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Blue Marble University

A New Education Model for a New World

3rd Floor, C & H Towers

Corner of Great Marlborough
and Great George Streets
Roseau, 00152
Commonwealth of Dominica

http://BlueMarbleUniversity.com
Info@BlueMarbleUniversity.com

Thesis/Dissertation Instructions

Blue Marble University

and its included schools

Panama College of Cell Science, and

Blue Marble University Medical School

Students Please Take Special Note: We are not your spell checkers nor grammar
checkers. Dissertations with errors in spelling or grammar will be rejected. Please
Use Grammarly or some other automated spell/grammar checker, or enlist the
services of a personal editor.

1. Purpose: The purpose of the dissertation segment of our program is for you to demonstrate you
are able to think independently, and write as a professional in the particular field. Be thinking about
the normal form of a research paper, many of which we have presented in your various courses.

2. Subject: This of course depends on your particular program or field of endeavor.

The main thing is that whatever you choose, even if you just are doing a review, there must be some
original ideas or thoughts that:

(a) clarify or extend current thinking and/or

(b) clearly demonstrate you have become and expert respecting the inquiry.(i.e. that others can build
upon your work).

3. Your Beginning Thoughts-Step 1 Prepare your Outline: Before you start to do anything, you
will have to construct a "roadmap" for your thesis. This evolves during discussion with your thesis
advisor or mentor. Some exploratory research will be required of you to ensure that your thesis
contains new material or thought. Therefore, you will need to prepare an Outline for your thesis,
which should include:

(A) The current state of the art or science as you see it (based of course on a thorough
literature review which should be incorporated into the introductory portion of the thesis

(B) How your study or review will further clarify or extend the thinking in this regard

(C) Is your proposal lab based in part?? If not, a literature review must be significant so
as to serve as the basis of other investigators using the material as a starting point to
design further experiments. Same for non-science oriented subjects.

4. Form: Your manuscript must be delivered in PDF form, as well as text format, such as rich text
format (rtf).

5. Contents: We have taught the general format of a published research papers and the parts
involved, order of parts, referencing formats etc. Please find a research paper or review from an
established journal in your field of endeavor to use as your guide. Your dissertation should typically
follow the following order:

* Title

* Authors

* Authorsʼ complete address and contact information including, if appropriate, Hospital,

Institute, Research Center, or University, address, phone, e-mail.

* Summary

* Introduction

* Materials and Methods: (Applicable only to science oriented dissertations). For

biomedical subjects, include patient details and tests, and in particular detailing the
source of stem cell or hormonal material, preparation techniques. If you are doing a lab
based project, THE SOURCE OF ALL BIOLOGICAL MATERIAL MUST BE CLEARLY
DEFINED as to where it came from, how it was collected and purified, how it’s content was
analyzed and verified, how it was stored.

* Results

* Discussion

* Conclusion

* No Footnotes are permitted. An important note can be included in References.

* References: Arrange alphabetically by author and follow standard reference reporting:

Article in Periodical or Journal: Testa, G., Borghese, L., Steinbeck, J. A., and Brustle, O.
Breakdown of the Potentiality Principle and Its Impact on Global Stem Cell Research. Cell Stem
Cell (2007) 1:153-156.
Article in a Book: Abramoff, P. and La Vie, M.F.P., in Biology of the Immune Response,
McGraw-Hill Book Co., New York, (1970), p.136.

Online Scholarly Journal:

For all online scholarly journals, provide the author(s) name(s), the name of the article in
quotation marks, the title of the publication in italics, all volume and issue numbers, and the year of
publication. Include a URL, DOI, or permalink to help readers locate the source.

Article in an Online-only Scholarly Journal (Website with Author)

If the journal you are citing appears exclusively in an online format (i.e. there is no
corresponding print publication) that does not make use of page numbers, indicate the URL or other
location information.

For Example:

Rosado-Erazo, Igneris, “How To Treat Patients With Adult Stem Cells Without Specific
FDA Approval And Without The Necessity Of Conducting Any Prior Clinical Trial”, J.Drake
Biomedical Institute, 6 December 2016, drakebiomedicalinstitute.wordpress.com/list-of-published-
works/
Accessed December 6, 2016

Other Website with No Author:

Note: Depending on the content, credible websites do not always include authors. Example:

“Website Article.” Website Title. Website Publisher, Date Month Year Published. Web. Date Month
Year Accessed.

Date Accessed: This is the day the article was read and found. Example:

“India.” Travel.State.Gov. Bureau of Consular Affairs, U.S. Department of State, 17 Feb. 2010.
Web. 4 May 2010.

Personal Communication:

Personal Communication includes: private letters, memos, some electronic communication (i.e.
email or messages from nonarchived discussion groups), personal interviews, telephone
conversations, etc.

These types of communication are not recoverable data and therefore should not be included on the
Reference page. Cite personal communications in text only.

Example:
Mark Johnson says... (personal communication, April 15, 2010)

(Terry O'Kelly, personal communication, June 6, 2009)

Personal Interview:

Personal interview by phone Structure:

Soriano, A. (2008, April 5). Telephone interview.

Personal interview by email Structure:

Soriano, A. (2008, April 5). Email interview.

Personal interview in person Structure:

Soriano, A. (2008, April 5). Personal interview.

Further Citation formats can be found as either APA style: https://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/

resource/560/01/

or as MLA style: https://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/747/01/

6. Special requirements for images: Your thesis should have a lot of images to make it interesting.
All images of tables, diagrams, figures, photos etc. INCLUDING THEIR LEGENDS, should be in
PDF or JPEG format only. Most of your computer software should allow you to explain or describe
the item in the "caption" section. This would be helpful so that you don't have a lot of orphan items
floating around. And PLEASE be sure your images are high quality!!! We do not want blurry
images and diagrams etc!!!! Be sure you use large file sizes, because, for example, a 100 KB image
will never likely be sufficient quality when converted to pdf. Images should have a minimum size
of 300KB and 150-300 dpi resolution. You may need to experiment with your set-up to see what
you can achieve.

7. Publication Plan: You should be thinking about a publication plan. Staff will assist with this and
will suggest submission targets. For biomedical reports, The Journal of the Drake Biomedical
Institute may also be a possibility. We would like to see all works published somewhere.

8. Cover Pages. Typically, you will need to supply two cover pages, one for your dissertation, and
one for publication.

See Samples Next Page

 Two Sample Cover Pages
You need two covers, one for your Dissertation presented to Blue Marble University
and one to use to present for Publication to a Journal or other outlet

SAMPLE DISSERTATION COVER

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 SAMPLE COVER FOR PUBLICATION