[Tex/LaTex] Publication list in Ph.D. thesis

chaptersfront-mattertable of contentsthesis

I am writing my Ph.D. thesis and I would like to add a list of the publications my thesis is based on. I would like the list to be in the first pages of the thesis, so I put it at the end of the \frontmatter. Now my \frontmatter is composed as follows

Title page
Dedication
Abstract (two languages as required by my Institution)
Table of contents
List of figures
List of publications

First question: I know that it is a matter of personal taste, but is it this order for the front matter unusual? What would be a more usual order?

Second question: being in the \frontmatter the list of publications has a roman numeration, and appears in the table of contents as follows:

Is it weird that roman numbers appear in the table of contents? Would it be better to put the list in the \mainmatter? Or is it better for \mainmatter to start with actual content, which is the Introduction chapter?

Best Answer

(I think this question is off-topic here, but I'm not sure.)

You should either include all of ToC, LoF and List of Publications in the table of contents, or none of them. And (with my copy editor hat one) this order makes sense to me.

Another option is to make the list of publications an unnumbered section in the Introduction, but one that is included in ToC; that's what I did for my thesis.

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[Tex/LaTex] Order of the pages in the front matter of a book

Allowed question or not, I'll make some suggestions.

Half-title pages (displaying nothing but the main title of a book) were introduced to protect the main title page, as Peter Wilson correctly states. Today, this is often achieved by dust jackets. If you still want to include a half-title page, don't put it after the title page.
If your abstract is formatted as an (unnumbered) chapter, putting it before the preface is surely an option. As an alternative (or in case of special formatting), you could place it before the ToC or even before the dedication.

[Tex/LaTex] Making changes to the Cambridge University thesis template

The title page is configured in the thesis-info.tex file, it includes some comments describing how to make modifications. In order to address your first issue, you could replace lines 57-63 of thesis-info.tex with the following:

%% You can redefine the submission text:
% Default as per the University guidelines:
% ``This dissertation is submitted for the degree of''
\renewcommand{\submissiontext}{A Thesis submitted for the Degree of}

%% Full title of the Degree
\degreetitle{Doctor of Philosophy\\\emph{in the Faculty of Science}}

One solution for you second issue is to uncomment line 79 in the thesis.tex file in order to change the page style to PageStyleII. This enables roman numeral page numbers for the page between the table of contents and chapter 1. However, switching to PageStyleII also changes the overall style of the pages which may be undesirable.

The page styles in this template appear to be defined in PhDThesisPSnPDF.cls, which would need to be modified if you want to keep the original page style while also enabling roman number page numbers.

Edit: It sounds like you want to add an unnumbered chapter which is still included in the ToC (Table of Contents). I managed to achieve this by adding the following commands to the Cambridge template:

\chapter*{Summary}
\addcontentsline{toc}{chapter}{Summary}

If you would prefer to make the summary into single page section instead of a separate chapter while still keeping the chapter-style ToC entry style, you can instead use this:

\newpage % Ensures summary starts on new page
\section*{Summary}
\addcontentsline{toc}{chapter}{Summary}
\markboth{Summary}{} % Replace chapter header with "Summary"

Best Answer

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[Tex/LaTex] Order of the pages in the front matter of a book

[Tex/LaTex] Making changes to the Cambridge University thesis template

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