Theses
The supervision of bachelor and master theses is always individually regulated. This means that you determine the starting time within the semester yourself and also do your own time management. Permissible language are English and German.
Application for theses
- You can apply for supervision every quarter by 15.03., 15.06., 15.09., or by 15.12.
- Please always name a topic (area) interest and indicate if you want to write a practical (implementation) or theoretical (literature) thesis
- Please always send a Transcript of Records as well
- Please send your application via the contact form on the right
- You will receive a confirmation or rejection soon after the date
Current thesis topics
Supervision process
- Initial topic discussion
By e-mail, telephone or in person, we set a topic and briefly discuss the preliminary content. - Exposé
Prior to the actual application, you will have written an approximately one-page exposé outlining what you perceive to be the problem situation and the research question. Furthermore, the exposé outlines what the result of your work could be (e.g. a model, a method, an implementation) and how you want to proceed methodically (e.g. literature analysis, case study, interviews). Do not slavishly adhere to this synopsis if it turns out that aspects of it do not fit well into the course of your work. However, significant deviations should definitely be discussed with the supervisor. - Supervision appointments
There are no fixed supervision appointments after registration, but you can request them, for example, to discuss your outline, to clarify open questions, or to address problems with the topic, literature research, or implementation. - Pre-correction offer
We offer to read 3 (Bachelor) to 5 (Master) pages of your thesis at some point during the course and to comment on them to give you an impression of what you can still optimize in your writing style, your argumentation, your source work, etc., so that you can submit a well-rounded thesis afterwards. However, we will not look through and pre-correct your entire paper before submission. - Grading After the paper is submitted, we will make every effort to grade it promptly and you are welcome to come in for a debriefing. Remember to give a presentation in the seminar.
Format templates
You can write your thesis at our department e.g. using Word or LaTeX. In this section you will find corresponding templates for download. The LaTeX template is optimized for the use with Overleaf. Alternatively, you can duplicate the LaTeX template directly in Overleaf.
The scope of the paper should basically be in accordance with the specifications of the respective valid course description. Currently, we expect about 40 pages in the Bachelor and about 80 pages in the Master, depending on the content of the thesis. Significant deviations should be discussed with the respective supervisor before submission. The requirement refers to the text pages of the thesis including figures and tables but excluding the bibliography and the appendix.
Text appendices should be added at the end of the thesis document in one PDF. Additional digital attachments are possible and may even be reasonable. Please submit these as one ZIP file.
Direct link to Overleaf repository
Reference Management
Good theses are based not only on good ideas on your part, but also on good references. You should always try to critically examine each statement and, if in doubt, support it with multiple references. In addition to textbooks from the library and Internet sources, which often provide good overviews, you should familiarize yourself with the following resources for journal and conference papers, which can often give you further and highly topical impulses.
- AIS Electronic Library: Full-text access to some top journals and the largest international information systems conferences
http://aisel.aisnet.org/ - IEEE Computer Society Digital Library: Full-text access to IEEE Computer Society journals and conference proceedings
https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/Xplore/home.jsp - ACM Digital Library: Literature and partly full-text database for journals and congress reports of the ACM
https://dl.acm.org/ - Springer Link: Access to textbooks and computer science related conference proceedings from Springer
http://link.springer.com/ - ScienceDirect: Access to computer science-related journals from Elsevier
https://www.sciencedirect.com/ (currently no access via TU) - Other publisher sites for online access with TU VPN if necessary: Wiley, T&F, Sage, INFORMS
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/
https://www.tandfonline.com/
https://journals.sagepub.com/
https://pubsonline.informs.org/ - Google Scholar: Research system that sometimes also helps you with a link to the PDF
https://scholar.google.de/ - ResearchGate: Scientific community with many fulltexts
https://researchgate.net/ - arXiv: Preprint server with full access to many peer-reviewed and non-peer-reviewed papers
https://arxiv.org/ - Social Science Research Network (SSRN): Preprint server with full access to many peer-reviewed and non-peer-reviewed papers
https://www.ssrn.com/ - dblp - Digital Bibliography & Library Project: Good for bibliography research. No full-text access
http://dblp.uni-trier.de/ - LitSonar: Comparative literature search across several databases
http://www.litsonar.com/ - Dortmund University Library: Overview of the physical and digital holdings of the TU Dortmund
https://www.ub.tu-dortmund.de/literatursuche/
If you are unable to access articles (even via "Institutional Access with VPN") there are several ways you can go:
- See if a preprint is available on arXiv, SSRN or ResearchGate or find a linked document via Google Scholar.
- Write to the authors.
- Don't search shadow libraries like sci-hub.
- Write to us.