Washington State Transportation Center

Report and Thesis Guidelines for Graduate Students

Updated January 2005

Part of TRAC's mission is to involve graduate students in transportation research, so you are an important part of the TRAC team. As you work on your research, your thesis, and most likely a research report, you have many tasks to complete. The purpose of this booklet is to ease the tasks of producing a research report and your thesis.

These guidelines have been developed from years of experience in working with UW graduate students. While you and your advisors work to make your research relevant, accurate, and timely, we'll help you communicate it to others comprehensibly and attractively.

CONTENTS

The TRAC Support Staff

Basic Production Process

Types of Reports

Text

Word Processing

Tables

Graphics

THE TRAC SUPPORT STAFF

Who We Are, What We Do

Judy Felch—Senior Secretary (3-8690)

Office machine operation, files, mail system, travel reporting, supply orders.

Bev Green—Fiscal Specialist Supervisor (3-6522)

Project budgets, payroll, purchasing.

Mary Marrah—Designer/Illustrator (3-3337)

Web interface graphics and website design, poster sessions, page design and layout, technical and conceptual illustration.

Amy O'Brien—Technical Communications Specialist (5-2644)

Report organizational requirements, writing style, grammar, page layout, survey writing and layout.

Ron Porter—Systems Analyst (3-3341)

Word processing programs, methods, and conversions; bibliographic and other databases; Internet and Web deployment

Duane Wright—Systems Analyst Programmer (3-3342)

Software development for analysis of freeway data

Application of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) for analysis of freeway and arterial movement

Graphics for displaying analysis results

Working with Us

Time

  • We need to be able to plan ahead.
  • Keep us posted, tell us your plans.
  • More time than you think is necessary for editing, word processing, formatting, reproduction, and report submittal.
  • The more organized you are, the less costly we are to your budget.

Questions

If you have any questions, PLEASE ASK. We'd rather prevent a problem than solve one.

BASIC PRODUCTION PROCESS

  1. Talk to Amy about report requirements and production.
  2. Talk to Bev about the project's budget if you think that funds are low.
  3. Work with Duane or Mary on graphics if you need them.
  4. Submit your material. We can often handle it more easily if we receive a few chapters at a time.
  5. WSDOT requires that all its reports be edited. TRAC requires that all reports for other contracting agencies also be edited. You can work with Amy to determine the appropriate level of edit based on the needs of the contracting agency, the needs of the material, and the remaining budget and time.

TYPES OF REPORTS

Many student theses are converted from TRAC reports. If you will be producing a combination of these documents, plan ahead carefully. A little advance thought can save weeks of work.

WSDOT Reports

  • Over half of TRAC's projects are sponsored by WSDOT. WSDOT may require three kinds of reports from its researchers:
  • Research Report (draft and final)
  • Technical Report (draft and final)
  • One-page Summary

Usually, a Technical Report is not necessary. Your project's contract specifies the kind and amount of reporting that is required. Consult with your project's Principle Investigator (probably your committee chair) to determine what you will need to write.

Research Reports

Consult the WSDOT Research Report Guidelines.

All WSDOT research projects require a Research Report. The purpose of these reports is to provide a short (35-50 pages) final report that can be easily read by busy administrators and others who want the gist of the research without all the technical details.

These reports are sent to WSDOT, FHWA, state DOTs, universities, libraries, the National Technical Information Service, and other interested researchers.

Technical Reports

Consult the WSDOT Technical Report Guidelines.

These are usually not requested for WSDOT research projects. The purpose of these reports is to fully document all aspects of the project. They may be as long as needed; however, most of their length may be in technical appendices.

They are printed in limited quantities and distributed to the WSDOT library, WSDOT specialists, FHWA, and other researchers upon request.

One-Page Summaries

One-page summaries are required for all projects. They have a specific layout and organization. They are meant to be an easily readable summary for large distribution.

Theses

Please be warned that because we are using project funds to produce your thesis (an unusually good deal for you), we are required to produce the project report first, the thesis second. Talk to us about timing.

Always consult the Style and Policy Manual for Theses and Dissertations, UW Graduate School.

Your committee determines the content and organization acceptable for your thesis. The Graduate School does not allow exceptions. If you want to include an element in your thesis that is not covered in the stylebook, call the Graduate School. Use or photographs and over-sized illustrations is discouraged. We also advise you to have a Graduate School thesis advisor check your thesis before we produce a final copy.

Plan ahead. Save yourself time and effort. Before you begin writing, know what your final product(s) will be. You need to know whether your thesis will be converted from a report, and if so, how the requirements of the two documents differ.

Other Reports for Other Agencies

Other agencies that support TRAC work (e.g., FHWA, NCHRP, SHRP or local agencies such as King County Metro or the Washington State Energy Office) have different report requirements. If they have no requirements, we usually follow WSDOT's format.

Papers (TRB and Others)

TRAC routinely produces papers for the Transportation Research Board (first drafts are due each August before its annual meeting—consult Instructions for Authors for paper requirements). We have also produced papers for the ITE student competition (held each spring). If you are interested in writing a refereed or competition paper, anticipate the due dates carefully.

TEXT

Organization

Most TRAC reports are WSDOT Research Reports. They must be organized as follows (see the WSDOT Research Report Guidelines for more detail):

Research Report

  • Executive Summary
  • Introduction or Background
  • Review of Previous Work
  • Research Approach/Procedures
  • Findings/Discussion
  • Conclusions
  • Recommendations
  • Application/Implementation
  • Acknowledgment
  • References
  • Appendices

Technical Report

  • Executive Summary
  • Introduction and Research Approach
  • Findings
  • Conclusions
  • Recommendations/Implementation
  • Acknowledgment
  • References
  • Appendices

Writing for Both Report and Thesis

If your thesis will be converted from a research report, plan their organization together so that your thesis will require as little reorganization or rewriting as possible. This makes your work—and our work—easier.

Remember, we must complete the project report before we can complete your thesis.

Style Guides

The office relies on Words Into Type and the Chicago Manual of Style.

References and Footnotes

Use of footnotes is discouraged. Ask us first.

Use an alphabetical reference list at the end of your report to indicate only documents cited in the text. Denote references at the appropriate place in the text (preferably after, rather than interrupting, a sentence, unless that would cause confusion) by the author's name and publication date in parentheses. Example: (Reed 1993)

Standard reference list style:

Last name, first name. Article title, Journal title, Volume number, year, pp.

Bibliographies may be used in addition to a reference list to document sources you have consulted but not directly cited. A bibliography should be alphabetical by author's name.

If you have many references, consider using a bibliographic software package such as ISI Researchsoft's ProCite or Reference Manager. Ask Ron if you need help.

WORD PROCESSING

Computer Programs

  • MS Word (PC or Macintosh)—we are able to convert text from other word processing programs into Word.
  • Excel (PC or Macintosh)—other spreadsheet files can be converted to Excel.
  • Adobe Acrobat (PC or Macintosh)—in addition to paper copies, all WSDOT and TRAC reports are now converted to pdf for publication on the TRAC and WSDOT Web sites.

Formulas

For mathematical formulas, use MS Word's built-in equation editor or MathType. Do not save formulas as graphic files and paste them into a Word document, as they cannot be edited.

Word Processing Dos and Don'ts

DO

  • Feel free to ask questions about the programs and how they work.
  • Assign and use a small set of "styles" to format paragraphs, headings, and other special text such as figure captions. This makes consistent formatting much simpler.
  • Break up large document files, or those with many graphics, into smaller (chapter) files, rather than providing us with one gigantic (and electronically unwieldy) file.
  • Provide us with the separate source files embedded in your Word file, including those for graphics, tables, and references.
  • Keep your formatting as simple as possible.

DON'T

Spend your time learning all the tricks and features of the word processing program unless you really want to.

TABLES

Consider using spreadsheets to enter large amounts of tabular information. Spreadsheet data can be easily converted to word processing text later. Use Word's Table features, rather than creating tables solely with tabs or spaces.

GRAPHICS

Many authors are now successfully creating their own report graphics, but we have years of experience with many communication challenges and many graphics programs, and we are happy to help.

Computer Programs

  • Adobe Illustrator—a powerful freehand drawing program.
  • Adobe Photoshop—a program for altering and editing digital or scanned photographs.
  • MS PowerPoint—the standard program for slide preparation.
  • Adobe InDesign—a page layout program used for specially formatted documents.
  • Excel—creates graphs and tables from spreadsheet data.

Kinds of Graphics

  • Charts—You don't have to construct your own charts. You can furnish the graphics staff with electronic data, and they can make the plots. Many styles of charts—pie, column, bar, scatter—are available.
  • Maps—Before you create a map, talk with the graphics staff. They may already have a computerized base map you need (such as of the state of Washington or the greater Seattle area). If not, they can create a base map. From there, you can add the details.
  • Illustrations—The staff can create a wide array of illustrations, technical, abstract, artsy, comical, or mundane.
  • Slides—If you need text slides, you can give the electronic text to the staff. If you have existing report graphics on file, they can generally be converted to slides (including adding color) with minimal time or trouble.

Color

Color hard copy (on paper or overhead transparency) is available. However, although WSDOT now makes all its reports available as pdf files on the Web, most clients, including WSDOT, still do not print their reports with color. Therefore, carefully consider your use of color and whether any information will be lost if your graphic is reproduced and viewed in black and white.

Graphics Dos and Don'ts

Do

  • Feel free to give us your ideas in any format—talk to us, write them down, draw them out.
  • Give us camera ready originals, or the electronic source files, when TRAC staff have not produced the graphics.

Don't

  • Spend your time learning all the tricks and features of the word processing program unless you really want to.

Remember: When in doubt, ASK. You can't ask a dumb question, but you can make a dumb (and costly) mistake.

Washington State Transportation Center
University of Washington,
Box 354802
University District Building
1107 NE 45th St, Ste 535
Seattle, Washington 98195
(206) 543-8690
FAX (206) 685-0767

Revised February 23, 2006

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