GUIDELINES

for
writing

Synopsis
for

PhD Scholars

CT UNIVERSITY
LUDHIANA
 PREFACE

This handbook presents the guidelines for PhD Scholars to write synopsis of research and
thesis/dissertations. These guidelines will be very helpful both to the students and their
Supervisors for preparation of their manuscripts and also brought uniformity to the whole
process. The previous guidelines are revised as per the valuable suggestions from the CT
University members. Further suggestions are always welcomed. These instructions will help
in saving a lot of time for both- scholars and committee for the preparation and the approval
of the synopsis and thesis/dissertations.
 COMPONENTS OF THE SYNOPSIS

TITLE PAGE:
The title page should be made strictly as per format provided in the Annexure-I in this
booklet. Only Times New Roman font should be used and the text alignment should be
centered. The title should be in capital letters and 16pt bold. All other content should be
written in 14pt font size. The title should be concise, specific and reflect the proposed
research programme. Scientific names in the title, if any, must be written in Latin binomial or
trinomial along with the authority.

MAIN BODY:
The ‘Times New Roman’ font should be used throughout the synopsis with 12pt font
size and 1.5pt spacing. The Headings/Titles of the chapters should be in UPPER CASE,
12pt BOLD.
The main body of the synopsis must include following chapters:
1. INTRODUCTION
This section should highlight the scope and significance of the proposed research work. The
Engineering / Technological / Scientific / Used / Social relevance or importance of the
research work should be reported. The work of other person should be properly
acknowledged with appropriate text citation in the context of single author, two
authors, three or more than three but less than six authors and six or more than six
authors.

2. REVIEW OF LITERATURE
An up-to-date and comprehensive review of relevant literature indicating history,
developments relating to the topic of the proposed of research problem should be given. In
particular, when and where the study has been conducted, what were the objectives of study,
methodology used to achieve the objective and lastly the outcome of the study.

The way of writing of review of literature.

 Single author
 Surname (Year)
e.g., Henry (1992)
  Two authors

 Surname of both the authors with ‘and’ as connector (Year)

e.g., Henry and Jones (2001)

 Three or more authors

 Surname of the first author followed by et al. (Year)

e.g., Henry et al. (2003)

The review of literature should be in chronological order preferably in ascending

order.

3. RESEARCH GAP AND PROBLEM FORMULATION

Need and significance of proposed research work should be clear and sufficient. This section
includes Research Gap, Problem Formulation. The likely outcomes of the study may be
mentioned in this section.

4. OBJECTIVES OF THE STUDY

The objectives and scope of the research work should be clearly mentioned.

5. HYPOTHESES

To achieve the research objectives the following hypotheses have been formulated like null
hypotheses:

Ho1: ………………..

Ho2: ………………….

And so on

6. METHODOLOGY
The experiments/data analysis should be planned in accordance with the objectives under the
following sub-heads:

(A) Enggerening and Science:

i) Name of the experiment

ii) Location: Field / Lab / Survey/ Others
iii) Methodology
iv) Observations to be recorded
v) Statistical analysis to be used (if any)

(B) Social Sciences:

Research Methodology
i) Research Design.
(a) Types of research design
(b) Research design used in the study.
ii) Sample Design
(a) Types of Sample design
(b) Sample design used in the study.
iii) Data Collection
iv) Data preparation
v) Data Analysis

7. PROPOSED PLAN OF WORK

Schedule WORK-FLOW TABLE (for 3 year time/work plan) milestones should be made as
per Annexure- II.

8. REFERENCES
All the cited literature should be referred in the end of the synopsis under the ‘References’
section. Similarly, the references should also be present in the text paragraphs at suitable
positions. List and sort all the references in alphabetical order

Note: APA style should be strictly followed as a citation style

(You can use Google scholar, www.citationmachine.net etc. for creating citations in APA
format.)

Common Examples:
1. Journal Articles:
Example:
1. Goodrum, A. A., McCain, K. W., Lawrence, S., & Giles, C. L. (2001). Scholarly
publishing in the Internet age: a citation analysis of computer science
literature. Information Processing & Management, 37(5), 661-675.
2. Oechsner, R., Pfeffer, M., Pfitzner, L., Binder, H., Müller, E., & Vonderstrass, T.
(2002). From overall equipment efficiency (OEE) to overall Fab effectiveness
(OFE). Materials Science in Semiconductor Processing, 5(4-5), 333-339.

2. Text Books:
Example:
1. Bishop, C. M. (2006). Pattern recognition and machine learning. Springer.
2. Witten, I. H., Frank, E., Hall, M. A., & Pal, C. J. (2016). Data Mining: Practical
machine learning tools and techniques. Morgan Kaufmann.

3. For website links:

Example:

1. Satalkar, B. (2010, July 15). Water aerobics. Retrieved from http://www.buzzle.com

2. Cain, K. (2012, June 29). The Negative effects of Facebook on communication. Social

Media Today RSS. Retrieved from http://socialmediatoday.com

4. For Conference proceedings:

Example:
Tuarob, S., Bhatia, S., Mitra, P., & Giles, C. L. (2013, August). Automatic detection of
pseudocodes in scholarly documents using machine learning. In 2013 12th International
Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition (pp. 738-742). IEEE.
 SUBMISSION OF SYNOPSIS
A Doctorate student may submit his/her synopsis after completion of course work
requirements. The following steps should be followed for the preparation and submission of
the synopsis.

While the submission, a rough draft of synopsis (2 copies stapled /in a loose cover
file) along with the cover letter and necessary supportive documents shall be sent to the
committee for the consideration where it will be evaluated. The supervisors are required to
make sure that the synopsis to be submitted are technically error free and grammatically
correct and are fully in accordance with the provided format and guidelines:

The synopsis should be typed using word processing software, printed B&W on a A4
paper, using 2.54cm / 1” margins on all sides except 1.5” on the left side for binding
purpose. The ‘Times New Roman’ font should be used throughout the synopsis with 12pt
font size and 1.5pt spacing. The Headings/Titles of the chapters should be in UPPER
CASE, 12PT BOLD.

All the pages should be numbered except the title page. If required, Sub-chapters can
be introduced between the chapters and should be numbered accordingly as (3.1, 3.2, 3.3,
…….). All the Figures and Tables must have their caption and they must be suitably
mentioned in text paragraph also.

The title page of the synopsis should be made exactly as per the given sample
(Annexure-I) in this booklet.

APPROVAL OF THE SYNOPSIS

The synopsis shall be considered by the committee of the university. The committee will
return the rough draft of the synopsis along with the comments/suggestions. The supervisor
should ensure that the suggested changes, if any, have been incorporated and re-submit the
rough draft of synopsis for approval. The decision will be communicated to the Major
Advisor at the earliest possible. On the approval, the 5 copies of approved synopsis shall be
submitted with spiral binding along with along with the cover letter and necessary
supportive documents. One CD containing the synopsis soft copy in both .doc and .pdf
format should also be attached.
 ANNEXURE-I

A
Research Plan
On

_______________________________

_______________________________

By

________________

Regd. No.__________

Under Guidance of

_________________________

Department of _________

CT UNIVERSITY
LUDHIANA (PUNJAB) INDIA
 Annexure- II (Example)

PROPOSED PLAN OF WORK:

In order to achieve the objectives of the study, the present research work has been planned as
illustrated below:

Academic Year Aug. 17-July 18 July 18-June 19 July 19 - June 20

Quarters 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4

Coursework                        

Literature Review
& Synopsis                        
Submission

Industrial Visits &

                       
Data Gathering

Compilation &
                       
Analysis of Data

Research
communication &                        
Thesis writing