking about and through every step of the research process, just like good quantitative research would. Describing and explaining the choices you made regarding such things as interview vs survey, type and structure of interview, format and content of the questionnaire, and selection of interview partners is a crucial part of the research work and, consequently, of my grading.

• Just like a student approaching a quantitative analysis would consult good econometrics/statistics texts to guide them towards and through their project, a student approaching a qualitative analysis is expected to read and think about their methodology, identify different options, and explain/defend their choices. 

• Each critical methodological choice you make is an excellent topic to discuss in a supervisory meeting; discussing these might even be more important than discussing any results you eventually obtain!

• The "conclusion" section of your thesis should do more than simply summarize what you did in your thesis

• Begin to write as soon as possible. Don't worry about having to start with the introduction section; just start writing something to build momentum.

• Even though you can leave writing the fully-fledged introduction until later (or even the end), start your thesis journey by writing an extended exposé. If you approached me with your own topic suggestion, submitting a brief exposé was a required step for you anyway. Build on this and extend it to greater detail and more specificity in all sections. If you chose an advertised project, you can build on the project description on the website. In either case, it is important to set out a clear goal for your thesis project and outline some path leading from today towards that goal. Anything you think is necessary to accomplish should be mentioned in this extended exposé. Anything that you find nice to have but that does not contribute to reaching the stated goal should be excluded from the extended exposé. We will find this document very helpful for orientation during our supervision meetings.

• I encourage you to share preliminary drafts with me. While I won't be able to give detailed feedback, this allows me to spot potential pitfalls at an early stage (and avoid unpleasant surprises after submission).

• There is no scarcity in writing guides. Here's a selection (in progress; I didn't check the guides in full detail; feedback welcome!):

  • https://www.edx.org/learn/writing/technische-universitat-munchen-academic-writing-made-easy 

  • https://docs.iza.org/dp16276.pdf Plamen Nikolov (2023) has compiled a very comprehensive guide aimed at doctoral students trying to craft publishable articles, but it is a helpful read and reminder for everyone writing in economics and related disciplines. For thesis work, I suggest having a close look at section I. "Essential Guidelines".

• "Academic language" is a writing style that is quite distinct from written language you may be familiar with, such as those used in news media, novels, or the business world. A good first guide for the style of language to aim for are your core references. Read them (again) carefully, trying to get a feel for the language and style they use, and aim for something similar. Also look at section I. in Nikolov's (2023) guide linked in the section above.

• The University of Manchester maintains an "Academic Phrasebank" that may be helpful to get familiar with a variety of ways to phrase key elements that appear in most research papers and expand your "academic vocabulary". (Note that there is a horizontal menu at the top corresponding to different sections of an academic paper, and a vertical menu on the left covering language that is less specific to certain parts of an academic article.)

• In your writing, avoid "weak" language (e.g.,  "it seems that", "it might be that", "it could mean that"). Be assertive and clear in your statements. This does not mean that you should make claims that you cannot back up with evidence. Instead, this means that you should only make those claims that you can back up to a reasonable degree. If you find yourself writing a sentence that only seems correct in weak language, it is a good indicator that you are stretching the evidence. The only exception where weak language is allowed is in introducing a research question. For instance:

  • "Based on the evidence earlier authors have assembled, R&D cooperation is associated with shorter development cycles. This could mean that cooperative R&D is more incremental than R&D performed by firms in isolation. This is what this thesis will investigate."

• Do not shy away from writing in the first person when describing your research process. Avoid creating cumbersome constructions in passive language. Passive language can still be useful at times, e.g., "This section provides a review of the relevant literature." When writing in active language, use the pronoun "I" instead of "we" since your thesis is a single-authored piece of work (isn't it!).

• I strongly recommend taking advantage of writing courses or consulting sessions available at the university to enhance the presentation of your work. For example, TUM's English Writing Center offers free 1-on-1 consulting sessions for students writing texts in English. I really cannot see any downsides but many upsides to having a try!

• Make (responsible!) use of AI writing assistance. For instance, TUM provides free access to the premium version of Grammarly, which I personally find extremely helpful. (Grammarly suggests replacing "I personally find" with "is", which I personally find too strong a statement.) Trinka.ai is a (mostly) free tool claiming to be specialized in academic writing. SpringerNature offers to give free AI-based feedback on language quality for authors; this should be a very reputable service, though I haven't tested it.

  • This includes asking ChatGPT for advice and inspiration on your writing. The emphasis here is on advice. Do not let it rewrite your text and then blindly copy its output into your thesis. It often uses an exaggerated tone that reminds me more of an advertisement or a corporate press release than a facts-centered academic text.

    • Under no circumstances use it, or any comparable service, to have it write whole sections of your thesis. Evidence of this violates the declaration of authorship required for each thesis and would lead you to fail your thesis. No exceptions.

  • At the same time, don't feel pressured to accept every single recommended change that such a tool makes! For some reason, AI writing tools seem to (or at least, used to) have a rather antiquated idea of what academic writing has to look like, which includes avoiding personal pronouns at all costs (see the point on writing in the first person above).

  • In general, try to ensure that your thesis reads like one homogeneous product, written in the same style throughout all sections of the thesis. If one section is written in a very different style than other sections, this can be a strong pointer that somebody else than the submitting student has worked on this section. This somebody else may, of course, include ChatGPT et al.

  • Please avoid using the following words in your thesis that have started to appear in student theses only since around late 2022. There is always a different way to express the same thought:

    • delve(s) into

    • multifaceted (e.g., "multifaced nature")

    • nuanced (e.g., "nuanced understanding")

    • dynamic(s) [in an economics context, this word is almost exclusively used wrongly -- dynamics implies a series of reactions, which the theses using the term rarely actually study] 

    • "maintain a competitive edge" [in an economics paper, this is far too generic -- the nature of this "edge" needs to be clearly defined]

• First and foremost, DO NOT, under any circumstances, copy text verbatim from somewhere else. This applies even when you add a citation to the source you copied from. Rephrase a thought in your own words. If you really believe that there is no alternative way to express a particular statement, mark the verbatim copy by using "quotation marks". Note that verbatim quotes are used very rarely in economics and management writing.

  • Note that if you copy a whole paragraph and change a few words here and there, this does most likely not count as rephrasing. The structure of the paragraph, and of the thoughts and information it provides, are also the intellectual work of the original author.

• Ensure your citations are clear, relevant, and complete.

• Clear and relevant together mean that your citations make sense: I want to be able to understand what you borrowed from every source you cited. For any sentence that is followed by a reference in your thesis, I want to be able to open that reference and find a part that relates to the sentence I just read in your dissertation. 

  • A good practice, therefore, is to add page numbers to the citation of a longer reference like a book or a longer report with more than 100 pages.

• Complete means to include comprehensive details about each source. Just mentioning "author (year)" is NOT sufficient. The fact that I can often guess the source by searching the title myself does not relieve you from your duty to properly cite the sources you build on. Citations are not just there to help the reader, but they also are a "currency" of academic work. The original author should be appropriately rewarded for helping you in your work.

• Figure out early how to organize, track, and insert citations. There are many different software solutions out there and just as many how-to guides. I personally use Zotero, but I'm sure there are many fine alternatives. If you decide to manage your references and citations by hand, reserve some extra time and attention to ensure all citations are correct.

  • Using a citation manager does not relieve you of the burden of correct citation! Your citation manager will likely correctly label an article that you downloaded from the website of an academic journal, but it might not know if the PDF file you downloaded from an authors personal webpage represents an unpublished manuscript, an article that was already included in a university department's discussion paper series, or possibly even a manuscript that was accepted for publication in a journal. It is your responsibility to add this information. 

  • If the article is really only a draft shared by the author, then (1) think twice if you really must cite it in your thesis, or if there exists a peer-reviewed article that you can instead cite, and (2) if you decide to cite it, include "unpublished manuscript", the web address and the date of last access in the reference list!

• Make sure all references appear in the bibliography, and only those.

• If you cite a company website, please include the full URL and the date of (last) access.

• For formatting of citations, have a look at TUM's rather comprehensive citation guide at https://www.ub.tum.de/en/citation-guide and our group's own guide at https://www.ep.mgt.tum.de/en/eoi/teaching/theses/. There are several different standards for formatting citations, which you can choose freely between, as long as you stick to one throughout the whole thesis. In economics and management science, the norm is to use inline citations with the first (two) author's name(s), such as Angenendt & Hottenrott (2024), instead of numbers such as [1] and [2] which are more common in the natural sciences or citations in footnotes which are more common in legal scholarship.

Here's the grading rubric that I use when grading theses. While one or two instances of errors in each category are acceptable, the higher their frequency, the lower the assigned grade will be associated with each criterion. Each criterion is independently graded on a five-point scale from 1 to 5, where 1 is the best assessment. The final grade is the weighted average of all point scores, rounded to the closest mark on the German grading scale (i.e., 1.25 is rounded down to "1,3", while 1.4 is rounded up to "1,3". Values ending in ".5" exactly are rounded up.).

Here's a collection of further writing guidance elaborating on the criteria of the grading rubric and giving some examples of writing mistakes and how to avoid them.

[TBA] And here's a checklist for students currently approaching their thesis project. This is meant as a helpful resource, but surely it cannot imply that ticking all the boxes directly translates into a certain grade.